Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money, and Social Obligation

Description

In his Debt: The First 5000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber put forward a new grand narrative of world history. From the Late Bronze Age onwards, all across the Near East and Mediterranean, relationships of mutual obligation were transformed into quantifiable and legally enforceable debts. Graeber suggests that this transformation made possible new economic institutions, such as IOUs, coinage, and chattel slavery. It also led to the emergence of modes of thought that have shaped Eurasian philosophical and religious traditions ever since. Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East explores the implications of this theory for the history of the Mediterranean and Near East. A distinguished group of ancient historians assesses how well Graeber's interpretations fit current understandings of ancient and late antique economies. At the same time, this volume offers a history of premodern credit systems which takes seriously the dual nature of debt as both quantifiable economic reality and immeasurable social obligation. By exploring the diverse ways in which social relationships were quantified in different ancient and late antique societies, the work introduces a method of writing the history of premodern systems of exchange that departs from the currently dominant paradigm of neo-institutional economics. Cover Half Title Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East Copyright Dedication Contents Preface List of Contributors 1. The Currency–​Slavery–​Warfare Complex: David Graeber and the History of Value in Antiquity 2. Beyond Debt: Markets and Morality in First-​Millennium Bce Babylonia 3. Cosmic Debt in Greece and India 4. Private Debts in Classical Greece: Bond of Friendship, Curse of Hatred? 5. Debt, Death, and Destruction in Ancient Rome 6. The Poetics and Politics of Exchange in Roman Agronomy 7. Monetization, Marketization, and State Formation: The Later Roman Empire as an Axial-​Age Economy 8. Zoroastrian Materialism: Religion, Empire, and Their Critics in Graeber’s Late Axial Age 9. Debt, Debt Bondage, and the Early Islamic Economy 10. Debt’s Fourth Millennium Seen from Below: How Papyri Modify the Picture 11. After the Axial Age: Debt and Obligation in the European Early Middle Ages 12. Afterword Notes Bibliography Index