Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

12 8 DEBT
In this light, the economists' insistence that economic life begins
with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with
no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that
it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.
As a result, though, the histories we tell are full of blank spaces,
and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without explanation,
much like the Thai women who appeared at Bush's door.
Recall the passage cited in Chapter Three, from numismatist Philip
Grierson, about money in the barbarian law codes:
Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle
and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with considerable
use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes
it is mainly in precious metal . . . 2
How is it possible to read this passage without immediately stopping
at the end of the first line "Bondmaids" Doesn't that mean
"slaves" (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful
and important that they came to function as currency. How did that
happen And if we are trying to understand the origins of money,
here, isn't the fact that people are using one another as currency at all
interesting or significant3 Yet none of the sources on money remark
much on it. It would seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls
were not actually traded, but just used as units of account. Still, they
must have been traded at some point. Who were they How were they
enslaved Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced
to slavery through debt Were they a major trade item The answer
to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it's hard to say more
because the history remains largely unwritten.4
Or let's return to the parable of the ungrateful servant. "Since he
was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his
children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt." How did that
happen Note that we're not even speaking of debt service here (he is
already his creditor's servant), but outright slavery. How did a man's
wife and children come to be considered no different than his sheep
and crockery-as property to be liquidated on the occasion of default
Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to be able to sell his
wife (It wasn'tY If he didn't own her, why was someone else allowed
to sell her if he couldn't pay his debts
The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It's hard not
to empathize with the distress of a father watching his daughter taken