Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

Chapter Seven
HONOR AND DEGRADATI ON
OR, ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATION
ur 5
[HAR]: n., liver; spleen; heart, soul;
bulk, main body; foundation; loan;
obligation; interest; surplus, profit;
interest-bearing debt; repayment; slavewoman.
-early Sumerian dictionary1
It is just to give each what is owed.
-Simonides
IN THE LAST CHAPTER, I offered a glimpse of how human economies,
with their social currencies-which are used to measure, assess,
and maintain relationships between people, and only perhaps incidentally
to acquire material goods-might be transformed into something
else. What we discovered was that we cannot begin to think about such
questions without taking into account the role of sheer physical violence.
In the case of the African slave trade, this was primarily violence
imposed from outside. Nonetheless, its very suddenness, its very brutality,
provides us with a sort of freeze-frame of a process that must have
occurred in a much slower, more haphazard fashion in other times and
places. This is because there is every reason to believe that slavery, with
its unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to turn them
into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere.
What happens, then, when the same process happens more slowly
It would seem that much of this history is permanently lost-since in
both the ancient Middle East and the ancient Mediterranean, most of
the really critical moments seem to have occurred just before the advent
of written records. Still, the broad outlines can be reconstructed.