Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

16 6 DEBT
The best way to do so, I believe, is to start from a single, odd, vexed
concept: the concept of honor, which can be treated as a kind of artifact,
or even as a hieroglyphic, a fragment preserved from history that
seems to compress into itself the answer to almost everything we've
been trying to understand. On the one hand, violence: men who live by
violence, whether soldiers or gangsters, are almost invariably obsessed
with honor, and assaults on honor are considered the most obvious
justification for acts of violence. On the other, debt. We speak both of
debts of honor, and honoring one's debts; in fact, the transition from
one to the other provides the best clue to how debts emerge from obligations;
even as the notion of honor seemed to echo a defiant insistence
that financial debts are not really the most important ones; an echo,
here, of arguments that, like those in the Vedas and the Bible, go back
to the very dawn of the market itself. Even more disturbingly, since the
notion of honor makes no sense without the possibility of degradation,
reconstructing this history reveals how much our basic concepts of
freedom and morality took shape within institutions-notably, but not
only, slavery-that we'd sooner not have to think about at all.
I I I I I
To underscore some of the paradoxes surrounding the concept and
bring home what's really at stake here, let us consider the story of one
man who survived the Middle Passage: Olaudah Equiano, born sometime
around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines
of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of
eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the
Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then
to a plantation in colonial Virginia.
Equiano's further adventures-and there were many-are narrated
in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano: or, Gustavus V ass a, the African, published in 1789. After
spending much of the Seven Years' War hauling gunpowder on a British
frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to
several owners-who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and
then broke their word-until he passed into the hands of a Quaker
merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his
freedom. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful
merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer,
and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His
eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the
movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.