Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

282 DEBT
Much of our free-market doctrine, then, appears to have been originally
borrowed piecemeal from a very different social and moral universe.93
The mercantile classes of the Medieval Near West had pulled off an extraordinary
feat. By abandoning the usurious practices that had made
them so obnoxious to their neighbors for untold centuries before, they
were able to become-alongside religious teachers-the effective leaders
of their communities: communities that are still seen as organized,
to a large extent, around the twin poles of mosque and bazaar.94 The
spread of Islam allowed the market to become a global phenomenon,
operating largely independent of governments, according to its own
internal laws. But the very fact that this was, in a certain way, a genuine
free market, not one created by the government and backed by its
police and prisons-a world of handshake deals and paper promises
backed only by the integrity of the signer-meant that it could never
really become the world imagined by those who later adopted many of
the same ideas and arguments: one of purely self-interested individuals
vying for material advantage by any means at hand.
The Fa r West:
Christendom (Commerce, Lending, and Wa r)
Where there is justice in war, there is
also justice in usury.
-Saint Ambrose
Europe, as I mentioned, came rather late to the Middle Ages and for
most of it was something of a hinterland. Still, the period began much
as it did elsewhere, with the disappearance of coinage. Money retreated
into virtuality. Everyone continued to calculate costs in Roman
currency, then, later, in Carolingian "imaginary money"-the purely
conceptual system of pounds, shillings, and pence used across Western
Europe to keep accounts well into the seventeenth century.
Local mints did gradually come back into operation, producing
coins in an endless variety of weight, purity, and denominations. How
these related to the pan-European system, though, was a matter of
manipulation. Kings regularly issued decrees revaluing their own coins
in relation to the money of account, "crying up" the currency by, say,
declaring that henceforth, one of their ecus or escudos would no longer
be worth 1/ 12 but now 1/s of a shilling (thus effectively raising taxes)
or "crying down" the value of their coins by doing the reverse (thus