Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AGE OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 327
fact, most likely less, since Aztec warriors were at least aristocrats).
Inside the small towns and rural hamlets, where the state was mostly
far away, Medieval standards survived intact, and "credit" was just as
much a matter of honor and reputation as it had ever been. The great
untold story of our current age is of how these ancient credit systems
were ultimately destroyed.
Recent historical research, notably that of Craig Muldrew, who has
sifted through thousands of inventories and court cases from sixteenthand
seventeenth-century England, has caused us to revise almost all our
old assumptions about what everyday economic life at that time was
like. Of course, very little of the American gold and silver that reached
Europe actually ended up in the pockets of ordinary farmers, mercers,
or haberdashers.40 The lion's share stayed in the coffers of either the aristocracy
or the great London merchants, or else in the royal treasury.41
Small change was almost nonexistent. As I've already pointed out, in
the poorer neighborhoods of cities or large towns, shopkeepers would
issue their own lead, leather, or wooden token money; in the sixteenth
century this became something of a fad, with artisans and even poor
widows producing· their own currency as a way to make ends meet.42
Elsewhere, those frequenting the local butcher, baker, or shoemaker
would simply put things on the tab. The same was true of those attending
weekly markets, or selling neighbors milk or cheese or candle-wax.
In a typical village, the only people likely to pay cash were passing
travelers, and those considered riff-raff: paupers and ne'er-do-wells so
notoriously down on their luck that no one would extend credit to
them. Since everyone was involved in selling something, however just
about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took
the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept
count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months
or year or so, communities would held a general public "reckoning,"
cancelling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those
differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of
coin or goods.43
The reason that this upends our assumptions is that we're used
to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called "the
market"-the breakup of older systems of mutual aid and solidarity,
and the creation of a world of cold calculation, where everything had
its price. Really, English villagers appear to have seen no contradiction
between the two. On the one hand, they believed strongly in the collective
stewardship of fields, streams, and forests, and the need to help
neighbors in difficulty. On the other hand, markets were seen as a kind
of attenuated version of the same principle, since they were entirely