Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Graeber starts with a simple question: what do we actually owe each other? And discovers that debt — far from being a neutral financial instrument — has always been a tool of power, war, and slavery. He traces the history of debt across five millennia: the Mesopotamian temples that invented credit, the Roman soldiers paid in salt, the medieval church's prohibition on interest, the Atlantic slave trade financed by debt, the IMF structural adjustment programs that impoverished nations in living memory. The myth that money preceded barter preceded debt turns out to be exactly that — a myth invented by economists who never looked at the anthropological evidence. The companion to The Dawn of Everything and the most important economics book on the shelf for teenagers ready to question what they've been told money actually is.