Debt is not just an economic fact but a social, political, and theological technology, one that has shaped human relations for thousands of years.

Graeber’s huge, unruly, brilliant history of debt, money, violence, obligation, barter myths, human economies, empire, credit, slavery, bureaucracy, markets, morality, and the strange moral language that lets numbers pretend to be justice. 

It is anthropology as counter-history, written against the tidy stories economics tells about itself. Graeber moves through ancient Mesopotamia, religious debt, coins and conquest, household economies, colonial violence, capitalism, credit systems, and the modern state, always asking what gets erased when human relationships are translated into accounts. For readers of political economy, anarchist theory, anthropology, Marx-adjacent history, anti-capitalist thought, or anyone who wants one of those big books that permanently changes the texture of a word you thought you understood.

Melville House paperback, updated and expanded edition. First Melville House printing of this edition, October 2014; originally first published in hardcover in 2011. Full number line present. Good second-hand condition with light shelfwear, mild corner/edge wear, and some page toning/handling visible.