ABSTRACT
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years tries to combine the resources of a wide range of academic disciplines to change the way people think about economics. The structural weaknesses of Debt have not kept it from becoming a prominent work of nonfiction. As a genre, Debt follows in the footsteps of Guns, Germs, and Steel, an equally vast work by the scientist and author Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel pushed geography as an academic discipline into the debates of economic historians in much the same way that Graeber intends for anthropology. Nearly 20 years after its publication in 1997, Diamond’s book continues to have considerable influence as a contribution to the theory of “path dependency”—the idea that states develop along a certain path because of predetermined factors like geography.
