ABSTRACT
While David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is an anthropologist, his book falls mainly within the field of economic history. The book is an attempt to rethink the way that economic history has approached the subject of debt, and in doing so it draws conclusions about economic systems that depend on repayment of debts. Debt covers a wide range of subjects, but frames all of them within the history of debt. Economic history is a young discipline, recognized as such only in the twentieth century. The theory of the history of money was first put forward in the early twentieth century by the German economist Georg Friedrich Knapp and came to be known as chartalism. Chartalism and the credit theory of money were highly influential in developing today’s dominant understanding of an economic system, known as Keynesianism, based on the idea that total spending is the most powerful force in the economy.
