ABSTRACT
Debt: The First 5,000 Years builds heavily on David Graeber’s previous scholarship and the development of his political ideas throughout his scholarly career. It also represents a change in Graeber’s scholarly direction, in which he turns away from the pure anthropology and ethnography that characterized his work in most of the 2000s to revisit the economic anthropology of his first book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. One of Debt’s major themes is the argument that the capitalist system uses debt as a mechanism to perpetuate inequality and abuse. This is rooted in Graeber’s doctoral fieldwork on the island of Madagascar, where he witnessed the first hand negative effects of large amounts of government debt on economy and people. Pressure to repay the national debt served as both moral and practical justification for cutting social welfare programs and harming quality of life.
