Debt (24 page)

Or let’s return to the parable of the ungrateful servant. “Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.” How did that happen? Note that we’re not even speaking of debt service here (he is already his creditor’s servant), but outright slavery. How did a man’s wife and children come to be considered no different than his sheep and crockery—as property to be liquidated on the occasion of default? Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to be able to sell his wife? (It wasn’t.)
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If he didn’t own her, why was someone else allowed to sell her if he couldn’t pay his debts?

The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It’s hard not to empathize with the distress of a father watching his daughter taken
off by strangers. On the other hand, one might also ask: Why weren’t they taking
him?
The daughter hadn’t borrowed any money.

It’s not as if it is ordinary for fathers in traditional societies to be able to sell their children. This is a practice with a very specific history: it appears in the great agrarian civilizations, from Sumer to Rome to China, right around the time when we also start to see evidence of money, markets, and interest-bearing loans; later, more gradually, it also appears in those surrounding hinterlands that supplied those civilizations with slaves.
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What’s more, if we examine the historical evidence, there seems good reason to believe that the very obsession with patriarchal honor that so defines “tradition” in the Middle East and Mediterranean world
itself
arose alongside the father’s power to alienate his children—as a reaction to what were seen as the moral perils of the market. All of this is treated as somehow outside the bounds of economic history.

Excluding all this is deceptive not only because it excludes the main purposes to which money was actually put in the past, but because it doesn’t give us a clear vision of the present. After all, who were those Thai women who so mysteriously appeared at Neil Bush’s hotel door? Almost certainly, they were children of indebted parents. Likely as not, they were contractual debt peons themselves.
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Focusing on the sex industry would be deceptive, though. Then as now, most women in debt bondage spend the vast majority of their time sewing, preparing soups, and scouring latrines. Even in the Bible, the admonition in the Ten Commandments not to “covet thy neighbor’s wife” clearly referred not to lust in one’s heart (adultery had already been covered in commandment number seven), but to the prospect of taking her as a debt-peon—in other words, as a servant to sweep one’s yard and hang out the laundry.
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In most such matters, sexual exploitation was at best incidental (usually illegal, sometimes practiced anyway, symbolically important.) Again, once we remove some of our usual blinders, we can see that matters have changed far less, over the course of the last five thousand years or so, than we really like to think.

These blinders are all the more ironic when one looks at the anthropological literature on what used to be called “primitive money”—that is, the sort one encounters in places where there are no states or markets—whether Iroquois wampum, African cloth money, or Solomon Island feather money, and discovers that such money is used
almost exclusively for the kinds of transactions that economists don’t like to have to talk about.

In fact, the term “primitive money” is deceptive for this very reason, since it suggests that we are dealing with a crude version of the kind of currencies we use today. But this is precisely what we don’t find. Often, such currencies are never used to buy and sell anything at all.
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Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers—almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.

Often, these currencies were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I’ve decided therefore to refer to them as “social currencies,” and the economies that employ them as “human economies.” By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

Historically, commercial economies—market economies, as we now like to call them—are a relative newcomer. For most of human history, human economies predominated. To even begin to write a genuine history of debt, then, we have to start by asking: What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do people accumulate in human economies? And what happens when human economies begin to give away to or are taken over by commercial ones? This is another way of asking the question, “How do mere obligations turn into debts?”—but it means not just asking the question in the abstract, but examining the historical record to try to reconstruct what actually did happen.

This is what I will do over the course of the next two chapters. First I will look at the role of money in human economies, then describe what can happen when human economies are suddenly incorporated into the economic orbits of larger, commercial ones. The African slave trade will serve as a particularly catastrophic case in point. Then, in the next chapter, I will return to the first emergence of commercial economies in early civilizations of Europe and the Middle East.

The most interesting theory of the origin of money is the one recently put forward by a French economist-turned-anthropologist named Philippe Rospabé. While his work is largely unknown in the English-speaking world, it’s quite ingenious, and it bears directly on our problem. Rospabé’s argument is that “primitive money” was not originally a way to pay debts of any sort. It’s a way of recognizing the existence of debts that cannot possibly be paid. His argument is worth considering in detail.

In most human economies, money is used first and foremost to arrange marriages. The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented as what used to be called “bride-price”: a suitor’s family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, or brass rings, or whatever is the local social currency, to a woman’s family, and they would present their daughter as his bride. It’s easy to see why this might be interpreted as buying a women, and many colonial officials in Africa and Oceania in the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion. The practice caused something of a scandal, and by 1926, the League of Nations was debating banning the practice as a form of slavery. Anthropologists objected. Really, they explained, this was nothing like the purchase of, say, an ox—let alone a pair of sandals. After all, if you buy an ox, you don’t have any responsibilities
to
the ox. What you are really buying is the right to dispose of the ox in any way that pleases you. Marriage is entirely different, since a husband will normally have just as many responsibilities toward his wife as his wife will have toward him. It’s a way of rearranging relations between people. Second of all, if you were really buying a wife, you’d be able to sell her. Finally, the real significance of the payment concerns the status of the woman’s children: if he’s buying anything, it’s the right to call her offspring his own.
¹⁰

The anthropologists ended up winning the argument, and “bride-price” was dutifully redubbed “bridewealth.” But they never really answered the question: What is actually happening here? When a Fijian suitor’s family presents a whale tooth to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, is this an advance payment for the services the woman will provide in cultivating her future husband’s gardens? Or is he purchasing the future fertility of her womb? Or is this a pure formality, the equivalent of the dollar that has to change hands in order to seal a contract? According to Rospabé, it’s none of these. The whale tooth, however valuable, is not a form of payment. It is really an acknowledgment
that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible. The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman; in the meantime, all one can do is to acknowledge the outstanding debt.

There are places where suitors say this quite explicitly. Consider the Tiv of Central Nigeria, who we have already met briefly in the last chapter. Most of our information on the Tiv comes from mid-century, when they were still under British colonial rule.
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Everyone at that time insisted that a proper marriage should take the form of an exchange of sisters. One man gives his sister in marriage to another, that man marries the sister of his newfound brother-in-law. This is the perfect marriage because the only thing one can really give in exchange for a woman is another woman.

Obviously, even if every family had exactly equal numbers of brothers and sisters, things couldn’t always work this neatly. Say I marry your sister but you don’t want to marry mine (because, say, you don’t like her, or because she’s only five years old). In that case, you become her “guardian,” which means you can claim the right to dispose of her in marriage to someone else—for instance, someone whose sister you actually do wish to marry. This system quickly grew into a complex system in which most important men became guardians of numerous “wards,” often scattered over wide areas; they would swap and trade them and in the process accumulate numerous wives for themselves, while less-fortunate men were only able to marry late in life, or not at all.
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There was one other expedient. The Tiv at that time used bundles of brass rods as their most prestigious form of currency. Brass rods were only held by men, and never used to buy things in markets (markets were dominated by women); instead, they were exchanged only for things that men considered of higher importance: cattle, horses, ivory, ritual titles, medical treatment, magical charms. It was possible, as one Tiv ethnographer, Akiga Sai, explains, to acquire a wife with brass rods, but it required quite a lot of them. You would need to give two or three bundles of them to her parents to establish yourself as a suitor; then, when you did finally make off with her (such marriages were always first framed as elopements), another few bundles to assuage her mother when she showed up angrily demanding to know what was going on. This would normally be followed by five more to get her guardian to at least temporarily accept the situation, and
more still to her parents when she gave birth, if you were to have any chance of their accepting your claims to be the father of her children. That might get her parents off your back, but you’d have to pay off the guardian forever, because you could never really use money to acquire the rights to a woman. Everyone knew that the only thing you can legitimately give in exchange for a woman is another woman. In this case, everyone has to abide by the pretext that a woman will someday be forthcoming. In the meantime, as one ethnographer succinctly puts it, “the debt can never be fully paid.”
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According to Rospabé, the Tiv are just making explicit the underlying logic of bridewealth everywhere. The suitor presenting bridewealth is never paying for a woman, or even for the rights to claim her children. That would imply that brass rods, or whale’s teeth, cowrie shells, or even cattle are somehow the equivalent of a human being, which by the logic of a human economy is obviously absurd. Only a human could ever be considered equivalent to another human. All the more so since, in the case of marriage, we are speaking of something even more valuable than one human life: we are speaking of a human life that also has the capacity to generate new lives.