Debt (39 page)

I then went on to describe how all this can begin to break down: how humans can become objects of exchange: first, perhaps, women given in marriage; ultimately, slaves captured in war. What all these relations have in common, I observed, was violence. Whether it is Tiv girls being tied up and beaten for running away from their husbands, or husbands being herded into slave ships to die on faraway plantations, that same principle always applies: it is only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationship with others (sisters, friends, rivals …) that render them unique, and thus reduce them to something that can be traded.

All of this, it is important to emphasize, can happen in places where markets in ordinary, everyday goods—clothing, tools, foodstuffs—do not even exist. In fact, in most human economies, one’s most important possessions could never be bought and sold for the same reasons that people can’t: they are unique objects, caught up in a web of relationships with human beings.
¹²⁴

My old professor John Comaroff used to tell a story about carrying out a survey in Natal, in South Africa. He had spent most of a week driving from homestead to homestead in a jeep with a box full of questionnaires and a Zulu-speaking interpreter, driving past apparently endless herds of cattle. After about six days, his interpreter suddenly started and pointed into the middle of one herd. “Look!” he said. “That’s the same cow! That one there—with the red spot on its back. We saw it three days ago in a place ten miles from here. I wonder what happened? Did someone get married? Or maybe there was a settlement to some dispute.”

In human economies, when this ability to rip people from their contexts does appear, it is most often seen as an end in itself. One can already see a hint of this among the Lele. Important men would occasionally acquire war captives from far away as slaves, but it was almost always to be sacrificed at their funeral.
¹²⁵
The squelching of one man’s individuality was seen as somehow swelling the reputation, the social existence, of the other.
¹²⁶
In what I’ve been calling heroic societies, of course this kind of addition and subtraction of honor and disgrace is
lifted from a somewhat marginal practice to become the very essence of politics. As endless epics, sagas, and eddas attest, heroes become heroes by making others small. In Ireland and Wales, we can observe how this very ability to degrade others, to remove unique human beings from their hearths and families and thus render them anonymous units of accounting—the Irish slave-girl currency, the Welsh washerwomen—is itself the highest expression of honor.

In heroic societies, the role of violence is not hidden—it’s glorified. Often, it can form the basis of one’s most intimate relations. In the
Iliad
, Achilles sees nothing shameful in his relation with his slave-girl, Briseis, whose husband and brothers he killed; he refers to her as his “prize of honor,” but almost in the very same breath, he also insists that, just any decent man must love and care for his household dependents, “so I from my heart loved this one, even though I won her with my spear.”
¹²⁷

That such relations of intimacy can often develop between men of honor and those they have stripped of their dignity, history can well attest. After all, the annihilation of any possibility of equality also eliminates any question of debt, of any relation other than power. It allows a certain clarity. This is presumably why emperors and kings have such a notorious tendency to surround themselves with slaves or eunuchs.

There is something more here, though. If one looks across the expanse of history, one cannot help but notice a curious sense of identification between the most exalted and the most degraded; particularly, between emperors and kings, and slaves. Many kings surround themselves with slaves, appoint slave ministers—there have even been, as with the Mamluks in Egypt, actual dynasties of slaves. Kings surround themselves with slaves for the same reason that they surround themselves with eunuchs: because the slaves and criminals have no families or friends, no possibility of other loyalties—or at least that, in principle, they shouldn’t. But in a way, kings should really be like that too. As many an African proverb emphasizes: a proper king has no relatives either, or at least, he acts as if he does not.
¹²⁸
In other words, the king and slave are mirror images, in that unlike normal human beings who are defined by their commitments to others, they are defined
only
by relations of power. They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings as one can possibly become.

At this point we can finally see what’s really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as
completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty—not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of “use and abuse” over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man’s household—to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.
¹²⁹

European and American intellectuals, it is true, have spent much of the last two hundred years trying to flee from the more disturbing implications of this tradition of thought. Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights …”—thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we’ve just kept the old ones, but with the word “not” inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn’t really have them in the first place.

Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate your liberty, at least temporarily, endures. In fact, it determines what most of us have to do for most of our waking hours, except, usually, on weekends. The violence has been largely pushed out of sight.
¹³⁰
But this is largely because we’re no longer able to imagine what a world based on social arrangements that did not require the continual threat of tasers and surveillance cameras would even look like.

ONE MIGHT WELL ASK:
If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the logic of slavery, then how did we ever eliminate slavery? Of course, a cynic might argue that we haven’t; we’ve just relabeled it. The cynic would have a point: an ancient Greek would certainly have seen the distinction between a slave and an indebted wage laborer as, at best, a legalistic nicety.
¹
Still, even the elimination of formal chattel slavery has to be considered a remarkable achievement, and it is worthwhile to wonder how it was accomplished. Especially since it was not just accomplished once. The truly remarkable thing, if one consults the historical record, is that slavery has been eliminated—or effectively eliminated—many times in human history.

In Europe, for instance, the institution largely vanished in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire—an historical achievement rarely recognized by those of us used to referring to these events as the beginning of “the Dark Ages.”
²
No one is quite sure how it happened. Most agree that the spread of Christianity must have had something to do with it, but that can’t have been the direct cause, since the Church itself was never explicitly opposed to the institution and in many cases defended it. Instead, the abolition appears to have happened
despite
the attitudes of both the intellectuals and the political authorities of the time. Yet it did happen, and it had lasting effects. On the popular level, slavery remained so universally detested that even a thousand years later, when European merchants started trying to revive the trade, they discovered that their compatriots would
not countenance slaveholding in their own countries—one reason why planters were eventually obliged to acquire their slaves in Africa and set up plantations in the New World.
³
It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism—probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries—had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever be justifiably enslaved.

What’s more, the demise of ancient slavery was not limited to Europe. Remarkably, right around the same time—in the years around 600 ad—we find almost exactly the same thing happening in India and China, where, over the course of centuries, amidst much unrest and confusion, chattel slavery largely ceased to exist. What all this suggests is that moments of historical opportunity—moments when meaningful change is possible—follow a distinct, even a cyclical pattern, one that has long been far more coordinated across geographical space than we would ever have imagined. There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the historical opportunities that exist in the present.

The easiest way to make these cycles visible is to reexamine exactly the phenomenon we’ve been concerned with over the course of this book: the history of money, debt, and credit. The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge. In the case of money, one event stands out above all others: the invention of coinage. Coinage appears to have arisen independently in three different places, almost simultaneously: on the Great Plain of northern China, in the Ganges river valley of northeast India, and in the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea, in each case, between roughly 600 and 500 bc. This wasn’t due to some sudden technological innovation: the technologies used in making the first coins were, in each case, entirely different.
⁴
It was a social transformation. Why this happened in exactly this way is an historical mystery. But this much we know: for some reason, in Lydia, India, and China, local rulers decided that whatever longstanding credit systems had existed in their kingdoms were no longer adequate, and they began to issue tiny pieces of precious metals—metals that had previously been used largely in international commerce, in ingot form—and to encourage their subjects to use them in day-to-day transactions.

From there, the innovation spread. For more than a thousand years, states everywhere started issuing their own coinage. But then, right around 600 ad, about the time that slavery was disappearing, the whole trend was suddenly thrown into reverse. Cash dried up. Everywhere, there was a movement back to credit once again.

If we look at Eurasian history over the course of the last five thousand years, what we see is a broad alternation between periods dominated by credit money and periods in which gold and silver come to dominate—that is, those during which at least a large share of transactions were conducted with pieces of valuable metal being passed from hand to hand.

Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war. Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There’s a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distinguished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of violence are everywhere—and this appears to have been an equally accurate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and pre-Mauryan India—there are obvious advantages to making one’s transactions simple. This is all the more true when dealing with soldiers. On the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot, much of which consists of gold and silver, and will always seek a way to trade it for the better things in life. On the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk. The economists’ barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when dealing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a passing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.