Debt (80 page)

115.
Princeps legibus solutus est
(“the sovereign is not bound by the laws”), a phrase initially coined by Ulpian and repeated by Justinian (1.3 pr.) This was a very new notion in the ancient world; the Greeks, for instance, had insisted that while men could do as they liked with their women, children, and slaves, any ruler who exploited their own subjects in the same way was the definition of a tyrant. Even the basic principle of modern sovereignty, that rulers hold the ultimate power of life and death over their subjects (which modern heads of state still hold in their power to grant pardons), was looked
on with suspicion. Similarly, under the Republic, Cicero argued that rulers who insisted on holding the power of life and death were by definition tyrants, “even if they prefer to be called kings” (De
Re Publica
3.23, Westbrook 1999:204.)

116.
In the Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough (1957:216); see Clanchy 1993:2–5.

117.
Aylmer 1980.

118.
To be fair, a classical liberal would insist that this is the logical conclusion with starting out from the notion of freedom as active instead of passive (or as philosophers put it, that there are “subjective rights”)—that is, seeing freedom not just as others’ obligations to allow us to do whatever the law or custom says we can do, but to do anything that is not specifically forbidden, and that this has had tremendous liberating effects. There is certainly truth in this. But historically, it has been something of a side effect, and there are many other ways to come to the same conclusion that do not require us to accept the underlying assumptions about property.

119.
Tuck 1979:49, cf. Tully 1993:252, Blackburn 1997:63–64.

120.
Note here that in this period, the justification was not based on any assumption of racial inferiority—racial ideologies came later—but rather on the assumption that African laws were legitimate and should be considered binding, at least on Africans.

121.
I’ve made the argument that wage labor is rooted in slavery extensively in the past—see e.g., Graeber 2006.

122.
This is the reason, as C.B. MacPherson (1962) explained, that when “human rights abuses” are evoked in the newspapers, it is only when governments can be seen as trespassing on some victim’s person or possessions—say, by raping, torturing, or killing them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like just about all similar documents, also speaks of universal rights to food and shelter, but one never reads about governments committing “human rights abuses” when they eliminate price supports on basic foodstuffs, even if it leads to widespread malnutrition, or for razing shantytowns or kicking the homeless out of shelters.

123.
One can trace the notion back as least as far back as Seneca, who in the first century ad, argued that slaves could be free in their minds, since force only applied to the “prison of the body”
(De ben-eficiis
3.20)—this appears to have been a key point of transition between the notion of freedom as the ability to form moral relations with others, and freedom as an internalization of the master’s power.

124.
See Roitman 2003:224 for one author who explicitly relates this to debt. For objects as unique points in a human history, there is a vast literature, but see Hoskins 1999, Graeber 2001.

125.
One can tell how unusual slavery was by informants’ assumptions that slaves would have no idea that this was to be their fate.

126.
Significantly, at the very moment when his social existence was the only existence he had left. The mass killing of slaves at the funerals of kings, or grandees, has been documented from ancient Gaul, to Sumer, China, and the Americas.

127.
Iliad
9:342–44.

128.
Evans-Pritchard 1948:36; cf., Sahlins 1981. For a good example of identification of kings and slaves, Feeley-Harnik 1982. Obviously, everyone is well aware that kings do have families, friends, lovers, etc—the point is that this is always seen as something of a problem, since he should be king to all his subjects equally.

129.
Regarding the influence of Roman law on the liberal tradition, it is fascinating to note that the very earliest author we have on record who laid out something like Smith’s model, where money, and ultimately coinage, is invented as an aid to commerce, was another Roman jurist, Paulus:
Digest
18.1.1.

130.
But it has by no means been eliminated. (If anyone is inclined to doubt this, I recommend they take a stroll through
their neighborhood ignoring all property rights, and see just how long it takes for the weapons to come out.)

1.
“Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver,” wrote the notorious cynic Ambrose Bierce (The
Devil’s Dictionary
, 1911:49). Certainly for those Thai women who appeared at Neil Bush’s door, the difference between having been sold by one’s parents, and working off one’s parents’ debt contract, was as much a technicality as it would have been two thousand years ago.

2.
One of the few authors I know who’s confronted the question head-on is Pierre Dockés (1979), who makes a convincing statement that it has to do with the power of the state: at least, slavery as an institution was briefly revived under the Carolingian empire and then vanished again afterward. It is certainly interesting that since the nineteenth century at least, the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” has become our historical paradigm for epochal social change, and no one much addresses the transition from ancient slavery to feudalism, even though there is reason to believe that whatever is happening now may much more closely resemble it.

3.
Robin Blackburn makes this argument quite convincingly in
The Making of New World Slavery
(1997). There were some exceptions, notably the Italian city-states. The story is of course more complicated than I’m representing it: one reason for the hostility was that during much of the Middle Ages, Europeans were largely victims of slave-raiders rather than their beneficiaries, with many captives marketed in North Africa and the Middle East.

4.
The Aegean coins were stamped; the Indian, punched; and the Chinese, cast. This suggests that we are not talking about diffusion here. Speaking of Indian coins, for instance, one historian remarks: “If there is one thing that seems clear from a punch-marked coin, it is that the person who thought it up had never seen a Greek coin—or if he had seen one, it had not impressed him. The punch-marked coin is made by an entirely different metallurgical process” (Schaps 2006:9).

5.
Pruessner (1928) was perhaps the first to point this out.

6.
They appear to have been widely used by Old Assyrian merchants operating in Anatolia (Veenhof 1997).

7.
Powell (1978, 1979, 1999:14–18) provides an excellent assessment of the evidence, emphasizing that Babylonians did not produce scales accurate enough to measure the tiny amounts of silver they would have had to use to make ordinary household purchases like fried fish or cords of firewood in cash. He concludes that silver was largely used in transactions between merchants. Market vendors therefore presumably acted as they do in small-scale markets in Africa and Central Asia, today, building up lists of trustworthy clients to whom they could extend credit over time (e.g., Hart 1999:201, Nazpary 2001).

8.
Hudson 2002:21–23, who hypothesizes that the time element was important as merchants would presumably otherwise delay to employ the funds as long as possible. See Renger 1984, 1994; Meiroop 2005.

9.
I’m referring here to
Qirad
and
Mudaraba
arrangements, similar to the ancient and Medieval Mediterranean
Commenda
(Udovitch 1970, Ray 1997).

10.
Herodotus 1.138.

11.
Herodotus 3.102–5.

12.
Mieroop 2002:63, 2005:29. He notes that Enmetena’s total grain income in any one year was roughly 37 million liters, making the sum he claims to be owed more than one thousand times his own palace’s annual revenue.

13.
Lambert 1971; Lemche 1979:16.

14.
Hudson 1993 provides the most detailed overview of this literature.

15.
Hudson 1993:20.

16.
Grierson 1977:17, citing Cerny 1954:907.

17.
Bleiberg 2002

18.
One authority states categorically: “I do not know of debt-annulment decrees issued by any Pharaoh” (Jasnow 2001:42), and adds that there is no evidence for debt-bondage until the very late Demotic period. This is the same period when Greek sources begin to speak of both.

19.
VerSteeg 2002:199; see Lorton 1977:42–44.

20.
This in certain ways resembles the legal loopholes created in both the Medieval Christian and Islamic worlds, where interest was formally banned: see chapter 10 below.

21.
Diodorus Siculus 1.79. See Westermann 1955:50–51 for a comparison of Greek and Egyptian sources on the subject.

22.
The history of the dissemination of interest-bearing debt is only beginning to be reconstructed. It does not yet appear in Ebla (c. 2500 bc), in Old or Middle Kingdom Egypt, or in Mycenaean Greece, but it eventually becomes common in the Levant in the late Bronze Age, and also in Hittite Anatolia. As we’ll see, it came quite late to Classical Greece, and even later to places like Germany.

23.
In Chinese historiography, in fact, this whole epoch is known as “the feudal period.”)

24.
The
Guanzi
, cited in Schaps 2006:20.

25.
Yung-Ti (2006) has recently argued that they weren’t, though we wouldn’t really know. Thierry (1992:39–41) simply assumes they were, providing much evidence of their use both as units of account and means of payment, but none of their use for buying and selling.

26.
At any rate, cowries were definitely being used as the equivalent of coins in later periods, and the government periodically either suppressed their use or reintroduced them (Quiggin 1949, Swann 1950, Thierry 1992:39–41, Peng 1994.) Cowrie money survived, alongside tally sticks, as a common form of currency in Yunnan province in the far south until relatively recent times (B. Yang 2002), and detailed studies exist, but—as far as I can tell—only in Chinese.

27.
Scheidel 2004:5.

28.
Kan 1978:92, Martzloff 2002:178. I note in passing that a study of the Inca
khipu
system itself would itself be quite fascinating in this regard; the strings were used to record both obligations we would consider financial, and others we would consider ritual, since as in so many Eurasian languages, the words “debt” and “sin” were the same in Quechua as well (Quitter & Urton 2002:270).

29.
L. Yang (1971:5) finds the first reliable literary reference to loans at interest in the fourth century bc. Peng (1994:98–101) notes that the earliest surviving records (the oracle bones and inscriptions) do not mention loans, but there’s no reason they would; he also assembles most of the available literary references, finds many references to loans in early periods, and concludes that there’s no way to know whether to take them seriously. By the Warring States period, however, there is abundant evidence for local usurers, and all the usual abuses.

30.
Yan tie lun I
2/4b2–6, in Gale (1967):12.

31.
Guanzi (73 12), Rickett (1998:397)

32.
So around 100 bc, “when flood and drought come upon them … those who have grain sell at half value, while those who have not borrow at exorbitant usury. Then paternal acres change hands; sons and grandsons are sold to pay debts; merchants make vast profits, and even petty tradesmen set up business and realize unheard of gains” (in Duyvendak 1928:32). Loans at interest are first documented in the fourth century bc in China but may have existed before that (Yang 1971:5). For a parallel case of child-selling for debt in early India, Rhys Davids 1922:218.

1.
Jaspers 1949.

2.
Parkes 1959:71.

3. Or, if one must be even more precise, we should probably end it in 632 ad, with the death of the Prophet.

4.
Obviously Vedic Hinduism is earlier; I am referring to Hinduism as a self-conscious religion, which is generally seen as having taken shape in reaction to Buddhism and Jainism around this time.

5.
The date used to be set much earlier, at 650 or even 700 bc, but recent archaeology has called this into question. Lydian coins still seem to be the earliest, though, as most of the others have been seem to be the earliest though.

6.
Prakash & Singh 1968, Dhavalikar 1974, Kosambi 1981, Gupta & Hardaker 1995. The latest accepted dates for the appearance of coinage in India, based on radiocarbon analysis, is circa 400 bc (Erdosy 1988:115, 1995:113).

7.
Kosambi (1981) notes that there seems to be a direct connection between the first of these and Bronze Age Harappan cities: “even after the destruction of Mohenjo Daro, which is entirely a trade city as shown by its fine weights and poor weapons, the traders persisted, and continued to use the very accurate weights of that period.” (ibid:91). Given what we know of Mesopotamia, with which the Harappan civilization was in close contact, it also seems reasonable to assume that they continued to employ older commercial techniques, and, indeed, “promissory notes” do appear as familiar practices in our earliest literary sources, such as the Jakatas (Rhys Davids 1901:16, Thapar 1995:125, Fiser 2004:194), even if these are many centuries later. Of course, in this case, the marks were presumably meant to confirm the accuracy of the weight, to show that it hadn’t been further trimmed, but the inspiration of earlier credit practices seems likely. Kosambi later confirms this: “The marks would correspond to modern countersignatures on bills or cheques cleared through business houses.” (1996:178–79)

8.
Our first literary record of coinage in China is of a kingdom that reformed its currency system in 524 bc—which means that it already had a currency system, and presumably had for some time (Li 1985:372).