Authors: David Graeber
9.
Schaps 2006:34. For a similar recent argument, Schoenberger 2008.
10.
Of course the very first coins were of fairly high denominations and quite possibly used for paying taxes and fees, and for buying houses and cattle more than for everyday purchases (Kraay 1964, Price 1983, Schaps 2004, Vickers 1985). A real market society in Greece, for instance, could only be said to exist when, as in the fifth century, ordinary citizens went to the market carrying minuscule coins of stamped silver or copper in their cheeks.
11.
First proposed by Cook (1958), the explanation has since lost favor (Price 1983, Kraay 1964, Wallace 1987, Schaps 2004:96–101; though cf. Ingham 2004:100)—largely, on the argument that one cannot pay soldiers with coins unless there are already markets with people willing to accept the coins. This strikes me as a weak objection, since the absence of coinage does not imply the absence of either money or markets; almost all parties to the debate (e.g., Balmuth [1967, 1971, 1975, 2001) who argues that irregular pieces of silver were already in wide use as currency, and Le Rider (2001), Seaford (2004:318–37) or for that matter Schaps (2004:222–35), who argue that they were not numerous enough to be a viable everyday currency, seem to give much consideration to the possibility that most market trade took place on credit. Anyway, as I’ve noted earlier, it would be easy enough for the state to ensure that the coins became acceptable currency simply by insisting that they were the only acceptable means of payment for obligations to the state itself.
12.
Most of the earliest known Greek bankers were of Phoenician descent, and it’s quite possible that they first introduced the concept of interest there (Hudson 1992).
13.
Elayi & Elayi 1992.
14.
Starr 1977:113; see Lee 2000.
15.
It’s interesting to note that, to our knowledge, the great trading nations did not produce much in the way of great art or philosophy.
16.
The great exception was of course Sparta, which refused to issue its own coinage but developed a system whereby aristocrats adopted a strict military lifestyle and trained permanently for war.
17.
Aristotle himself noted the connection when he emphasized that the constitution of a Greek state could be predicted by the main army of its military: aristocracies if they relied on cavalry (since horses were very expensive), oligarchies in the case of heavy infantry (since armor was not cheap), democracy in the case of light infantry or navies (since anyone could wield a sling or row a boat)
(Politics
4.3.1289b33–44, 13.1297b16–24, 6.7.1321a6–14).
18.
Keyt (1997:103) summarizing
Politics
1304b27–31.
19.
Thucydides (6.97.7) claimed that 20,000 escaped from the mines in 421 bc, which is probably exaggerated, but most sources estimate at least 10,000 for most of that century, generally working shackled and under atrocious conditions (Robinson 1973).
20.
Ingham 2004:99–100.
21.
MacDonald 2006:43.
22.
On Alexander’s armies monetary needs, Davies 1996:80 in turn, 83; on his logistics more generally, Engels 1978. The figure 120,000 includes not only actual troops but servants, camp-followers, and so forth.
23.
Green 1993:366.
24.
The Roman institution was called
nexum
, and we don’t know entirely how it worked: i.e., whether it was a form of labor contract, whereby one worked off the debt for a fixed term, or something more like African pawn systems, where the debtor—and his or her children—served in conditions roughly like those of a slave until redemption (see Testart 2002 for the possibilities). See Buckler 1895, Brunt 1974, Cornell 1994:266–67, 330–32.
25.
Hence, most of the scandalous stories that sparked uprisings against debt bondage centered on dramatic cases of physical or sexual abuse; of course, once debt bondage was abolished and household labor was instead supplied by slaves, such abuse was considered normal and acceptable.
26.
The first bronze coins paid to soldiers seem to have been coined around 400 bc (Scheidel 2006), but this was the traditional date according to Roman historians.
27.
What I am arguing flies in the face of much of the conventional scholarly wisdom, summed up best perhaps by Moses Finley when he wrote “in Greece and Rome the debtor class rebelled; whereas in the Near East they did not”—and therefore reforms like those of Nehemiah were at least minor, temporary palliatives. Near Eastern rebellion took a different form; moreover, Greek and Roman solutions were both more limited and more temporary than he supposed.
28.
Ioannatou 2006 for a good example. Cataline’s conspiracy of 63 bc was an alliance of indebted aristocrats and desperate peasants. On continued Republican debt and land redistribution campaigns: Mitchell 1993.
29.
Howgego makes this point: “If less is heard of debt under the Principate it may well be because political stability removed the opportunity for the expression of discontent. This argument is supported by the way in which debt re-emerges as an issue at times of open revolt” (1992:13).
30.
Plutarch,
Moralia
, 828f—831a.
31.
There is, needless to say, a vast and conflicting literature, but probably the best source is Banaji (2001). He emphasizes in the late empire, “debt was the essential means by which employers enforced control over the supply of labour, fragmenting the solidarity of workers and ‘personalizing’ relations between owners
and employees” (ibid:205), a situation he compares interestingly to India.
32.
Kosambi 1966, Sharma 1968, Misra 1976, Altekar 1977:109–38. Contemporary Indian historians, who refer to them as gana-sanghas (“tribal assemblies”), tend to dismiss them as warrior aristocracies supported by populations of helots or slaves, though of course, Greek city-states could be described the same way.
33.
In other words, they looked more like Sparta than like Athens. The slaves were also collectively owned (Chakravarti 1985:48–49.) Again, one has to wonder how much this was really the general rule, but I yield to the predominant scholarly opinion on such matters.
34.
Arthasastra
2.12.27. See Schaps 2006:18 for a nice comparative commentary.
35.
Thapar 2002:34, Dikshitar 1948.
36.
There were also taxes, of course, usually ranging from 1/6 to 1/4 of total yield (Kosambi 1996:316; Sihag 2005), but taxes also served as a way to bring goods to the market.
37.
So Kosambi 1966:152–57.
38.
And wage labor, two phenomena that, as so often in the ancient world, largely overlapped: the common phrase for workers used in texts from the period was
dasa-karmakara
, “slave-hireling” with the assumption that slaves and laborers worked together and were barely distinguishable (Chakravarti 1985). On the predominance of slavery, see Sharma 1958, Rai 1981. The extent is contested, but early Buddhist texts do seem to assume that any wealthy family would normally have domestic slaves—which certainly wasn’t true in other periods.
39.
Punch-marked coins were also eventually replaced, after Alexander’s brief conquest of the Indus Valley and his establishment of Greek colonists in Afghanistan, by Aegean-style coins, ultimately causing the entire Indian tradition to disappear (Kosambi 1981, Gupta & Hardaker 1985.)
40.
It’s referred to as the “Pillar Edict” (Norman 1975:16).
41.
There’s a good deal of debate as to when: Schopen (1994) emphasizes there is little evidence for substantial Buddhist monasteries until the first century ad, perhaps three centuries later. This has a great deal of bearing on monetarization too, as we’ll see.
42.
“The private trader was regarded as a thorn
(kantaka)
, a public enemy just short of a national calamity, by Arth. 4.2, taxed and fined for malpractices of which many are taken for granted” (Kosambi 1996:243).
43.
Those wishing to become monks had to first affirm that they were not themselves debtors (just as they also had to promise they weren’t runaway slaves); but there was no rule saying the monastery itself could not lend money. In China, as we’ll see, providing easy credit terms for peasants came to be seen as a form of charity.
44.
Similarly, Buddhist monks are not allowed to see an army, if they can possibly avoid it (Pacittiya, 48–51).
45.
Lewis 1990.
46.
Wilbur 1943, Yates 2002. The state of Qin, during the Warring States period, not only allowed for army officers to be allocated slaves by rank, but for merchants, craftsmen, and the “poor and idle” to themselves be “confiscated as slaves” (Lewis 1990:61–62).
47.
Scheidel (2006, 2007, 2009) has considered the matter at length and concluded that Chinese currency took the unusual form that it did for two maibn reasons: (1) the historical coincidence that Qin (which used bronze coins) defeated Chu (which used gold) in the civil wars, and subsequent conservatism, and (2) the lack of a highly paid professional army, which allowed the Chinese state to act like the early Roman republic, which also limited itself to bronze coins for peasant conscripts—but unlike the Roman republic, was not surrounded by states accustomed to other forms of currency.
48. Pythagoras was, as far as we know, the first to take the latter course, founding a secret political society that for a while had control over the levers of political power in the Greek cities of southern Italy.
49.
Hadot 1995, 2002. In the ancient world, Christianity was recognized as a philosophy largely because it had its own forms of ascetic practice.
50.
On the Tillers: Graham 1979, 1994:67–110. They seem to have flourished around the same time as Mo Di, the founder of Mohism (roughly 470–391 bc). The Tillers ultimately vanished, leaving behind mainly a series of treatises on agricultural technology, but they had a tremendous influence on early Taoism—which, in turn, became the favorite philosophy for peasant rebels for many centuries to come, starting with the Yellow Turbans of 184 ad. Eventually, Taoism was displaced by messianic forms of Buddhism as the favorite ideology of rebellious peasants.
51.
Wei-Ming 1986, Graham 1989, Schwartz 1986.
52.
Legend has it that after one Pythagorean mathematician discovered the existence of irrational numbers, other members of the sect took him on a cruise and dropped him overboard. For an extended discussion of the relation of early Pythagoreanism (530–400 bc) to the rise of a cash economy, see Seaford 2004:266–75).
53.
At least if my own experience in Madagascar is anything to go on.
54.
War is quite similar: it’s also an area in which it’s possible to imagine everyone as playing a game where the rules and stakes are unusually transparent. The main difference is that in war one does care about one’s fellow soldiers. On the origins of our own notion of “self-interest,” see chapter 11 below.
55.
Not to be confused with the unrelated Confucian term
li
, meaning “ritual” or “etiquette.” Later,
li
became the word for “interest”—that is, not only “self-interest,” but also “interest payment” (e.g., Cartier 1988:26–27). I should note that my argument here is slightly unconventional. Schwartz (1985:145–51) notes that in Confucius, “profit” has a purely pejorative meaning, and he argues that it was subversively reinterpreted by Mo Di. I find it unlikely that Confucius represents conventional wisdom at this time; while his writings are the earliest we have on the subject, his position was clearly marginal for centuries after his death. I am assuming instead that the Legalist tradition reflected the common wisdom even before Confucius—or certainly, Mencius.
56.
Zhan Guo Ce
(“Strategies of the Warring States”) no. 109, 7.175
57.
Annuals of Lü Buwei
, 8/5.4.
58.
See Ames (1994) for a discussion of key terms:
si li
(self-interest),
shi
(strategic advantage), and
li min
(public profit).
59.
Book of Lord Shang 947–48, Duyvendak 1928:65.
60.
Kosambi’s translation (1965:142); the Encyclopedia Britannica prefers “handbook on profit” (entry for “CĀrvĀka”); Altekar (1977:3), “the science of wealth.”
61.
Nag & Dikshitar 1927:15. Kosambi argues that the Mauryan polity was thus based on a fundamental contradiction: “a moral law-abiding population ruled by a completely amoral king” (1996:237). Yet such a situation is hardly unusual, before or since.
62.
Thucydides 5.85-113 (cf. 3.36–49). The event took place in 416 bc, around the same time that Lord Shang and Kautilya were writing. Significantly, Thucydides’ own objections to such behavior are not explicitly moral but center on showing that it was not to the “long-term profit” of the empire (Kallet 2001:19). On Thucydides’ own utilitarian materialism more generally, see Sahlins 2004.
63.
Mozi 6:7B, in Hansen 2000:137
64.
Mencius 4.1, in Duyvendak 1928:76–77. He appears to be referring to a distinction originally made by Confucius himself: “the superior person understands what is right while the inferior person
only understands what is personally profitable”
(Analects
7.4.16).
65.
The Mohist path—overtly embrace financial logic—was the less well trodden. We’ve already seen how in India and Greece, attempts to frame morality as debt went nowhere: even the Vedic principles are ostensibly about liberation from debt, which was also, as we’ve seen, a central theme in Israel.
66.
Leenhardt 1979:164.
67.
This interpretation does fly fairly directly in the face of the main thrust of scholarship on the issue, which tends instead to emphasize the “transcendental” nature of Axial Age ideas (e.g., Schwartz 1975, Eisenstadt 1982, 1984, 1986, Roetz 1993, Bellah 2005).
68.
The Greek system actually began with Fire, Air, and Water, and the Indian with Fire, Water, and Earth, though in each case there were numerous elaborations. The Chinese elemental system was fivefold: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water.