David Graeber - History Quotes

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Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.

David Graeber

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.

David Graeber

To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.

David Graeber

The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.

David Graeber

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

David Graeber