Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a 2011 book by David Graeber. It is a history of debt as a social institution, arguing that the standard economics narrative — barter leads to money leads to credit — is historically backwards. Credit and debt relations came first; money was introduced by states and military operations; and barter economies appear only where monetary systems have collapsed.
Graeber traces how debt has been used as a mechanism of domination across civilizations: debt peonage, debtors’ prisons, structural adjustment programs, and the moral language of obligation that makes the debtor always wrong and the creditor always justified. He argues that periodic debt cancellation (jubilees) was a recognized necessity in ancient societies and that the refusal to cancel debts has historically produced social crisis.
The book’s anarchist political framework grounds the analysis: mutual aid, gift economies, and communistic sharing (Graeber’s term for everyday cooperation) are the baseline of human economic life, not exceptions to a competitive norm. Markets and debt are impositions maintained by force, not natural outcomes of human exchange.