I’ve just published my collected essays on the Sumerian and Babylonian origins of money, interest-bearing debt, land tenure and enterprise from c. 2500 BC to 500 BC, as well as my article on Alexander Marshack’s Ice Age notation. I’ve priced the 544-pge book just below $30 for paperback and $40 for hardback.
Michael Hudson is the foremost expert on the financial and monetary systems of the antiquarian Western/Near Eastern World, from Mesopotamia to the Fall of the Roman Empire. In this work he totally demolishes the myth that money developed from a need to simplify barter transactions. Instead, money developed as a complement to credit/debt relationships, initially mainly between Temples and Kings as creditors and merchants and small farmers as debtors.
A second main theme is that many small farmers borrowed out of desperation, e.g. after bad harvests, so that the only way to prevent growing inequality was to introduce occasional debtor holidays via Jubilees or clean slates. But rich creditors, outside the ruling family, did not like to do this, and, whenever they controlled policy, land holding became centralized, and tax revenue declined, leading to collapse. Hudson’s analysis poses the issue of whether debt forgiveness is feasible and/or desirable in the modern world.
Charles Goodhart
author of ‘Goodhart’s Law’ and initial external member of Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.
While David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years exposed the myth of barter, Michael Hudson’s brilliant book demonstrates that money’s origins can be found in the temples and palaces of the Ancient Near East. Money was created to denominate debts to authorities incurred as rents and fees, and for the advance of land, seeds, animals and beer. As debts tended to grow faster than ability to pay, periodic debt cancellations restored liberty and the ability of communities to support themselves.
Hudson warns that the rise of Western civilization’s doctrine of the inviolability of debt drowns the majority of the world’s population in unpayable debts and servitude to oligarchies. Social balance, growth, liberty, and resilience can only be restored with debt cancellations and Clean Slates.
L. Randall Wray,
Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute and Professor of Economics, Bard College
Michael Hudson was the major influence on my husband David Graeber. David and I often discussed his debt to Michael’s research in his own advocacy of Clean Slates”
Nika Dubrovsky,
David Graeber’s partner and the founder of David Graeber institute
