Debt :

The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber (New York: Melville House, 2011)

Abstract

Most histories of money are histories of coins and tokens but, coins come and go with empires. Money has much deeper roots in the form of obligation that binds together even the simplest societies. As Brent Ranalli puts it, “It takes an anthropologist to write a truly universal economic history, and that is what David Graeber has accomplished with ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’. With its wide scope, Debt offers valuable perspective on contemporary issues. The problem of economic insecurity that makes basic income so urgent today is not a unique feature of modernity or capitalism (though modern technological advances make possible for the first time a universal basic income as a solution), but it has been with us since the development of money per se—that is, financial credit, or debt—at the dawn of civilization.”