Debt: The First 5,000 Years
An anthropologist's history of debt, credit, and money across 5,000 years, arguing that credit systems preceded coinage and that the "barter economy" origin story of money is a myth. Published by Melville House in July 2011, it became an unlikely bestseller and a touchstone text of the Occupy era.
542 pages, and a reader's advice for the back half is "Skip everything after the Middle Ages": the Babylonian and Roman sections do real archival work, then Islam and China get a survey. That is not a back-half problem only, since "the book drifts along in too many directions," and shock value keeps arriving where a citation belongs. Opposing economists show up mainly to be knocked over. "If you like your books to be robustly argued with appropriate credence given to opposing arguments, I suggest you pick up something else," one reviewer writes. Another calls it "the attempt to strap history into a Procrustean bed," which is what 5,000 years look like when they all have to prove one point about capitalism.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
