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The History of Debt: Monarchs, Markets, and Mankind
Paperback
Series: History
Business GeneralInvesting & Finance
Currently unavailable to order
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 27 2025
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.42 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
What if debt isn't just about money, but about power, rebellion, and the fate of empires? This book traces 5,000 years of financial warfare, from Mesopotamian temples where credit was invented long before coins existed to the Wall Street systems that shape your life today. It rewrites everything you think you know about owing and owning.
Starting with the surprising truth that credit came before barter, not the other way around, this large print edition follows debt through every era of human civilization. Hammurabi's Code capping interest at 20% while temple lenders found loopholes. Ancient kings erasing debts wholesale to prevent revolutions. Solon wiping the slate clean to save Athens from civil war. The Catholic Church excommunicating bankers for usury while Islamic finance built trade empires on zero-interest loans. Viking thralls entering slavery over unpaid grain debts. Renaissance bankers funding wars with double-entry bookkeeping. Colonial powers using forced resource debt to disguise slavery. The Bank of England born in 1694 specifically to fund war. And industrial-era company stores trapping miners in cycles of debt they could never escape. The same patterns repeat across millennia, and this book connects every one of them.
What's inside:
- The origins of debt: why barter is a myth, how credit systems predated coinage, and the Mesopotamian temples where lending was first formalized
- Debt as political weapon: ancient kings using mass forgiveness to prevent uprisings, Solon's revolt in Athens, and the pattern of debt crises triggering revolutions
- Religion and finance: the Catholic war on usury, Islamic zero-interest lending that built trade empires, and the tension between faith and banking that shaped medieval economies
- Colonial debt traps: how loans funded slavery and conquest, forced labor disguised as credit systems, and the post-slavery economies that kept workers trapped in company-store debt
- Modern echoes: how the Bank of England was born from war debt, how 19th-century empires collapsed from defaults, and why the same debt-trap patterns from ancient Egypt are still recognizable today
Reader review:
This book completely changed how I think about debt. The chapter on Hammurabi's debt laws was fascinating, and the one exposing colonial credit systems was infuriating. It connects dots across 5,000 years in a way that makes modern finance suddenly make a lot more sense. Large print made the denser historical sections much easier to get through. Prof. Elena R.
Debt built pyramids, funded crusades, and sparked revolutions. It also trapped entire populations in cycles of poverty that lasted generations. This book traces that full history honestly and shows why understanding how debt has always worked is the first step to seeing the system clearly. Large print edition for comfortable reading.
Order your copy today.
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