{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02390852390852391, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0031185031185031187, 'mean_word_length': 5.1584, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the global trade networks of Armenian merchants from New Julfa by Sebouh David Aslanian

imperial expansion that recreated a hard currency period (fuelled by the mines of the New World and Asian demand for metal). The abandonment of the gold standard in 1973 is the mark of another transition back to a virtual, credit-based economy, the contours of which we are just beginning to see. These chapters reveals a rare degree of breadth in global history, anthropology, and archaeology, deployed creatively and relentlessly. The first use of coins? Religious and ceremonial rituals to signify loyalty and irredeemable obligations. The first cash traders? Mercenaries and soldiers divorced from local communities and carrying looted bits of metal. The first regime of absolute property rights? Roman legal protection of the slave-owner’s right to dominate the slave. The first stateless global market? Merchants operating under Islam’s anti-usury umbrella. Origins do not always yield essences, and the evidence is never watertight, but this is a book that speculates and provokes rather than proves. If I have serious quibbles, they are of omissions in an already large and digression-filled book. There is little attempt to deal with the argument that interest-bearing debt facilitates saving for the future and investment in technologies that better our material conditions. Debt could have dealt more with classical economists on money, as Hume, Wicksell, and Fisher all had smart things to say about currency versus credit, laying the foundations for the quantity theory of money that underpins macroeconomics. At the other end, Debt also could have marshalled the new behavioural science research on reciprocity and wellbeing that would have buttressed the ethnographic and historical literatures that Graeber draws on. Finally, for a book that clearly owes inspiration to many themes in Marx, there is little attempt to dive behind the veil of Benthamite exchange and look at what the implications of the theory are for the organization of work and production. Graeber’s periodization suggests that slavery is the form of labour in the hard currency regime, and briefly draws analogies to wage labour. But if, as Antonio Negri once wrote, ‘Money has one face, the face of the boss’, then this face is largely missing in Debt. There are many applications of Graeber’s anthropology, including microfinance, online currency, the macroeconomics of sovereign default, and the distribution, even the definition, of wealth. But at the bottom of it is the notion that the debt relationship is just a commitment to future payback. Economists know that that commitment can rarely be taken for granted, particularly during periods of crisis. Promises and contracts can be broken, or enforced by love, honour, the courts, or the marines, depending on the broader institutions making up the context. We, economists have just begun incorporating these social and political foundations of complex exchange into our models. Finally, this book historicizes and legitimates both the form and the content of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. This is unsurprising, given the small-a anarchism that influences both the author and the movement. The internal commons constructed in Zuccotti Park are mirrored in Graeber’s recognition of the festival and the gift as modes of economic organization. The political content of the occupation, with its hostility to debt, finance, and inequality, resonates with the demand of foreclosed peasantry throughout history: ‘Cancel the debts and redistribute the land’. While this book is full of insights that anthropologists, classicists, historians, and economists will find useful, 2011’s Occupy Wall Street is possibly the best testimony to the inspiration found in Debt.