Graeber also outlines the important role that debt forgiveness has played, historically, in curbing runaway debt and out-of-control usury. Harsh penalties for debts tend to hurt the lowest strata of society, and in ancient times, could end in enslavement or worse - taking a very dynamic element of the economy out of the equation. So rulers in a number of places, until about the Enlightenment, often established safeguarding systems that protected debtors rather than lenders.

In the most remote recorded times, he argues, it was debt, rather than money, that made society hum. The majority of cuneiform documents we have from ancient Mesopotamia relate to financial matters, and they show that by about 3500 BC the Sumerians had a uniform system of accountancy, the silver shekel. However, Graeber asserts, this denomination was less money in our modern sense (it hardly circulated) than a way for accountants to keep track of who owed what to whom. Debt, in other words, was the basic currency that got business done. Money of the portable kind emerged later, primarily in times and areas of conflict, when grab-and-go was a priority. As civilization advanced and spread, systems where debt was central and instrumental to economic activity emerged in the Islamic world, India, China, and throughout the Mediterranean.

Graeber, who teaches at the University of London, is an academic with a keen interest in the cultural roots of debt, and also an unapologetic critic of modern capitalism’s approach to money. His new book, “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” (Melville House Publishing), is a scholarly and readable history of debt that also wrestles with the changing moral status of debt over the centuries. Modern history, in his framework, is in part the story of commercial values coming to trump human and political ones, and his ambition in writing this sort of book is to make people think differently about debt and social relationships - to question why we feel so powerfully compelled to “honor” our debts, and whether having debt, or even skipping out on it, is as morally suspect as we’ve made it out to be.

Debt may seem a cruel invention, a tool that encourages people and nations to live far beyond their means instead of carefully husbanding their money. Quite the contrary, finds anthropologist David Graeber; it you look back far enough, you find that societies have been dealing with debt for longer than they have been using money, and that debt has been essential in governing economic life for five millennia. The modern problem with debt, he argues, lies in how we’ve come to think of it.

THE WORD ITSELF is one we find chilling: debt. On a personal level, the burden of debt can hang over our lives and choke off our options; at the national level, worry about the ballooning US debt has threatened to paralyze both Washington and the economy as a whole.

Politically Graeber considers himself an anarchist, and is quite outspoken in his own support of the idea of debt forgiveness for developing countries. Graeber spoke to Ideas by phone from New York City, where he is spending time while working through a yearlong fellowship with the British Academy.

IDEAS: You’ve done academic research on debt and valuation before, but the history of debt is a sprawling project. Why tackle it?

GRAEBER: It was really much to do with my political involvement, a lot of which revolved around debt. But once you’re onto it, you start noticing it everywhere. Almost all political issues turn on debt, and debt has this incredible power. That’s why I started the book with an anecdote where a liberal do-gooder lawyer actually thinks that paying debts is a fundamental moral obligation. The notion of, “Well, we have to pay our debts,” seems to be such a powerful argument that it’s the trump card of anyone trying to do any type of political demagoguery.

IDEAS: A lot of people think of barter, rather than debt, as the earliest kind of economy. But you write that pure barter economies never existed?

GRAEBER: As an anthropologist, it’s kind of a professional pet peeve. We’ve been looking for this mythical land of barter for the last 200 years, so we would have found it by now . . . .The spot trade, where it’s in the moment and you never see each other again, this is the opposite of any kind of exchange in primitive economies. In order to create the idea that life is just a series of exchanges we can all walk away from - a very antisocial notion of what people are about - you have to eradicate all obligations that people have to each other.

IDEAS: In the book you identify a move from human economies, those about human relationships, to commercial economy, where anything can be quantified. How does that happen?