Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money, and Social Obligation ed. by John Weisweiler (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money, and Social Obligation ed. by John Weisweiler
• Brent D. Shaw

Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money, and Social Obligation Edited by John Weisweiler Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 296. ISBN: 9780197647172

The proclaimed aims of the ten collected essays in this volume are two: to contribute to a "history of ancient credit systems" and "to test the accuracy" of David Graeber's well-known grand narrative on debt (2). As for the first, it is a qualified success; the second will leave many readers, including the reviewer, with an unresolved paradox. Graeber's overarching program in Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) is clearly explained in Weisweiler's introduction (chapter 1). Graeber held that credit, and therefore debt and attendant moralizing ideas, have been primal driving forces of human economic exchange. Other than moral injunctions, he argued that violence has been the key creator and enforcer of large-scale indebtedness and that states were the formalized structures that invented coinage as an efficient uniform computational mode of paying their hired enforcers, the soldiers in their armies. Whenever this configuration of state power receded—what Graeber calls the currency-slavery-warfare nexus—so did money in the form of currency and slavery as a form of labor. The structure of debt and state power, vitally linked to chattel slavery, first occurred on a global scale in Karl Jaspers' "Axial Age." Each contributor therefore considers Graeber's ideas within his or her own scholarly bailiwick in this time [End Page 273] span—from Babylonian Mesopotamia to the post-Roman states of western Europe. Since the focus of this journal is Late Antiquity, I shall consider the final half dozen contributions that are most relevant to its concerns and, amongst these, focus on the ones that most directly grapple with Graeber's big theory. These chapters are especially welcome because, as Neville Morley observes, "Rome is a striking absentee from Graeber's historical narrative" (85).

Of the latter contributions, one that puts Graeber's ideas directly to the test is, paradoxically, John Weisweiler's essay on late Roman antiquity (chapter 7). I say "paradoxically" because, unlike the paean to Graeber with which Weisweiler begins the book (chapter 1), all the facts arraigned in his essay speak directly against the big picture advocated by the anthropologist. Late Roman antiquity, he shows, was not a time marked by the dissolution of previous economic or political forces; it did not lapse into a species of non-currency economy; it did not witness a much weakened system of coinage; there was no great decline in trade networks; large rural estates did not become autarkic; in most regions of the empire populations did not plunge downward; slavery did not decline; and the general economy was not in recession or becoming "proto-feudal" in nature. Weisweiler demonstrates the falsity of such claims in detail. He could have added much more. Far from gradually becoming an under-monetized entity, the empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, was relatively saturated with coinage—a picture sustained not just by the evidence of coin hoards (as pointed out by Weisweiler) but by a host of surface and other occasional finds. There was not less but more coined money around than ever before. And as the detailed research of Kyle Harper has shown, far from vanishing slavery remained as deeply entrenched as ever. Furthermore, the contributions by Arietta Papaconstantinou (chapter 10) on the Egyptian papyri of the late antique to early Islamic period and the essay by Alice Rio (chapter 11) on the early mediaeval west both confirm how fundamentally mistaken Graeber was not only in his claims about coinage but about the economy in general and its relationship to militarized states. Indeed, Papaconstantinou (148) wonders aloud why Graeber had not consulted a work as basic as Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005). She points out that the analytical boxes that he uses—Greek city-states, Roman empire, the "Middle Ages"—are conventional ones of a canonical Western Civ story. Their validity is not questioned nor is any explanation...