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David Graeber's fresh...fascinating...thought-provoking...and exceedingly timely (Financial Times) history of debt

Anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: before there was money, there was debt. For more than five thousand years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods--that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion--words like guilt, sin, and redemption--derive in large part from ancient debates about debt and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history--as well as how it has defined human history and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

David Graeber teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value; Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar; Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire; and Direct Action: An Ethnography. He has written for Harper's, Nation, Mute, and the New Left Review.

Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over eight hundred titles to his credit. Named one of the Best Voices of the Century and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.