Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 10

Effectively, the Chinese government had gone back to its old policy of encouraging markets and merely intervening to prevent any undue concentrations of capital. It quickly proved spectacularly successful, and Chinese markets boomed. Indeed, many speak of the Ming as having accomplished something almost unique in world history: this was a time when the Chinese population was exploding, but living standards markedly improved.7 The problem was that the new policy meant that the regime had to ensure an abundant supply of silver in the country, so as to keep its price low and minimize popular unrest-but as it turned out, the Chinese mines were very quickly exhausted. In the 1530s, new silver mines were discovered in j.a.pan, but these were exhausted in a decade or two as well. Before long, China had to turn to Europe and the New World.

Now, since Roman times, Europe had been exporting gold and silver to the East: the problem was that Europe had never produced much of anything that Asians wanted to buy, so it was forced to pay in specie for silks, spices, steel, and other imports. The early years of European expansion were largely attempts to gain access either to Eastern luxuries or to new sources of gold and silver with which to pay for them. In those early days, Atlantic Europe really had only one substantial advantage over its Muslim rivals: an active and advanced tradition of naval warfare, honed by centuries of conflict in the Mediterranean. The moment when Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean in 1498, the principle that the seas should be a zone of peaceful trade came to an immediate end. Portuguese flotillas began bombarding and sacking every port city they came across, then seizing control of strategic points and extorting protection money from unarmed Indian Ocean merchants for the right to carry on their business unmolested.

At almost exactly the same time, Christopher Columbus-a Genoese mapmaker seeking a short-cut to China-touched land in the New World, and the Spanish and Portuguese empires stumbled into the greatest economic windfall in human history: entire continents full of unfathomable wealth, whose inhabitants, armed only with Stone Age weapons, began conveniently dying almost as soon as they arrived. The conquest of Mexico and Peru led to the discovery of enormous new sources of precious metal, and these were exploited ruthlessly and systematically, even to the point of largely exterminating the surrounding populations to extract as much precious metal as quickly as possible. As Kenneth Pomeranz has recently pointed out, none of this would have been possible were it not for the practically unlimited Asian demand for precious metals.

Had China in particular not had such a dynamic economy that changing its metallic base could absorb the staggering quant.i.ties of silver mined in the New World over three centuries, those mines might have become unprofitable within a few decades. The ma.s.sive inflation of silver-denominated prices in Europe from 1500 to 1640 indicates a shrinking value for the metal there even with Asia draining off much of the supply.8 By 1540, a silver glut caused a collapse in prices across Europe; the American mines would, at this point, simply have stopped functioning, and the entire project of American colonization foundered, had it not been for the demand from China.9 Treasure galleons moving toward Europe soon refrained from unloading their cargoes, instead rounding the horn of Africa and proceeding across the Indian Ocean toward Canton. After 1571, with the foundation of the Spanish city of Manila, they began to move directly across the Pacific. By the late sixteenth century, China was importing almost fifty tons of silver a year, about 90 percent of its silver, and by the early seventeenth century, 116 tons, or over 97 percent.10 Huge amounts of silk, porcelain, and other Chinese products had to be exported to pay for it. Many of these Chinese products, in turn, ended up in the new cities of Central and South America. This Asian trade became the single most significant factor in the emerging global economy, and those who ultimately controlled the financial levers-particularly Italian, Dutch, and German merchant bankers-became fantastically rich.

But how exactly did the new global economy cause the collapse of living standards in Europe? One thing we do know: it clearly was not by making large amounts of precious metal available for everyday transactions. If anything, the effect was the opposite. While European mints were stamping out enormous numbers of rials, thalers, ducats, and doubloons, which became the new medium of trade from Nicaragua to Bengal, almost none found their way into the pockets of ordinary Europeans. Instead, we hear constant complaints about the shortage of currency. In England: For much of the Tudor period the circulating medium was so small that the taxable population simply did not have sufficient coin in which to pay the benevolences, subsidies, and tenths levied upon them, and time and time again household plate, the handiest near money that most people possessed, had to be surrendered.11 This was the case in most of Europe. Despite the ma.s.sive influx of metal from the Americas, most families were so low on cash that they were regularly reduced to melting down the family silver to pay their taxes.

This was because taxes had to be paid in metal. Everyday business in contrast continued to be transacted much as it had in the Middle Ages, by means of various forms of virtual credit money: tallies, promissory notes, or, within smaller communities, simply by keeping track of who owed what to whom. What really caused the inflation is that those who ended up in control of the bullion-governments, bankers, large-scale merchants-were able to use that control to begin changing the rules, first by insisting that gold and silver were money, and second by introducing new forms of credit-money for their own use while slowly undermining and destroying the local systems of trust that had allowed small-scale communities across Europe to operate largely without the use of metal currency.

This was a political battle, even if it was also a conceptual argument about the nature of money. The new regime of bullion money could only be imposed through almost unparalleled violence-not only overseas, but at home as well. In much of Europe, the first reaction to the "price revolution" and accompanying enclosures of common lands was not very different from what had so recently happened in China: thousands of one-time peasants fleeing or being forced out of their villages to become vagabonds or "masterless men," a process that culminated in popular insurrections. The reaction of European governments, however, was entirely different. The rebellions were crushed, and this time, no subsequent concessions were forthcoming. Vagabonds were rounded up, exported to the colonies as indentured laborers, and drafted into colonial armies and navies-or, eventually, set to work in factories at home.

Almost all of this was carried out through a manipulation of debt. As a result, the very nature of debt, too, became once again one of the princ.i.p.al bones of contention.

Part I:.

Greed, Terror, Indignation, Debt.

No doubt scholars will never stop arguing about the reasons for the great "price revolution"-largely because it's not clear what kind of tools can be applied. Can we really use the methods of modern economics, which were designed to understand how contemporary economic inst.i.tutions operate, to describe the political battles that led to the creation of those very inst.i.tutions?

This is not just a conceptual problem. There are moral dangers here. To take what might seem an "objective," macro-economic approach to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the behavior of early European explorers, merchants, and conquerors as if they were simply rational responses to opportunities-as if this were just what anyone would have done in the same situation. This is what the use of equations so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to a.s.sume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville, and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quant.i.ties of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that some will enslave them. In fact, history makes it quite clear that this is not the case. Any number of civilizations have probably been in a position to wreak havoc on the scale that the European powers did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ming China itself was an obvious candidate), but almost none actually did so.12 Consider, for instance, how the gold and silver from the American mines were extracted. Mining operations began almost immediately upon the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenocht.i.tlan in 1521. While we are used to a.s.suming that the Mexican population was devastated simply as an effect of newly introduced European diseases, contemporary observers felt that the dragooning of the newly conquered natives to work in the mines was at least equally responsible.13 In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov offers a compendium of some of the most chilling reports, mostly from Spanish priests and friars who, even when committed in principle to the belief that the extermination of the Indians was the judgment of G.o.d, could not disguise their horror at scenes of Spanish soldiers testing the blades of their weapons by eviscerating random pa.s.sers-by, and tearing babies off their mother's backs to be eaten by dogs. Such acts might perhaps be written off as what one would expect when a collection of heavily armed men-many of violent criminal background-are given absolute impunity; but the reports from the mines imply something far more systematic. When Fray Toribio de Motolinia wrote of the ten plagues that he believed G.o.d had visited on the inhabitants of Mexico, he listed smallpox, war, famine, labor exactions, taxes (which caused many to sell their children to moneylenders, others to be tortured to death in cruel prisons), and the thousands who died in the building of the capital city. Above all, he insisted, were the uncountable numbers who died in the mines: The eighth plague was the slaves whom the Spaniards made in order to put them to work in the mines. At first those who were already slaves of the Aztecs were taken; then those who had given evidence of insubordination; finally all those who could be caught. During the first years after the conquest, the slave traffic flourished, and slaves often changed master. They produced so many marks on their faces, in addition to the royal brand, that they had their faces covered with letters, for they bore the marks of all who had bought and sold them.

The ninth plague was the service in the mines, to which the heavily laden Indians traveled sixty leagues or more to carry provisions ... When their food gave out they died, either at the mines or on the road, for they had no money to buy food and there was no one to give it to them. Some reached home in such a state that they died soon after. The bodies of those Indians and of the slaves who died in the mines produced such a stench that it caused a pestilence, especially at the mines of Oaxaca. For half a league around these mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that came to fatten themselves upon the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun."14 Similar scenes were reported in Peru, where whole regions were depopulated by forced service in the mines, and Hispaniola, where the indigenous population was eradicated entirely.15 When dealing with conquistadors, we are speaking not just of simple greed, but greed raised to mythic proportions. This is, after all, what they are best remembered for. They never seemed to get enough. Even after the conquest of Tenocht.i.tlan or Cuzco, and the acquisition of hitherto-unimaginable riches, the conquerors almost invariably regrouped and started off in search of more treasure.

Moralists throughout the ages have inveighed against the endlessness of human greed, just as they have against our supposedly endless l.u.s.t for power. What history actually reveals, though, is that while humans may be justly accused of having a proclivity to accuse others of acting like conquistadors, few really act this way themselves. Even for the most ambitious of us, our dreams are more like Sindbad's: to have adventures, to acquire the means to settle down and live an enjoyable life, and then, to enjoy it. Max Weber of course argued that the essence of capitalism is the urge-which he thought first appeared in Calvinism-never to settle down, but to engage in endless expansion. But the conquistadors were good Medieval Catholics, even if ones usually drawn from the most ruthless and unprincipled elements of Spanish society. Why the unrelenting drive for more and more and more?

It might help, I think, to go back to the very onset of Hernan Cortes's conquest of Mexico: What were his immediate motives? Cortes had migrated to the colony of Hispaniola in 1504, dreaming of glory and adventure, but for the first decade and a half, his adventures had largely consisted of seducing other people's wives. In 1518, however, he managed to finagle his way into being named commander of an expedition to establish a Spanish presence on the mainland. As Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who accompanied him, later wrote, around this time He began to adorn himself and be more careful of his appearance than before. He wore a plume of feathers, with a medallion and a gold chain, and a velvet cloak trimmed with loops of gold. In fact he looked like a bold and gallant Captain. However, he had no money to defray the expenses I have spoken about, for at the time he was very poor and much in debt, despite the fact that he had a good estate of Indians and was getting gold from the mines. But all this he spent on his person, on finery for his wife, whom he had recently married, and on entertaining guests ...

When some merchant friends of his heard that he had obtained his command as Captain General, they lent him four thousand gold pesos in coin and another four thousand in goods secured on his Indians and estates. He then ordered two standards and banners to be made, worked in gold with the royal arms and a cross on each side with a legend which said, "Comrades, let us follow the sign of the Holy Cross with true faith, and through it we shall conquer."16 In other words, he'd been living beyond his means, got himself in trouble, and decided, like a reckless gambler, to double down and go for broke. Unsurprising, then, that when the governor at the last minute decided to cancel the expedition, Cortes ignored him and sailed for the mainland with six hundred men, offering each an equal share in the expedition's profits. On landing he burned his boats, effectively staking everything on victory.

Let us skip, then, from the beginning of Diaz's book to its final chapter. Three years later, through some of the most ingenious, ruthless, brilliant, and utterly dishonorable behavior by a military leader ever recorded, Cortes had his victory. After eight months of grueling house-to-house warfare and the death of perhaps a hundred thousand Aztecs, Tenocht.i.tlan, one of the greatest cities of the world, lay entirely destroyed. The imperial treasury was secured, and the time had come, then, for it to be divided in shares amongst the surviving soldiers.

Yet according to Diaz, the result among the men was outrage. The officers connived to sequester most of the gold, and when the final tally was announced, the troops learned that they would be receiving only fifty to eighty pesos each. What's more, the better part of their shares was immediately seized again by the officers in their capacity of creditors-since Cortes had insisted that the men be billed for any replacement equipment and medical care they had received during the siege. Most found they had actually lost money on the deal. Diaz writes: We were all very deeply in debt. A crossbow was not to be purchased for less than forty or fifty pesos, a musket cost one hundred, a sword fifty, and a horse from 800 to 1000 pesos, and above. Thus extravagantly did we have to pay for everything! A surgeon, who called himself Mastre Juan, who had tended some very bad wounds, charged wildly inflated fees, and so did a quack named Murcia, who was an apothecary and a barber and also treated wounds, and there were thirty other tricks and swindles for which payment was demanded of our shares as soon as we received them.

Serious complaints were made about this, and the only remedy that Cortes provided was to appoint two trustworthy persons who knew the prices of goods and could value anything that we had bought on credit. An order went out that whatever price was placed on our purchases or the surgeon's cures must be accepted, but that if we had no money, our creditors must wait two years for payment.17 Spanish merchants soon arrived charging wildly inflated prices for basic necessities, causing further outrage, until: Our general becoming weary of the continual reproaches which were thrown out against him, saying he had stolen everything for himself, and the endless pet.i.tions for loans and advance in pay, determined at once to get rid of the most troublesome fellows, by forming settlements in those provinces which appeared most eligible for this purpose.18 These were the men who ended up in control of the provinces, and who established local administration, taxes, and labor regimes. Which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions of Indians with their faces covered by names like so many counter-endorsed checks, or the mines surrounded by miles of rotting corpses. We are not dealing with a psychology of cold, calculating greed, but of a much more complicated mix of shame and righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that would only compound and acc.u.mulate (these were, almost certainly, interest-bearing loans), and outrage at the idea that, after all they had gone through, they should be held to owe anything to begin with.

And what of Cortes? He had just pulled off perhaps the greatest act of theft in world history. Certainly, his original debts had now been rendered inconsequential. Yet he somehow always seemed to find himself in new ones. Creditors were already starting to repossess his holdings while he was off on an expedition to Honduras in 1526; on his return, he wrote the Emperor Charles V that his expenses were such that "all I have received has been insufficient to relive me from misery and poverty, being at the moment I write in debt for upwards of five hundred ounces of gold, without possessing a single peso towards it."19 Disingenuous, no doubt (Cortes at the time owned his own personal palace), but only a few years later, he was reduced to p.a.w.ning his wife's jewelry to help finance a series of expeditions to California, hoping to restore his fortunes. When those failed to turn a profit, he ended up so besieged by creditors that he had to return to Spain to pet.i.tion the emperor in person.20 If all this seems suspiciously reminiscent of the fourth Crusade, with its indebted knights stripping whole foreign cities of their wealth and still somehow winding up only one step ahead of their creditors, there is a reason. The financial capital that backed these expeditions came from more or less the same place (if in this case Genoa, not Venice). What's more, that relations.h.i.+p, between the daring adventurer on the one hand, the gambler willing to take any sort of risk, and on the other, the careful financier, whose entire operations are organized around producing steady, mathematical, inexorable growth of income, lies at the very heart of what we now call "capitalism."

As a result, our current economic system has always been marked by a peculiar dual character. Scholars have long been fascinated by Spanish debates that ensued, in Spanish universities like Santander, about the humanity of the Indians (Did they have souls? Could they have legal rights? Was it legitimate to forcibly enslave them?), just as they have argued about the real att.i.tudes of the conquistadors (was it contempt, revulsion, or even grudging admiration for their adversaries?)21 The real point is that at the key moments of decision, none of this mattered. Those making the decisions did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details. To take a telling example: after the earliest years of the gold and silver mines described by Motolinia, where millions of Indians were simply rounded up and marched off to their deaths, colonists settled on a policy of debt peonage: the usual trick of demanding heavy taxes, lending money at interest to those who could not pay, and then demanding that the loans be repaid with work. Royal agents regularly attempted to forbid such practices, arguing that the Indians were now Christian and that this violated their rights as loyal subjects of the Spanish crown. But as with almost all such royal efforts to act as protector of the Indians, the result was the same. Financial exigencies ended up taking precedence. Charles V himself was deeply in debt to banking firms in Florence, Genoa, and Naples, and gold and silver from the Americas made up perhaps one-fifth of his total revenue. In the end, despite a lot of initial noise and the (usually quite sincere) moral outrage on the part of the king's emissaries, such decrees were either ignored or, at best, enforced for a year or two before being allowed to slip into abeyance.22 All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising in its att.i.tude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise.23 Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.

It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way. The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point-and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones that pursued that very same combination of exploration, conquest, and extraction as did the conquistadors. It is a structure designed to eliminate all moral imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue-and regularly do-that, if it were their own money, of course they would not fire lifelong employees a week before retirement, or dump carcinogenic waste next to schools. Yet they are morally bound to ignore such considerations, because they are mere employees whose only responsibility is to provide the maximum return on investment for the company's stockholders. (The stockholders, of course, are not given any say.) The figure of Cortes is instructive for another reason. We are speaking of a man who, in 1521, had conquered a kingdom and was sitting atop a vast pile of gold. Neither did he have any intention of giving it away-even to his followers. Five years later, he was claiming to be a penniless debtor. How was this possible?

The obvious answer would be: Cortes was not a king, he was a subject of the King of Spain, living within the legal structure of a kingdom that insisted that, if he were not good at managing his money, he would lose it. Yet as we've seen, the king's laws could be ignored in other cases. What's more, even kings were not entirely free agents. Charles V was continually in debt, and when his son Philip II-his armies fighting on three different fronts at once-attempted the old Medieval trick of defaulting, all his creditors, from the Genoese Bank of St. George to the German Fuggers and Welsers, closed ranks to insist that he would receive no further loans until he started honoring his commitments.24 Capital, then, is not simply money. It is not even just wealth that can be turned into money. But neither is it just the use of political power to help one use one's money to make more money. Cortes was trying to do exactly that: in cla.s.sical Axial Age fas.h.i.+on, he was attempting to use his conquests to acquire plunder, and slaves to work the mines, with which he could pay his soldiers and suppliers cash to embark on even further conquests. It was a tried-and-true formula. But for all the other conquistadors, it provided a spectacular failure.

This would seem to mark the difference. In the Axial Age, money was a tool of empire. It might have been convenient for rulers to promulgate markets in which everyone would treat money as an end in itself; at times, rulers might have even come to see the whole apparatus of government as a profit-making enterprise; but money always remained a political instrument. This is why when the empires collapsed and armies were demobilized, the whole apparatus could simply melt away. Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it. True, this was a financial logic that could never have existed without states and armies behind it in the first place. As we have seen in the case of Medieval Islam, under genuine free-market conditions-in which the state is not involved in regulating the market in any significant way, even in enforcing commercial contracts-purely compet.i.tive markets will not develop, and loans at interest will become effectively impossible to collect. It was only the Islamic prohibition against usury, really, that made it possible for them to create an economic system that stood so far apart from the state.

Martin Luther was making this very point in 1524, right around the time that Cortes was first beginning to have trouble with his creditors. It is all very well, Luther said, for us to imagine that all might live as true Christians, in accordance with the dictates of the Gospel. But in fact there are few who are really capable of acting this way: Christians are rare in this world; therefore the world needs a strict, hard, temporal government that will compel and constrain the wicked not to rob and to return what they borrow, even though a Christian ought not to demand it, or even hope to get it back. This is necessary in order that the world not become a desert, peace may not perish, and trade and society not be utterly destroyed; all of which would happen if we were to rule the world according to the Gospel and not drive and compel the wicked, by laws and the use of force, to do what is right ... Let no one think that the world can be ruled without blood; the sword of the ruler must be red and b.l.o.o.d.y; for the world will and must be evil, and the sword is G.o.d's rod and vengeance upon it.25 "Not to rob and to return what they borrow"-a telling juxtaposition, considering that in Scholastic theory, lending money at interest had itself been considered theft.

And Luther was referring to interest-bearing loans here. The story of how he got to this point is telling. Luther began his career as a reformer in 1520 with fiery campaigns against usury; in fact, one of his objections to the sale of Church indulgences was that it was itself a form of spiritual usury. These positions won him enormous popular support in towns and villages. However, he soon realized that he'd unleashed a genie that threatened to turn the whole world upside-down. More radical reformers appeared, arguing that the poor were not morally obliged to repay the interest on usurious loans, and proposing the revival of Old Testament inst.i.tutions like the sabbatical year. They were followed by outright revolutionary preachers who began once again questioning the very legitimacy of aristocratic privilege and private property. In 1525, the year after Luther's sermon, there was a ma.s.sive uprising of peasants, miners, and poor townsfolk across Germany: the rebels, in most cases, representing themselves as simple Christians aiming to restore the true communism of the Gospels. Over a hundred thousand were slaughtered. Already in 1524, Luther had a sense that matters were spilling out of control and that he would have to choose sides: in that text, he did so. Old Testament laws like the Sabbatical year, he argued, are no longer binding; the Gospel merely describes ideal behavior; humans are sinful creatures, so law is necessary; while usury is a sin, a four to five-percent rate of interest is currently legal under certain circ.u.mstances; and while collecting that interest is sinful, under no circ.u.mstances is it legitimate to argue that for that reason, borrowers have the right to break the law.26 The Swiss Protestant reformer Zwingli was even more explicit. G.o.d, he argued, gave us the divine law: to love thy neighbor as thyself. If we truly kept this law, humans would give freely to one another, and private property would not exist. However, Jesus excepted, no human being has ever been able to live up to this pure communistic standard. Therefore, G.o.d has also given us a second, inferior, human law, to be enforced by the civil authorities. While this inferior law cannot compel us to act as we really ought to act ("the magistrate can force no one to lend out what belongs to him without hope of recompense or profit")-at least it can make us follow the lead of the apostle Paul, who said: "Pay all men what you owe."27 Soon afterward, Calvin was to reject the blanket ban on usury entirely, and by 1650, almost all Protestant denominations had come to agree with his position that a reasonable rate of interest (usually five percent) was not sinful, provided the lenders act in good conscience, do not make lending their exclusive business, and do not exploit the poor.28 (Catholic doctrine was slower to come around, but it did ultimately accede by pa.s.sive acquiescence.) If one looks at how all this was justified, two things jump out. First, Protestant thinkers all continued to make the old Medieval argument about interesse: that "interest" is really compensation for the money that the lender would have made had he been able to place his money in some more profitable investment. Originally, this logic was just applied to commercial loans. Increasingly, it was now applied to all loans. Far from being unnatural, then, the growth of money was now treated as completely expected. All money was a.s.sumed to be capital.29 Second, the a.s.sumption that usury is something that one properly practices on one's enemies, and therefore, by extension, that all commerce partakes something of the nature of war, never entirely disappears. Calvin, for instance, denied that Deuteronomy only referred to the Amalekites; clearly, he said, it meant that usury was acceptable when dealing with Syrians or Egyptians; indeed with all nations with whom the Jews traded.30 The result of opening the gates was, at least tacitly, to suggest that one could now treat anyone, even a neighbor, as a foreigner.31 One need only observe how European merchant adventurers of the day actually were treating foreigners, in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, to understand what this might mean in practice.

Or, one might look closer to home. Take the story of another well-known debtor of the time, the Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg-Ansbach (14811527), of the famous Hohenzollern dynasty: Casimir was the son of Margrave Friedrich the Elder of Brandenburg, who has come to be known as one of the "mad princes" of the German Renaissance. Sources differ on just how mad he actually was. One contemporary chronicle describes him as "somewhat deranged in his head from too much racing and jousting;" most agree that he was given to fits of inexplicable rage, as well as to the sponsors.h.i.+p of wild, extravagant festivals, said often to have degenerated into wild baccha.n.a.lian orgies.32 All agree, however, that he was poor at managing his money. At the beginning of 1515, Friedrich was in such financial trouble-he is said to have owed 200,000 guilders-that he alerted his creditors, mostly fellow n.o.bles, that he might soon be forced to temporarily suspend interest payments on his debts. This seems to have caused a crisis of faith, and within a matter of weeks, his son Casimir staged a palace coup-moving, in the early hours of February 26, 1515, to seize control of the castle of Pla.s.senburg while his father was distracted with the celebration of Carnival, then forcing him to sign papers abdicating for reason of mental infirmity. Friedrich spent the rest of his life confined in Pla.s.senburg, denied all visitors and correspondence. When at one point his guards requested that the new Margrave provide a couple guilders so he could pa.s.s the time gambling with them, Casimir made a great public show of refusal, stating (ridiculously, of course) that his father had left his affairs in such disastrous shape that he could not possibly afford to.33 Casimir dutifully doled out governors.h.i.+ps and other prize offices to his father's creditors. He tried to get his house in order, but this proved surprisingly difficult. His enthusiastic embrace of Luther's reforms in 1521 clearly had as much to do with the prospect of getting his hands on Church lands and monastic a.s.sets than with any particular religious fervor. Yet at first, the disposition of Church property remained moot, and Casimir himself compounded his problems by running up gambling debts of his own said to have amounted to nearly 50,000 guilders.34 Placing his creditors in charge of the civil administration had predictable effects: increasing exactions on his subjects, many of whom became hopelessly indebted themselves. Unsurprisingly, Casimir's lands in the Tauber Valley in Franconia became one of the epicenters of the revolt of 1525. Bands of armed villagers a.s.sembled, declaring they would obey no law that did not accord with "the holy word of G.o.d." At first, the n.o.bles, isolated in their scattered castles, offered little resistance. The rebel leaders-many of them local shopkeepers, butchers, and other prominent men from nearby towns-began with a largely orderly campaign of tearing down castle fortifications, their knightly occupants being offered guarantees of safety if they cooperated, agreed to abandon their feudal privileges, and swore oaths to abide by the rebels' Twelve Articles. Many complied. The real venom of the rebels was reserved for cathedrals and monasteries, dozens of which were sacked, pillaged, and destroyed.

Casimir's reaction was to hedge his bets. At first he bided his time, a.s.sembling an armed force of about two thousand experienced soldiers, but refusing to intervene as rebels pillaged several nearby monasteries; in fact, negotiating with the various rebel bands in such apparent good faith that many believed he was preparing to join them "as a Christian brother."35 In May, however, after the knights of the Swabian League defeated the rebels of the Christian Union to the south, Casimir swung into action, his forces brus.h.i.+ng aside poorly disciplined rebel bands to sweep through his own territories like a conquering army, burning and pillaging villages and towns, slaughtering women and children. In every town he set up punitive tribunals, and seized all looted property, which he kept, even as his men also expropriated any wealth still to be found in the region's cathedrals, ostensibly as emergency loans to pay his troops.

It seems significant that Casimir was, of all the German princes, both the longest to waver before intervening, and the most savagely vengeful once he did. His forces became notorious not only for executing accused rebels, but systematically chopping off the fingers of accused collaborators, his executioner keeping a grim ledger of amputated body parts for later reimburs.e.m.e.nt-a kind of carnal inversion of the account ledgers that had caused him so much trouble in his life. At one point, in the town of Kitzingen, Casimir ordered the gouging out of the eyes of fifty-eight burghers who had, he declared, "refused to look at him as their lord." Afterward he received the following bill:36 80 beheaded 69 eyes put out or fingers cut off 114 fl.

from this to deduct Received from the Rothenburgers 10 fl.

Received from Ludwig von Hutten 2 fl.

Remainder Plus 2 months' pay at 8 fl. per month 16 fl.

Total 118 fl.

[Signed] Augustin, the executioner, who the Kitzingers call "Master Ouch."

The repression eventually inspired Casimir's brother Georg (later known as "the Pious") to write a letter asking him if Casimir was intending to take up a trade-since, as Georg gently reminded him, he could not very well continue to be a feudal overlord if his peasants were all dead.37 With such things happening, it is hardly surprising that men like Thomas Hobbes came to imagine the basic nature of society as a war of all against all, from which only the absolute power of monarchs could save us. At the same time, Casimir's behavior-combining as it does a general att.i.tude of unprincipled, cold-blooded calculation with outbursts of almost inexplicably vindictive cruelty-seems, like that of Cortes's angry foot soldiers when unleashed on the Aztec provinces, to embody something essential about the psychology of debt. Or, more precisely, perhaps, about the debtor who feels he has done nothing to deserve being placed in his position: the frantic urgency of having to convert everything around oneself into money, and rage and indignation at having been reduced to the sort of person who would do so.

Part II:.

The World of Credit and the World of Interest.

Of all the beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit; it is never to be forced; it hangs upon opinion; it depends upon our pa.s.sions of hope and fear; it comes many times unsought-for, and often goes away without reason; and once lost, it is hardly to be quite recovered.

-Charles Davenant, 1696 He that has lost his credit is dead to the world.

-English and German Proverb The peasants' visions of communistic brotherhood did not come out of nowhere. They were rooted in real daily experience: of the maintenance of common fields and forests, of everyday cooperation and neighborly solidarity. It is out of such homely experience of everyday communism that grand mythic visions are always built.38 Obviously, rural communities were also divided, squabbling places, since communities always are-but insofar as they are communities at all, they are necessarily founded on a ground of mutual aid. The same, incidentally, can be said of members of the aristocracy, who might have fought endlessly over love, land, honor, and religion, but nonetheless still cooperated remarkably well with one another when it really mattered (most of all, when their position as aristocrats was threatened); just as the merchants and bankers, much as they competed with one another, managed to close ranks when it really mattered. This is what I refer to as the "communism of the rich," and it is a powerful force in human history.39 The same, as we've seen repeatedly, applies to credit. There are always different standards for those one considers friends or neighbors. The inexorable nature of interest-bearing debt, and the alternately savage and calculating behavior of those enslaved to it, are typical above all of dealings between strangers: it's unlikely that Casimir felt much more kins.h.i.+p with his peasants than Cortes did with the Aztecs (in fact, most likely less, since Aztec warriors were at least aristocrats). Inside the small towns and rural hamlets, where the state was mostly far away, Medieval standards survived intact, and "credit" was just as much a matter of honor and reputation as it had ever been. The great untold story of our current age is of how these ancient credit systems were ultimately destroyed.

Recent historical research, notably that of Craig Muldrew, who has sifted through thousands of inventories and court cases from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, has caused us to revise almost all our old a.s.sumptions about what everyday economic life at that time was like. Of course, very little of the American gold and silver that reached Europe actually ended up in the pockets of ordinary farmers, mercers, or haberdashers.40 The lion's share stayed in the coffers of either the aristocracy or the great London merchants, or else in the royal treasury.41 Small change was almost nonexistent. As I've already pointed out, in the poorer neighborhoods of cities or large towns, shopkeepers would issue their own lead, leather, or wooden token money; in the sixteenth century this became something of a fad, with artisans and even poor widows producing their own currency as a way to make ends meet.42 Elsewhere, those frequenting the local butcher, baker, or shoemaker would simply put things on the tab. The same was true of those attending weekly markets, or selling neighbors milk or cheese or candle-wax. In a typical village, the only people likely to pay cash were pa.s.sing travelers, and those considered riff-raff: paupers and ne'er-do-wells so notoriously down on their luck that no one would extend credit to them. Since everyone was involved in selling something, however just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would held a general public "reckoning," cancelling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods.43 The reason that this upends our a.s.sumptions is that we're used to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called "the market"-the breakup of older systems of mutual aid and solidarity, and the creation of a world of cold calculation, where everything had its price. Really, English villagers appear to have seen no contradiction between the two. On the one hand, they believed strongly in the collective stewards.h.i.+p of fields, streams, and forests, and the need to help neighbors in difficulty. On the other hand, markets were seen as a kind of attenuated version of the same principle, since they were entirely founded on trust. Much like the Tiv women with their gifts of yams and okra, neighbors a.s.sumed they ought to be constantly slightly in debt to one another. At the same time, most seem to have been quite comfortable with the idea of buying and selling, or even with market fluctuations, provided it didn't get to the point of threatening honest families' livelihoods.44 Even when loans at interest began to be legalized in 1545, that did not ruffle too many feathers, as long as it took place within that same larger moral framework: lending was considered an appropriate vocation, for example, for widows with no other source of income, or as a way for neighbors to share in the profits from some minor commercial venture. William Stout, a Quaker merchant from Lancas.h.i.+re, spoke glowingly of Henry Coward, the tradesman in whose shop he first apprenticed: My master then had a full trade of groceries, ironmongerware, and several other goods, and very much respected and trusted, not only by the people of his own religious profession, but by all others of all professions and circ.u.mstances ... His credit was so much, that any who had money to dispose of lodged it with him to put out to interest or to make use of it.45 In this world, trust was everything. Most money literally was trust, since most credit arrangements were handshake deals. When people used the word "credit," they referred above all to a reputation for honesty and integrity; and a man or woman's honor, virtue, and respectability, but also, reputation for generosity, decency, and good-natured sociability, were at least as important considerations when deciding whether to make a loan as were a.s.sessments of net income.46 As a result, financial terms became indistinguishable from moral ones. One could speak of others as "worthies," as "a woman of high estimation" or "a man of no account," and equally of "giving credit" to someone's words when one believes what they say ("credit" is from the same root as "creed" or "credibility"), or of "extending credit" to them, when one takes them at their word that they will pay one back.

One should not idealize the situation. This was a highly patriarchal world: a man's wife or daughter's reputation for chast.i.ty was as much a part of his "credit" as his own reputation for kindness or piety. What's more, almost all people below the age of 30, male or female, were employed as servants in someone else's household-as farmhands, milkmaids, apprentices-and as such, were of "no account" at all.47 Finally, those who lost credibility in the eyes of the community became, effectively, pariahs, and descended into the criminal or semi-criminal cla.s.ses of rootless laborers, beggars, harlots, cutpurses, hawkers, pedlars, fortune-tellers, minstrels, and other such "masterless men" or "women of ill repute."48 Cold cash was employed largely between strangers, or when paying rents, t.i.thes, and taxes to landlords, bailiffs, priests, and other superiors. The landed gentry and wealthy merchants, who eschewed handshake deals, would often use cash with one another, especially to pay off bills of exchange drawn on London markets.49 Above all, gold and silver were used by the government to purchase arms and pay soldiers, and amongst the criminal cla.s.ses themselves. This meant that coins were most likely to be used both by the sort of people who ran the legal system-the magistrates, constables, and justices of the peace-and by those violent elements of society they saw it as their business to control.

Over time, this led to an increasing disjuncture of moral universes. For most, who tried to avoid entanglement in the legal system just as much as they tried to avoid the affairs of soldiers and criminals, debt remained the very fabric of sociability. But those who spent their working lives within the halls of government and great commercial houses gradually began to develop a very different perspective, whereby cash exchange was normal and it was debt that came to be seen as tinged with criminality.

Each perspective turned on a certain tacit theory of the nature of society. For most English villagers, the real font and focus of social and moral life was not so much the church as the local ale-house-and community was embodied above all in the conviviality of popular festivals like Christmas or May Day, with everything that such celebrations entailed: the sharing of pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the physical embodiment of what was called "good neighborhood." Society was rooted above in the "love and amity" of friends and kin, and it found expression in all those forms of everyday communism (helping neighbors with ch.o.r.es, providing milk or cheese for old widows) that were seen to flow from it. Markets were not seen as contradicting this ethos of mutual aid. It was, much as it was for Tusi, an extension of mutual aid-and for much the same reason: because it operated entirely through trust and credit.50 England might not have produced a great theorist like Tusi, but one can find the same a.s.sumptions echoed in most of the Scholastic writers, as for instance in Jean Bodin's De Republica, widely circulated in English translation after 1605. "Amity and friends.h.i.+p," Bodin wrote, "are the foundation of all human and civil society"-they const.i.tute that "true, natural justice" on which the whole legal structure of contracts, courts, and even government must necessarily be built.51 Similarly, when economic thinkers reflected on the origins of the money, they spoke of "trusting, exchanging, and trading."52 It was simply a.s.sumed that human relations came first.

As a result, all moral relations came to be conceived as debts. "Forgive us our debts"-this was the period, the very end of the Middle Ages, that this translation of the Lord's Prayer gained such universal popularity. Sins are debts to G.o.d: unavoidable, but perhaps manageable, since at the end of time our moral debts and credits will be all canceled out against each other in G.o.d's final Reckoning. The notion of debt inserted itself into even the most intimate of human relations. Like the Tiv, Medieval villagers would sometimes refer to "flesh debts," but the notion was completely different: it referred to the right of either partner in a marriage to demand s.e.x from the other, which in principle either could do whenever he or she desired. The phrase "paying one's debts" thus developed connotations, much as the Roman phrase "doing one's duty" had, centuries before. Geoffrey Chaucer even makes a pun out of "tally" (French: taille) and "tail" in the s.h.i.+pman's Tale, a story about a woman who pays her husband's debts with s.e.xual favors: "and if so I be faille, I am youre wyf, score it upon my taille."53 Even London merchants would occasionally appeal to the language of sociability, insisting that in the final a.n.a.lysis, all trade is built on credit, and credit is really just an extension of mutual aid. In 1696, for instance, Charles Davenant wrote that even if there were a general collapse of confidence in the credit system, it could not last long, because eventually, when people reflected on the matter and realized that credit is simply an extension of human society, They will find, that no trading nation ever did subsist, and carry on its business by real stock [that is, just coin and merchandise]; that trust and confidence in each other, are as necessary to link and hold a people together, as obedience, love, friends.h.i.+p, or the intercourse of speech. And when experience has taught man how weak he is, depending only on himself, he will be willing to help others, and call upon the a.s.sistance of his neighbors, which of course, by degrees, must set credit again afloat.54 Davenant was an unusual merchant (his father was a poet). More typical of his cla.s.s were men like Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan, published in 1651, was in many ways an extended attack on the very idea that society is built on any sort of prior ties of communal solidarity.

Hobbes might be considered the opening salvo of the new moral perspective, and it was a devastating one. When Leviathan came out, it's not clear what scandalized its readers more: its relentless materialism (Hobbes insisted that humans were basically machines whose actions could be understood by one single principle: that they tended to move toward the prospect of pleasure and away from the prospect of pain), or its resultant cynicism (if love, amity, and trust are such powerful forces, Hobbes asked, why is it that even within our families, we lock our most valuable possessions in strongboxes?) Still, Hobbes' ultimate argument-that humans, being driven by self-interest, cannot be trusted to treat each other justly of their own accord, and therefore that society only emerges when they come to realize that it is to their long-term advantage to give up a portion of their liberties and accept the absolute power of the King-differed little from arguments that theologians like Martin Luther had been making a century earlier. Hobbes simply subst.i.tuted scientific language for biblical references.55 I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of "self-interest."56 It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes' time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores. By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense.

But why "interest"? Why make a general theory of human motivation out of a word that originally meant "penalty for late payment on a loan"?

Part of the term's appeal was that it derived from bookkeeping. It was mathematical. This made it seem objective, even scientific. Saying we are all really pursuing our own self-interest provides a way to cut past the welter of pa.s.sions and emotions that seem to govern our daily existence, and to motivate most of what we actually observe people to do (not only out of love and amity, but also envy, spite, devotion, pity, l.u.s.t, embarra.s.sment, torpor, indignation, and pride) and discover that, despite all this, most really important decisions are based on the rational calculation of material advantage-which means that they are fairly predictable as well. "Just as the physical world is ruled by the laws of movement," wrote Helvetius, in a pa.s.sage reminiscent of Lord Shang, "no less is the moral universe ruled by laws of interest."57 And of course it was on this a.s.sumption that all the quadratic equations of economic theory could ultimately be built.58 The problem is that the origin of the concept is not rational at all. Its roots are theological, and the theological a.s.sumptions underpinning it never really went away. "Self-interest" is first attested to in the writings of the Italian historian Francesco Guicciadini (who was, in fact, a friend of Machiavelli), around 1510, as a euphemism for St. Augustine's concept of "self-love." For Augustine, the "love of G.o.d" leads us to benevolence toward our fellows; self-love, in contrast, refers to the fact that, since the Fall of Man, we are cursed by endless, insatiable desires for self-gratification-so much so that, if left to our own devices, we will necessarily fall into universal compet.i.tion, even war. Subst.i.tuting "interest" for "love" must have seemed an obvious move, since the a.s.sumption that love is the primary emotion was precisely what authors like Guicciadini were trying to get away from. But it kept that same a.s.sumption of insatiable desires under the guise of impersonal math, since what is "interest" but the demand that money never cease to grow? The same was true when it became the term for investments-"I have a twelve-percent interest in that venture"-it is money placed in the continual pursuit of profit.59 The very idea that human beings are motivated primarily by "self-interest," then, was rooted in the profoundly Christian a.s.sumption that we are all incorrigible sinners; left to our own devices, we will not simply pursue a certain level of comfort and happiness and then stop to enjoy it; we will never cash in the chips, like Sindbad, let alone question why we need to buy chips to begin with. And as Augustine already antic.i.p.ated, infinite desires in a finite world means endless compet.i.tion, which in turn is why, as Hobbes insisted, our only hope of social peace lies in contractual arrangements and strict enforcement by the apparatus of the state.

The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal-and often vindictive-power of the state. English villagers in Elizabethan or Stuart times did not like to appeal to the justice system, even when the law was in their favor-partly on the principle that neighbors should work things out with one another, but mainly, because the law was so extraordinarily harsh. Under Elizabeth, for example, the punishment for vagrancy (unemployment) was, for first offense, to have one's ears nailed to a pillory; for repeat offenders, death.60 The same was true of debt law, especially since debts could often, if the creditor was sufficiently vindictive, be treated as a crime. In Chelsea around 1660, Margaret Sharples was prosecuted for stealing cloth, "which she had converted into a petticoat for her own wearing," from Richard Bennett's shop. Her defense was that she had bargained with Bennett's servant for the cloth, "but having not money sufficient in her purse to pay for it, took it away with purpose to pay for it so soon as she could: and that she afterwards agreed with Mr Bennett of a price for it." Bennett confirmed that this was so: after agreeing to pay him 22 s.h.i.+llings, Margaret "delivered a hamper with goods in it as a p.a.w.n for security of the money, and four s.h.i.+llings ninepence in money." But "soon after he disliked upon better consideration to hold agreement with her: and delivered the hamper and goods back," and commenced formal legal proceedings against her.61 As a result, Margaret Sharples was hanged.

Obviously, it was the rare shopkeeper who wished to see even his most irritating client on the gallows. Therefore decent people tended to avoid the courts entirely. One of the most interesting discoveries of Craig Muldrew's research is that the more time pa.s.sed, the less true this became.

Even in the late Middle Ages, in the case of really large loans, it was not unusual for creditors to lodge claims in local courts-but this was really just a way of ensuring that there was a public record (remember that most people at the time were illiterate). Debtors were willing to go along with the proceedings in part, it would seem, because if there was any interest being charged, it meant that if they did default, the lender was just as guilty in the eyes of the law as they were. Less than one-percent of these cases were ever brought to judgment.62 The legalization of interest began to change the nature of the playing field. In the 1580s, when interest-bearing loans began to become common between villagers, creditors also began to insist on the use of signed, legal bonds; this led to such an explosion of appeals to the courts that in many small towns, almost every household seemed to be caught up in debt litigation of some sort or other. Only a tiny proportion of these suits were ever brought to judgment, either: the usual expedient was still to rely on the simple threat of punishment to encourage debtors to settle out of court.63 Still, as a result, the fear of debtor's prison-or worse-came to hang over everyone, and sociability itself came to take on the color of crime. Even Mr. Coward, the kindly shopkeeper, was eventually laid low. His good credit itself became a problem, especially as he felt honor-bound to use it to help the less fortunate: He also dealt in merchandise with loose partners, and became concerned much with persons of declining circ.u.mstances, where neither profit nor credit could be got; and he gave uneasiness to his wife, by his frequenting some houses of no good character. And she was a very indolent woman, and drew money privately from him, and his circ.u.mstances became so burdensome that he daily expected to be made a prisoner. Which, with the shame of forfeiting his former reputation, it drew him into despair and broke his heart, so that he kept to his house for some time and died of grief and shame.64 It is perhaps not surprising, when one consults contemporary sources about what those prisons were like, particularly for those who were not of aristocratic origins. Mr. Coward would surely have known, as the conditions at the most notorious, like Fleet and Marshalsea, caused periodic scandals when exposed in parliament or the popular press, filling the papers with stories of shackled debtors "covered with filth and vermin, and suffered to die, without pity, of hunger and jail fever," as the aristocratic roues placed in the elite side of the same jails lived lives of comfort, visited by manicurists and prost.i.tutes.65 The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a communities-and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact, because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and pa.s.sion-when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged. What was it that Richard Bennett really had against Margaret Sharples? We'll never know the back-story, but it's a pretty safe bet that there was one. The effects on communal solidarity must have been devastating. The sudden accessibility of violence really did threaten to transform what had been the essence of sociality into a war of all against all.66 It's not surprising then, that by the eighteenth century, the very notion of personal credit had acquired a bad name, with both lenders and borrowers considered equally suspect.67 The use of coins-at least among those who had access to them-had come to seem moral in itself.

Understanding all this allows us to see some of the European authors considered in earlier chapters in an entirely new light. Take Panurge's encomium on debt: it turns out that the real joke is not the suggestion that debt ties communities together (any English or French peasant of the day would have simply a.s.sumed this), or even that only debt ties communities together; it is putting the sentiment in the mouth of a wealthy scholar who's really an inveterate criminal-that is, holding up popular morality as a mirror to make fun of the very upper cla.s.ses who claimed to disapprove of it. Or consider Adam Smith: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.68 The bizarre thing here is that, at the time Smith was writing, this simply wasn't true.69 Most English shopkeepers were still carrying out the main part of their business on credit, which meant that customers appealed to their benevolence all the time. Smith could hardly have been unaware of this. Rather, he is drawing a utopian picture. He wants to imagine a world in which everyone used cash, in part because he agreed with the emerging middle-cla.s.s opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone really did conduct themselves this way, and avoid confusing and potentially corrupting ongoing entanglements. We should all just pay the money, say "please" and "thank you," and leave the store. What's more, he uses this utopian image to make a larger point: that even if all businesses operated like the great commercial companies, with an eye only to self-interest, it wouldn't matter. Even the "natural selfishness and rapacity" of the rich, with all their "vain and insatiable desires" will still, through the logic of the invisible hand, lead to the benefit of all.70 In other words, Smith simply imagined the role of consumer credit in his own day, just as he had his account of the origins of money.71 This allowed him to ignore the role of both benevolence and malevolence in economic affairs; both the ethos of mutual aid that forms the necessary foundation of anything that would look like a free market (that is, one which is not simply created and maintained by the state), and the violence and sheer vindictiveness that had actually gone into creating the compet.i.tive, self-interested markets that he was using as his model.

Nietzsche, in turn, was taking up Smith's premises, that life is exchange, but laying bare everything (the torture, murder, mutilation) that Smith preferred not to have to talk about. Now that we have seen just a little of the social context, it's difficult to read Nietzsche's otherwise puzzling descriptions of ancient hunters and herdsmen keeping accounts of debts and demanding each others' eyes and fingers without immediately thinking of Casimir's executioner, who actually did present his master with a bill for gouged eyes and severed fingers. What he is really describing is what it took to produce a world in which the son of a prosperous middle-cla.s.s reverend, such as himself, could simply a.s.sume that all human life is premised on calculated, self-interested exchange.

Part III:.

Impersonal Credit-money.

One reason that historians too