Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

The Rise and Fall of Jubilee Debt Cancellations and Clean Slates

What were Debt Jubilees?

Social purpose of Debt Jubilees

How well did Debt Jubilees succeed?

Why did debt Jubilees fall into disuse?

Archaic Economies versus Modern Preconceptions

Widespread misinterpretation of Neolithic and Bronze Age society

The International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE)

What makes Western civilization “Western”?

A legacy of financial instability

The Major Themes of this Book

Part I:  Overview

1. Babylonian Perspective on Liberty and Economic Order

2. Jesus’s First Sermon and the Tradition of Debt Amnesty 32-57

The meaning of Biblical deror (and hence “the Year of Our Lord”)

From Judaism to Christianity

The Dead Sea Scroll 11QMelchizedek

Debt in the Biblical laws, historical narratives and parables

3. Credit, Debt and Money: Their Social and Private Contexts

From chieftain households to temples

Anachronistic views of the Mesopotamian takeoff and its enterprise

Growing scale of the temple and palace economy leads to monetization

Creating markets for commodities, and as a fiscal vehicle for tax debts

Land tenure

What Sumerian commercial enterprise bequeathed to antiquity

Classical antiquity privatizes credit and stops cancelling agrarian debts

How the modern financial and legal system emerged from antiquity’s debt crisis

A Chronology of Clean Slates and Debt Revolts in Antiquity

Mesopotamian Debt Cancellations, 2400–1600 BC

Allusions to Debt Cancellations in Canaan/Israel/Judah and Egypt  1400–131 BC

Debt Crises in Classical Antiquity: Greece and Rome 650 BC–425 AD

Part II: Social Origins of Debt

4. The Anthropology of Debt, from Gift Exchange to Wergild Fines

The reciprocity of gift exchange

How classical moneylending differs from gift exchange

Fine-debts for personal injury catalyze special-purpose proto-money

Debts called into being monetary means to pay them

Cattle as a denominator of debts, but not of commercial exchange or interest

Debt collection procedures originally preserved economic viability

Collecting debts from borrowers who committed no offenses

5. Creditors as Predators: The Anthropology of Usury

A misleading theory of how usury began

Failure of physical productivity or risk levels to explain early interest rates

Most personal loans are for consumption, not to make a profit

Paying interest out of the surplus provided by the debtor’s own collateral

The polarizing dynamics of agrarian usury, contrasted with productive credit

6. Origins of Mercantile Interest in Sumer’s Palaces and Temples

How the social values of tribal communities discourage enterprise

Temples of enterprise

The need for merchants and other commercial agents to manage trade

The primary role of the large institutions in setting interest rates

Nullification of commercial silver debts when accidents prevented payment

Diffusion of Near Eastern finance and commercial enterprise

7. Rural Usury as a Lever to Privatize Land

How debt bondage interfered with royal claims for corvée labor

Fictive “adoptions” to circumvent sanctions against alienating land to outsiders

The contractual clause “sold at the full price”

Royal proclamations to save rural debtors from disenfranchisement

Part III:  The Bronze Age Invents Usury, But Counters Its Adverse Effects

8. War, Debt and amar-gi in Sumer, 2400 BC

City-state rivalries and the rise of urban dynasties

Lagash’s water wars with Umma, and the ensuing tribute debts

Enmetena’s proclamation of amar-gi, economic freedom from debt

9. Urukagina Proclaims amar-gi: 2350 BC

Palace domination of the temples

Urukagina’s reform text c. 2350 BC

Cancelling debts and freeing bondservants

Sumerian amar-gi as an ideological Rorschach test for translators

The timing of amar-gi and subsequent clean slates

10. Sargon’s Akkadian Empire and Its Collapse, 2300–2100 BC

Sargon’s conquest of southern Mesopotamia

Gutian Domination of Sumer: c. 2220–2120

Descent of the Gutians into Mesopotamia, and the First Interregnum

11. Lagash’s Revival Under Gudea, and his Debt Cancellation, 2130 BC

12. Trade, Enterprise and Debt in Ur III: 2111–2004 BC

Privatization of trade and agriculture

What Ur-Namma’s laws meant by níg-si-sá

13. Isin Rulers replace Ur III and Proclaim níg-si-sá: 2017–1861 BC

Lipit-Ishtar’s laws and the fall of the Isin dynasty

14. Diffusion of Trade and Finance Via Assyrian Merchants, 2000–1790 BC

Commercial and personal debts in Kanesh

Assur’s trade strategy and andurārum proclamations

The archaeological context for Assur’s andurārum inscriptions

Assyrian monopolistic commercial policy

15. Privatizing Mesopotamia’s Intermediate Period: 2000–1600 BC

Property rights as an independent dynamic

Economic entropy and indebtedness

Amorite takeover of the temples

A financial market in rentier shares

Tensions between local headmen and the palace

How wide a sphere did royal debt amnesties affect?

The nomadic takeover of Southern Mesopotamia

Larsa’s period of dominance, 1932-1763 BC

Rim-Sin’s debt cancellations

16. Hammurabi’s Laws and mı-šarum Edicts: 1792–1750 BC

Retaining the loyalty of Babylonia’s cultivators by proclaiming mı-šarum

The scope of Hammurabi’s laws

The importance of record keeping as a check on abuses

Physical punishment for lawbreakers too poor to pay

Growing palace power over the temples and landed communities

The rate of interest on silver and barley debts

Enforcement of Hammurabi’s laws in practice

17. Freeing the Land and its Cultivators from Predatory Creditors

How the palace saved subsistence land from being privatized

Limits on creditors aggressively taking crops

Laws saving citizens from debt bondage

How Hammurabi’s laws preserved economic balance

Hammurabi’s philosophy of deterrence regarding creditor abuses

18. Samsuiluna’s and Ammisaduqa’s mı-šarum Edicts:  1749 and 1646 BC

Hammurabi’s son Samsuiluna takes the throne, 1749-1712 BC

Ammisaduqa’s mı-šarum edict closes legalistic loopholes

19. Social Cosmology of Babylonia’s Debt Cancellations

Military conflict and land pressure make mīšarum proclamations more frequent

Restoring the (idealized) order

The end of the Old Babylonian Period

20. Usury and Privatization in the Periphery, 1600–1200 BC

Decentralization and grabitization gain momentum

The Kassite Age in Babylonia, 1600–1200 BC

Creditor stratagems in Nuzi, 1450–1400 BC

How indebtedness led to a dependent labor force

The Hurrian-Hittite “Song of Release” extends the application of andurārum

Expropriation of cultivators from the land

The Middle Assyrian epilogue

21. From the Dawn of the Iron Age to the Rosetta Stone

Debt amnesties in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires

The Inscriptions of Sargon II (722 to 705) and his grandson Esarhaddon (681 to 669)

Egypt’s pharaonic amnesties

Part IV:  The Biblical Legacy

22. Judges, Kings and Usury: 8th and 7th Centuries BC

The anti-royalist spirit of Biblical law

Land tenure threatened by debt foreclosure

The prophets lead a revolt

How the Ten Commandments pertain to the usury problem

23. Biblical Laws Call for Periodic Debt Cancellation

Lending and interest in the Covenant Code of Exodus

The Priestly Code of Deuteronomy

Jeremiah depicts the Babylonian captivity as divine retaliation for violating the Covenant

24. The Babylonian Impact on Judaic Debt Laws

Ezekiel’s apocalyptic message in the face of Judah’s defeat by Babylonia

From Ezekiel to Third-Isaiah

The reforms of Nehemiah and Ezra

Egypt substituted for Babylonian oppression

Recasting Babylonian andurārum proclamations in a Yahwist context

25. From Religious Covenant to Hillel

The twilight of economic renewal and the Jubilee

Creditor misbehavior in the story of Job

The post-exilic prophets, psalms and proverbs

From royal to Levitical rhythms of economic renewal

The implicit conflict underlying Judah’s first Jubilee

Judah revolts and a new oligarchy emerges

How Hillel’s prosbul yielded power to creditors and land appropriators

26. Christianity Spiritualizes the Jubilee Year as the Day of Judgment

Jesus’ teachings on debt forgiveness

From the Jubilee Year to the Day of Judgment

From redemption to charity

From Stoic Philosophy to the Church Fathers

The Virgin Mary replaces Nanshe and Nemesis

The End Time and the Day of Judgment

Redemption, the arrow of time and the Christian Millennium

27. Byzantine Echo

Roman fiscal reform from Diocletian to Justinian

The Novels of Basil and Romanus protecting smallholders from the dynatoi

Romanos’ Novel of 934 barring dynatoi from acquiring village land

28. Zenith and Decline of Byzantium: 945–1204

Tax exemption for Church property

The fight by Basil II (976–1025) against the dynatoi

Land monopoly leads to fiscal and military dismantling

Epilogue

29. Western Civilization is Rooted in the Bronze Age Near East

How creditor appropriation turned land into “private property”

The meaning of economic liberty

Bronze Age money as a means of palatial production and trade accounting

The inherent inability of personal and agrarian debts to be paid over the long run

General Index A to Z

Historical Persons

Modern Authors

Bibliography

About Michael Hudson

Illustration Credits

Endnotes