Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Money, obligation, and social order across millennia.
Graeber dismantles the textbook story that money evolved from barter — it did not; credit and obligation came first, and coin was a late formalization. The implication for anyone building financial infrastructure is unsettling and clarifying: debt is not a financial instrument but a social relation, and the systems we build to manage it are encoding moral assumptions about who owes what to whom. That is not a small design choice.