On the experience of moral confusion --
The myth of barter --
Primordial debts --
Cruelty and redemption --
A brief treatise on the moral grounds of economic relations --
Games with sex and death --
Honor and degradation, or, on the foundations of contemporary civilization --
Credit versus bullion, and the cycles of history --
The axial age (800 BC --
600 AD) --
The middle ages (600 AD --
1450 AD) --
Age of the great capitalist empires (1450-1971) --
(1971- ).

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 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.