Brad’s Reviews > ...And Forgive Them Their Debts > Status Update

"‘One finds mention, here and there, of ‘peasant revolts,’ Jean Bottéro writes, ‘but these appear to have been provoked by terrible catastrophes such as famine, and are directed against an individual such as a king, not against an institution. In reality, the old inhabitants of Mesopotamia appear to have been devoid of any revolutionary spirit,’ as there was no idea of an alternative way to organize society."

The Sumerian interest rate on commercial loans, denominated in silver, was "set by ease of calculation rather than reflecting profit rates or productivity, and remained remarkably stable century after century.”

"...A similar grounding of the interest rate in the prevailing arithmetical system of weights and measures is found in subsequent regions for their local fractional system."

Even in the case of fines…the intention seems not to have been to impose such permanent distress on offenders as would deprive the social body of the wrongdoer's ability to meet his normal commitments.

Hudson ties the shifting of legal authority to creditors lacking such high-minded, longue durée concerns with civilizational decline. See: financialized debt in modern America.

"The relevance of studying antiquity's financial destiny is to see how the initial safety valves it enacted were dismantled by creditor oligarchies that imposed debt-ridden austerity as credit and markets became increasingly privatized."

"During times of a powerful state, i.e. Ur III, the state attempted to monopolize all propertyabd establishall production by state command; when the state was weak, i.e. Kassite Babylonia, property and production fell into the hands of private families and individuals."

"In addition to preserving economic solvency for the population, rulers thus found debt cancelation to be a way to prevent a financial oligarchy from emerging to rival the policy aims of kings."