Reconsidering Debt Remission in Light of the Ancient World

This article situates the recent calls for debt remission, or Jubilee, in terms of the history of debt. It goes back to ancient Southwest Asia (and Rome), where we find three functions of debt. It was primarily a means for securing labour of the context of a chronic shortage of labour. Its secondary features included the flow of wealth to the lender and the securing of class differences. However, we need to distinguish debt from credit, since the two are often assumed to be part of the same structure. While debt was extractive, credit was allocative. It relied on a mutual system of knowing interaction among village communities. With these distinctions in mind, it is possible to return to the question of remission or amelioration. On this matter, I argue that such amelioration was only partial and targeted, functioning as a safety valve for an economic system facing crisis. It was also the opportunity for significant political spin, and did little to alleviate the actual problems. The article closes by considering the implications for toda