About the book: 2024 / This book is a large-scale and revolutionary study of the history of commodity-money relations from ancient times to the present day days undertaken by the American anthropologist, professor at the London School of Economics and activist, one of the “anti-leaders” of the Occupy Wall Street movement, David Graeber (1961–2020). Graeber, relying on anthropological methods, puts forward the thesis that at the heart of what we traditionally call economics, lies the category of debt, which at different stages of development of society can take the form of money, barter, collateral, loans, shares, and so on. One of the imperatives of the book is to wrest economics from the clutches of the “professional economists” who proved their incompetence during the last global crisis, and place it in the broader context of cultural history, political science, sociology and other humanities disciplines. For a wide range of readers.