Debt as Power

Richard H. Robbins is Distinguished Teaching Professor in Anthropology at Plattsburgh State University of New York, USA Tim Di Muzio is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia

'This radical and wide-ranging book provides an innovative critical analysis of an alarming scourge of our times: debt. Developed as a critique of the categories of money and credit as technical and socially neutral categories in neoclassical economics, ‘Debt as Power’ provides an economic anthropology – at once historical and international - of the origins, intensification and socially deleterious consequences of debt as a technology of power. Derived from the Marxist theoretical framework of differential accumulation and conceiving of capitalism less in terms of a relation between exploiter and exploited and more as a relation between creditor and debtor, the study reads the international history of capitalist debt with strikingly new results. It opens up a new perspective on the origins of debt within the context of England’s 17th Century’s bellicose geopolitical context, emphasising the capitalisation of the English/British state and its indebtedness to private investors. It moves on to explore the transatlantic spread and intensification of debt – private and public – through war, commerce, and colonialism. And concludes with an analysis of the further role of odious debt after WWII in the production of inter-state and domestic inequalities. The book ends with a call to arms: debt strike! ‘Debt as Power’ immeasurably advances our understanding of the international history of debt as a technology of power. It constitutes a fresh and important contribution to critical IR and IPE.'2017 Sussex International Theory Prize - Honourable Mention