Debt as Power

Reviews / Votes

'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 -- .