After more than a year of wanting to read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a friend gave it to me, so I finally have—at the same time that everybody else has moved on to reading his latest work on democracy.

Bloomberg Businessweek called Debt, ‘a sprawling, erudite, provocative work’. For me, anthropologist and anarchist Graeber asks the great and central questions about debt. I was ultimately unconvinced by his central thesis that the swings between coinage money and credit money have been a decisive factor in human history. But it is a book that tackles head-on one of the most serious issues of our time and, in so doing, distinguishes itself from the hundreds of books and hundreds of thousands of pages of commentary on the Global Financial Crisis. He is not content to swim in the shallows of the ‘more regulatory oversight of banks’ school. Instead, he wants to explore the blue ocean of how moral attitudes to credit have shaped societal structure.