What Is This?
Around 2400 BC, the Sumerian king Enmetena of Lagash issued a proclamation cancelling all personal debt in his kingdom. He called it amargi — a word that translates, approximately, as "return to mother" — the restoration of the free status that debt had stripped from citizens who had been forced into bondage to repay loans they could no longer service.
Enmetena was not being radical. He was following established practice. For roughly 2,000 years across Mesopotamia — Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria — royal debt cancellations were a regular feature of economic governance. When a new king took the throne, it was standard practice to declare a misharum (Akkadian: "equity" or "justice") — a Clean Slate that cancelled debts, freed debt bondsmen, and returned land that had been pledged as collateral to its original owners. Hammurabi issued at least four such proclamations. His law code (c. 1754 BC), famous for its "eye for an eye" principle, also contains detailed regulations designed to prevent debt bondage from becoming permanent.^1
This history was almost entirely unknown until a group of Assyriologists and economic historians, led by the late Harvard cuneiformist Thorkild Jacobsen and developed into a comprehensive economic analysis by Michael Hudson, excavated it from thousands of clay tablets. Hudson's 2018 book ...and Forgive Them Their Debts reconstructed the Bronze Age debt economy from primary sources and made an argument that challenges the foundational assumptions of modern economics: periodic debt cancellation was not charity, not radical redistribution, not a violation of property rights. It was deliberate economic maintenance engineering, and its abandonment is what made modern debt crises structurally inevitable.
The mechanism Hudson identifies: compound interest causes debt to grow exponentially, while productive economies grow arithmetically. No matter how productive a farmer, a craftsman, or a city-state, there is a mathematical ceiling on how much can be produced in a season. Debt compounded at the standard ancient rate of 33% per year (or 20% for silver debts) doubles every three years. Given any temporary disruption — drought, disease, war — debtors fall behind, pledge their land as collateral, lose their land to creditors, and become debt bondsmen working the land they used to own. The concentration of land and labour in the hands of creditors hollows out the free peasantry that provides military service, tax revenue, and the productive base of the kingdom.
Clean Slate proclamations were the correction valve. They reset the system before concentrations became irreversible. They were not issued constantly — usually at accession or in response to specific economic crises — but their regularity prevented debt from accumulating into permanently destabilising concentrations. The kings who issued them were not being generous. They were being strategic. A kingdom of free farmers who owed nothing was more productive, more militarily capable, and more taxable than one of debt bondsmen serving private creditors.
Why Does It Matter?
- The modern consensus that debt cancellation is economically destructive has almost no historical support before the Roman Republic. Hudson's research argues that the taboo against debt cancellation is not a timeless economic principle — it is a post-Roman legal inheritance. Roman law, unlike Babylonian law, treated private debt contracts as inviolable and made no provision for periodic Clean Slates. The Roman Republic was notoriously dominated by a creditor oligarchy (the Senate represented large landowners, who were the primary creditors). When Roman law became the foundation of European commercial law, its anti-jubilee bias became embedded in the structure of modern capitalism. What we call "debt morality" — the idea that debts must always be repaid regardless of consequences — is a historically contingent legal tradition, not a natural law.^2
- "Forgive us our debts" was originally a literal policy demand. The Lord's Prayer in the original Greek uses opheilema — debt — not "trespass" or "sin." Hudson argues that the Mosaic Jubilee (Leviticus 25, which mandates debt cancellation and return of land every 50 years) and Jesus's proclamation in Luke 4:18 ("to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour") were both direct references to the Clean Slate tradition. Early Christianity, Hudson argues, was partly a debt-cancellation movement — the social context of Roman Palestine was extreme debt peonage, and the "good news" was explicitly economic as well as spiritual. The spiritualisation of "debt" into "sin" — which happened gradually in the Latin translations — was not a clarification but a neutralisation of a political message.
- Every major historical debt crisis has eventually resolved through some form of de facto jubilee. The 1930s Depression ended partly through debt restructuring and default at sovereign and private levels. The post-WWII German economic miracle was enabled by the London Debt Agreement of 1953, which cancelled 50% of Germany's debt and rescheduled the rest over 30 years — the most generous debt cancellation in modern history, extended by the same Western powers that are now unwilling to extend similar terms to developing nations. The IMF's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative is a partial modern jubilee. Greece's crisis resolution involved debt writedowns. Argentina, Iceland, and others have recovered from debt crises through default and restructuring faster than countries that attempted full repayment under austerity. The jubilee doesn't stop happening — it just happens via crisis rather than via policy.^3
- Current global debt levels make the Triffin dilemma's implications acute. Global debt is approximately $315 trillion — over 3x global GDP. Sovereign debt in developed economies is at levels that historically preceded either inflation, default, or restructuring. The mathematical problem Hudson identifies — debt grows exponentially, economies arithmetically — hasn't changed. What changes is how the correction happens: orderly jubilee or disorderly crisis. No mechanism for orderly correction currently exists in the institutional framework of international finance. The IMF's mandate is to ensure debt repayment, not to coordinate cancellation. The alternatives are inflation (which is a de facto partial debt cancellation through debasement) or restructuring under duress.
- The frame changes how you read crypto. Bitcoin maximalists often describe Bitcoin as the "hard money" solution to debt-based fiat currency. Hudson's analysis inverts this: hard money — money that cannot be expanded — makes debt crises more severe, not less. The Bronze Age societies that ran jubilees used clay tablet debt records that could be literally smashed (this is attested in the record — creditors' tablets were deliberately destroyed during Clean Slate proclamations). Debt denominated in an inelastic asset cannot be inflated away. It must be cancelled, defaulted, or repaid — and the third option is mathematically unavailable for the bottom of the distribution when compound interest is involved. The Bitcoin/hard money thesis is, in Hudson's framework, a creditor's thesis: it protects the value of existing claims at the cost of making adjustment more violent.
Key People & Players
Michael Hudson (University of Missouri) — Economist and Assyriologist who has spent 40 years reconstructing ancient debt economics from cuneiform sources. His ...and Forgive Them Their Debts (2018) is the primary scholarly treatment. His earlier Super Imperialism (1972) — about how the US post-Bretton Woods used its debt to extract wealth from other nations — anticipated many of the macro dynamics now playing out.^4
Thorkild Jacobsen (1904–1993) — Danish-American Assyriologist who first excavated the evidence for amargi and Sumerian debt cancellation from the clay tablets. Hudson built directly on Jacobsen's philological work.
David Graeber (1961–2020) — Anthropologist and anarchist whose Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) covered similar historical ground to Hudson but from an anthropological and political philosophy perspective, arguing that the moral weight attached to debt repayment is a historically constructed tool of social control rather than a natural or universal principle. More accessible than Hudson; less economically rigorous.^5
Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BC) — Babylonian king whose law code is the most famous ancient legal document, but whose repeated misharum proclamations (at least four documented) represent the most important economic policy content of his reign. The law code is largely understood as a debt-economy regulation document by Hudson's reading.
Steve Keen (University of Western Sydney) — Contemporary economist who has most rigorously modelled the mathematical dynamics of compound debt in modern economies, showing how debt-deflation spirals emerge when debt service exceeds income growth. His models are the modern equivalent of Hudson's historical argument: the mathematics of compound interest in a finite economy are unstable without correction mechanisms.
The Current State
The modern academic economics mainstream has almost entirely ignored Hudson's historical work — partly because it challenges foundational assumptions of the discipline (debt contracts are inviolable; markets clear; private property rights are absolute) and partly because it has ideological implications that are uncomfortable across the political spectrum.
The historical evidence is not seriously contested. The cuneiform record of ancient debt cancellations is extensive and well-documented. What is contested is Hudson's interpretation — that these cancellations were economically functional and that their absence from modern economic arrangements represents a structural gap rather than a development.
The practical policy question is becoming less theoretical. With global debt at $315 trillion and the IMF warning that 60% of low-income countries are in or near debt distress, the mechanisms by which debt eventually clears are becoming a live policy debate. The options — sustained growth (arithmetically difficult), inflation (politically combustible), austerity (socially catastrophic and historically ineffective), or restructuring/jubilee (ideologically taboo but historically normal) — are not equally available.
The most likely modern equivalent: Not a formal debt jubilee, but a cascade of sovereign and private debt restructurings — each individually framed as a special case, collectively constituting a de facto Clean Slate over the course of a decade. Whether this happens through negotiated order or through crisis is the question.
Best Resources to Learn More
- ...and Forgive Them Their Debts by Michael Hudson (2018) — The primary source. Dense and scholarly but the only comprehensive treatment of the ancient debt cancellation evidence.^6
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (2011) — More accessible, broader scope, anthropological perspective. Start here if Hudson feels too technical.^7
- Michael Hudson's website (michael-hudson.com) — Extensive free essays, interviews, and summaries of the historical research.^8
- Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? by Steve Keen — The modern mathematical treatment of compound debt dynamics. Complements Hudson's historical argument with contemporary modelling.^9
- Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson (1972, updated 2021) — How the US dollar system extracts debt service from the global economy. The macro-political companion to the debt jubilee history.^10