If I may ask why did the practice of usury and what is debt bondage emerge?
And why in Mesopotamia?
I can see the consequences-social strife and the like but how did these things just come into being?
And could sargon's unification have been a way of dealing with the social and political tensions these practices brought on?
In Graeber's
Debt he discusses the possibility that it was a function of city-state governments trying to profit off the high-risk, high-reward trade with northeast Arabia and particularly India.
The concept is, IIRC, that the trade wouldn't have been affordable without government investment, but that the combination of extreme distance and political disunity made managing the merchants and sailors involved impossible. It would have been too easy to game the system - how are you going to prove that a ship
didn't go down off Dilmun, or a local king
didn't seize the cargo? So the theory goes it was all about taking risk off the books of the temple bureaucrats. You give money to clan X, that plies the river trade and has major holdings you could seize if it came to that. They give prior consent, setting collateral for the chance to multiply their wealth. Then
no matter what happens to the expedition, the king takes his money back with compensation for his trouble. It's win-win often enough, and always
sounds win-win on paper, so it becomes common practice. So the theory goes anyway.
It's...believable, at least. If something like that was how it got started, it's not hard to picture how it spread. First it gets applied more generally with government loans to wealthy families, individuals, some too-clever sorts realize the implications, and the practice proliferates. If it dawned on you too late how nasty compound interest can be, and you have money to make loans,
offering loans at compound interest is a pretty obvious solution. People in those situations tend to even encourage those in their debt to do that sort of thing. Pyramid scheme explosion.
People and communities keep having to relearn why pyramid schemes are bad, that they don't work. But if it was literally the first time it had ever happened, the breaks would be off. Magical thinking rampant.
But really we don't know. I'd be very pleasantly surprised if we ever really get to "know" the answers to those questions, though.
Except the last. I won't belabor the point.
Because Mesopotamia brought forth so much wealth that it could easily be allocated very unequally; because its societies grew so large there to sustain Great complexity, because later on, it experienced crises which were very serious but not sufficient to cause breakdown.
All that played into the hands of profiteers. And a corresponding culture always develops.
I dunno. There's certainly a logic to that, but then we have to ask why it only seems to have been invented once, when those causative factors could be applied to almost every civilization.