John Weisweiler is University Lecturer in Ancient History and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East and author of From Republican Empire to Universal State: Senators, Emperors, Senators and Local Elites in Early Imperial and Late-Antique Rome.

• Preface 1 The Currency-Slavery-Warfare Complex: David Graeber and the History of Value in Antiquity John Weisweiler 2 Beyond Debt: Markets and Morality in First-Millennium-BCE Babylonia Reinhard Pirngruber 3 Cosmic Debt in Greece and India Richard Seaford 4 Private Debts in Classical Greece: Bond of Friendship, Curse of hatred? Moritz Hinsch 5 Debt, Death, and Destruction in Ancient Rome Lisa Eberle 6 The Poetics and Politics of Exchange in Roman Agronomy Neville Morley 7 Monetization, Marketization and State Formation: The Later Roman Empire as an Axial Age Economy John Weisweiler 8 Zoroastrian Materialism: Religion, Empire, and Their Critics in Graeber's Late Axial Age Richard Payne 9 Debt, Debt Bondage, and the Early Islamic Economy Michael Bonner 10 Debt's Fourth Millennium Seen From Below: How Papyri Modify the Picture Arietta Papaconstantinou 11 After the Axial Age: Debt and Obligation in the European Early Middle Ages Alice Rio 12 Afterword Keith Hart

Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East is a remarkable book. Weisweiler and his colleagues expand the very notion of what the study of the ancient economy can reveal. The more capacious view afforded by anthropology opens our eyes to the embedding of economic thought and conduct in matrices of social relations and systems of value of enormous complexity. At the same time, the chronological and geographic ambition of the work endows it great conceptual and comparative significance. One senses the enriching of an entire field.