If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence - but also, the systematic threat of violence - maintained by the contemporary state. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy'.

What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. Here he begins to fill in our historical knowledge gap

Anthropologist David Graeber argues that it is only with a general historical understanding of debt and its relationship to violence that we can begin to appreciate our emerging epoch.

David graeber history of debt