Credit and debt are increasingly important themes in social history. Concerns of all times and places, they begin with the most traditional and universal of all economic institutions, the gift. A gift, as Marcel Mauss (1954, pp. 35–36) pointed out in his famous essay on the subject, necessarily implies credit because it creates an obligation to repay while at the same time making it socially unacceptable to repay immediately. The interest bearing loan, too, is a very ancient institution. The Mesopotamian legal code of Hammurabi, inscribed in a stone stele thirty-eight centuries old, already specifies maximum permissible interest rates for loans in grain and silver, and comes to the aid of peasant debtors by exempting them from the obligation to repay their creditors in years of drought or flooding (Homer 1963, pp. 26–27). The potential for accident and abuse that is inherent in credit, and especially the scope it may offer for profiting from the misfortunes of debtors, means that it has always drawn the attention of moralists and theologians as well as legislators. Even in secular and scientific contexts, discussions of credit and debt today continue to be informed by concepts of usury and prodigality rooted in religious and ethical teachings.

Another perennial source of interest in the topic of debt is the dramatic ambivalence of the phenomenon itself, as symbolized by its eerily antithetical synonyms: credit, indicating trust, approval, and empowerment, and debt, indicating obligation, constraint, and danger. Debt is, as Charles Malamoud (1988) evocatively puts it, lien de vie, noeud mortel — at once a lifeline and a hanging noose. Throughout history it has been both a valued resource and a feared encumbrance, not only for the poor in times of absolute need, but also for the rich and powerful in times when preserving their privileges demanded a financial gamble.