The success of the Jubilee 2000 Campaign for the remission of the debts of the poorest countries of the world may depend on understanding the implications of certain kinds of unrepayable debt, in a way that relates less to any sort of charity than to an analysis of economic, social and political history. The debts of the poorest countries are unrepayable because of their huge scale in relation to the resources of the debtor, though not so huge in relation to the wealth of the creditors, in most cases the world’s richest countries, principally the G7. We may note to begin with that these debts were largely incurred in the 1960s and subsequent decades by the governments of newly-independent countries, mostly very poor and rather backward, in pursuit of a rapid development in their economies, infrastructure and educational resources, but that this incurring was almost entirely shaped on the advice of the creditors whose apparent expertise, monetary and technical, dominated the whole process. That is to say, western governments, international agencies and private companies presided over a process whereby relatively uninformed politicians in newly-independent countries accepted huge loans for inadequately thought-through projects, oblivious of the long-term consequences for their economies of the need to service such debts in the future. Doubtless the situation was made worse by the corruption and inefficiency of many of the governments concerned, but the effect of such corruption was greatly enhanced by the willingness of western financiers to play along with governments well known for their corruption, the loans of the IMF to Mobutu’s Zaire being just one particularly blatant case.