Every Old Society Had a Release Valve
Mesopotamia cancelled debts periodically, and not out of kindness. It was maintenance. We kept the mechanism and removed the valve.
Ancient Mesopotamia had a mechanism the modern world has quietly dropped, and its absence explains more than most of what gets written about the economy.
They cancelled debts. Periodically, comprehensively, by royal proclamation. A new king would take the throne and wipe the slate: agrarian debts void, debt-slaves returned home, forfeited land restored. The Babylonians called it a mesharum. The Hebrew Bible calls it the jubilee.
The temptation is to read this as ancient generosity, rulers being kind in a way our harder world cannot afford.
It was nothing of the sort. Michael Hudson has spent a career on these records, and what they show is a survival mechanism. Rulers who did not cancel found their farmers foreclosed into bondage, their fields untended, their armies unmanned and their societies in revolt. The jubilee was not charity. It was maintenance, performed by people who had noticed that debt at interest compounds faster than agriculture grows and who had built a release valve accordingly.
We kept the mechanism and removed the valve.