Recommended: the prolific work of Prof. Michael Hudson. His early seminal work ‘Super Imperialism’ was ignored by the left (its intended audience) and instead was adopted by the CIA as a manual on how to drive its hegemony. It made him the highest paid analyst on Wall St and, among other things, he showed how the US Global Military Industrial Empire expenditure exactly mirrored the US Current Account Deficit.
Further study with Harvard Anthropology Department placed his work within a broader context and a much longer timescale, examining the history of debt and financial organization in the Ancient Near East. There autocratic rulers were established to protect the 95% from the inevitable emergence of a wealthy oligarchy who would expropriate and turn them into debt-slaves. As no economy on the planet has ever managed to grow faster than compound interest on debt, regular ‘debt jubilees’ or wiping the slate clean of private debt obligations, kept the oligarchs down and the state functioning long-term. With the population both able and willing to transfer resources to the centre for infrastructure and self-defense, the Debtors Rights were paramount, based on ability to pay.
This changed in the Hellenic and Roman Empire which provide the foundations of Western Law. Creditors Rights became paramount, and oligarchies emerged which, once they had exploited the 95%, dispossessing them and forcing them to work as serfs on their latifundia (plantations), then needed to look to move beyond the domestic frontiers.
Until eventually the oligarchs found that everyone, including the mercenaries hired to defend the Empire, hated them. So much so that the Roman Senate itself ended up supporting the so-called ‘barbarians’ to come and destroy these oligarchs.
It is no coincidence that the Western elite and their public architecture, White House, Capitol etc. mirror the creditor-based Roman Imperial models.
https://michael-hudson.com/2023/05/the-arc-of-time-pro-creditor-history/
https://michael-hudson.com/2019/06/food-blackmail-the-washington-consensus-and-freedom/
The michael-hudson.com site is a goldmine, maintained by his students, is extremely searchable using tags.
