this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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In Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, he talks about how the conquistadors were at the lower levels of some kind of debt peonage pyramid scheme where the low-level soldiers owed a certain amount of gold to Cortés for organizing and outfitting the expedition, who owed a bunch of money to various creditors including the King of Spain, who owed a bunch of money to various bankers in Venice etc. So they were financially encouraged to be as brutal and extractive as possible when they gained power over the Native peoples. Graeber describes it as one of the first building blocks of capitalism, where those in power had no responsibility other than to extract as much wealth as possible from the people they had power over.