Over the last century, debt has become a pervasive and pressing issue across the globe. Today, we are all in debt: as individuals and as households, as members of small towns and as citizens of nation-states. However, the pervasiveness of debt does not mean its burdens are shared equally. To the contrary, spectacular levels of debt are key to the reproduction of existing relations of poverty and exploitation, as well as to the production of new dynamics of inequality and violence that we are just beginning to understand.
The present Global Debt Syllabus is the last installment of public syllabi incubated or produced by Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, a working group at Columbia University which began in 2016. A project of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the group emerged out of a concern with Puerto Rico’s massive debt and austerity crisis, which exploded in 2015. The group rapidly expanded its focus to examine the history of debt across the Caribbean and then to develop a perspective on debt that is globally comparative, both historically and geographically. Over the course of more than three years, the working group also hosted a series of reading groups and public conferences, and seeded the award-winning community currency project Valor y Cambio.
The syllabi move from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean to a global history of debt which includes the Caribbean but also offers additional points of entry into the global history of debt. Over 19 units and case studies, the Global Debt Syllabus brings together scholarly works as well as primary sources and multimedia pieces. The syllabus includes units devoted to key concepts and historical case studies, but also includes generally ignored dimensions of debt such as gender power relations as well as novel junctures, including how the COVID-19 crisis is already reshaping who is more in debt and who benefits from such an imposition. Throughout, the syllabus provides insights into the ways that people around the world are working to eradicate forms of debt that are unsustainable, unjust, and unpayable.
Access the Global Debt Syllabus here.