The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation
by éric Toussaint (Author)

About the Author
éric Toussaint, Senior Lecturer at the University of Liège, is president of Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts, Belgium. He is the author of “Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank, Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers.”.

About this book
For as long as there have been rich nations and poor nations, debt has been a powerful force for maintaining the unequal relations between them. Treated as sacrosanct, immutable, and eternally binding, it has become the yoke of choice for imperial powers in the post-colonial world to enforce their subservience over the global south. In this ground-breaking history, renowned economist éric Toussaint argues for a radical reversal of this balance of accounts through the repudiation of sovereign debt.

Brief contents
1. How the South Paid for the North’s Crises and for Its Own Subjugation
2. How Debt and Free Trade Subordinated Independent Latin America
3. In the Nineteenth Century, Mexico Proved That Debt Can Be Repudiated
4. Newly Independent Greece Had an Odious Debt Around Its Neck
5. Debt as a Means for Continued Domination over Greece
6. Debt as an Instrument of Colonial Conquest of Egypt
7. Debt: How France Appropriated Tunisia
8. Alexander Nahum Sack and Sovereign Debts
9. Odious Debt according to Sack and according to the CADTM
10. Debt Repudiations between 1830 and 1930
11. Mexico’s Victory against Its Creditors (1914–1942)
12. The Repudiation of Debt by the Soviets
Conclusion
Chronology
Bibliography
Notes

Pages: 270 pages
Publisher: Haymarket Books (April 23, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608463095
ISBN-13: 978-1608463091