Limited Wants, Unlimited Means
by John Gowdy · John Gowdy
Island Press reader collecting anthropological and economic writing on hunter-gatherer societies, including Sahlins on the original affluent society. Readers come away with evidence that scarcity is socially constructed rather than a universal economic condition.
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Anthropological history arguing credit preceded coinage by millennia, tracing debt through Mesopotamian temple accounts, axial-age empires, and modern finance. Readers gain a case against the barter origin myth and a vocabulary for debt as a moral relation.
The Great Transformation
Polanyi's 1944 account of how self-regulating markets were created by state action in nineteenth-century Britain, and how society moved to protect itself. Introduces embeddedness, fictitious commodities, and the double movement as tools for reading market history.