Islamic Capitalism

In Benjamin Kunkel's long, rewarding, and thoughtful reflection on debt, credit, the nature of money and contemporary finance ("Forgive us our debts"), I found this intriguing selection from David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  It is a discussion of the nature of early Islamic capitalism, global, free-market, private (in the sense of private property), but not usurious, purely self-interested, or consumerist.  It suggests, albeit very loosely and not without caveats, that we need not be trapped between socialism and capitalism: 

By abandoning the usurious practices that had made them so obnoxious to their neighbours for untold centuries before, [merchants] were able to become – alongside religious teachers – the effective leaders of their communities … The spread of Islam allowed the market to become a global phenomenon … But the very fact that this was, in a certain way, a genuinely free market, not one created by the government and backed by its police and prisons – a world of handshake deals and paper promises backed only by the integrity of the signer – meant that it could never really become the world imagined by those who later adopted many of the same ideas and arguments: one of purely self-interested individuals vying for material advantage by any means at hand.

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