The return of populism after the 2008 global financial crisis was, given the left’s abandonment of interventionist economic policy and alienation of its traditional voters, inevitable. However, as we have been at pains to stress, the dominant narratives that accompanied the return of populism were remarkably onesided and tended to ignore the long history of Western populist responses to technocratic arrogance and economic injustice. The American economist Michael Hudson has drawn upon a substantial body of anthropological work that reveals remarkably different attitudes to populism. In eras stretching from Ancient Rome to post-bellum America, populists were regarded as heroic representatives of the populace, a body of people living in a specific territory they regarded as home. Populism was the principal source of solidarity and political energy in struggles against extractive landholding elites in the Ancient World across the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Large-scale economies became increasingly based on credit, which allowed accelerated expansion because labour and materials could be bought before sales. Defying laws and norms clearly laid down by Judaic and Pagan religions, powerful landholders used their substantial assets to become major creditors, irresponsibly indebting farmers and eventually acquiring more assets as the debt burden became impossible to pay. Drawing upon the stabilising activities of the initial palace economies, state authorities offered an alternative source of currency issue as credit which could be bound by powerful laws and decrees that ensured indebtedness would not bankrupt too many families. Most effective were periodic jubilees, which would wipe slates clean, relieve debt, reverse foreclosures, restore property and reboot economic activity.

The fundamental political struggle in the Ancient World was rooted in economics and property ownership. Put simply, state authorities functioned to prevent landholding creditors using private loans to become oligarchs. Small subsistence farmers were actually pledging their livelihoods as collateral and therefore risked the permanent loss of everything they had worked for and on which their lives depended. Private landholding families who acted as creditors wanted to abandon restrictive laws and debt jubilees to make the forfeiture of property as payment for debt permanent.