this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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From the beginning of civilization all the way up to the end of medieval times, leaders understood the importance of jubilees: Every generation or so the concentration of wealth under a hierarchy gets so bad, so unbearable, that debt must be relieved across society by decree to prevent open revolt.
Nation states were the end of all that. The merchants (Today we call them capitalists) are not the figureheads of society the same way that kings were, they don't fear for their lives when they order politicians to double down on debt, issue new currency endlessly if they must, force through any economic hardships in order to prevent the relief of worsening inequality, to prevent the endless accrual of their wealth and lifestyles.
Instead of relief every 50-odd years, we've been hurting more and more for the past several hundred because nation states provide a faceless, unassailable aegis for the top heirarchs that never existed before in history.
AFAIK jubilee is a biblical expression and it's not clear if it happened at all in ancient Israel and certainly not every 50 years (as mandated in the Torah) but it certainly happened unregularly in nearby mesopotania (that's where the inspiration comes from).
I'm not away of anything comparable in medieval Europe. Peasants were considered part of the land and paid regular tribute but didn't pile up debts or did they?
No I say up to the end of medieval times because shortly thereafter (After a brief 30-year kerfuffle) is when we see the first emergence of what we'd recognize today as nation states. Though I do not refer only to debt cancellations that go by that specific name, "jubilee" is just what we often refer to it in the west. It was done to varying degrees in many ancient cultures.
Around 1300 the church kind of coopted "jubilee" as being a bulk forgiveness of sin rather than financial debt (I think the Catholic Church did one as recently as 2000). But traditions like May Day and various festivals of fools kept the spirit of social inversion and and anti-hierarchy alive since then. We still practice echoes of those traditions today in things like April Fool's, "opposite day", our current labor-centric May Day, etc.