Government bonds are the biggest and most advanced system of lending for profit in human history. They are presented as normal and respectable public finance.

This research shows how an invention from medieval Venice grew into a worldwide system. It takes money from taxpayers and transfers it to bondholders. At the same time, it limits the freedom of democracies, because governments must keep paying interest on the debt.

Looking at sources from early religious teachings through to modern financial rules, we can see the change. What was once condemned as a sin is now treated as the very basis of state power.

What is a loan?

You borrow £100. You agree to pay back £100 plus £10 more for the time you hold the money. That extra charge is interest.

Today, we see that as normal. We expect to pay interest when we take a loan.

For most of human history, it was not seen as normal finance. It was usury.

Usury was judged a mortal sin.

In Christian law, the Church banned it for more than a thousand years. In Islam, it is still banned as riba.

The ban on usury was central cannon to both the Christian and Islamic legal traditions.

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas set out the framework that guided Christian teaching for centuries. He wrote:

“To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice” (Aquinas, T.).

Aquinas explained that money is different from things like houses. A house can be rented and still remain intact. Money, however, is consumed when it is spent. To charge for the “use” of money while also demanding its repayment means selling the same thing twice—once as the money itself, and again as its supposed “use” (Aquinas, T.); (Geisst, C.R.).

This teaching was later reinforced by Pope Benedict XIV in his 1745 encyclical Vix Pervenit. He declared usury to be “always illicit” and said that “the nature of the sin called usury has its proper place and origin in a loan contract”. The church was clear: any gain beyond the amount lent, even if small, was unlawful and usurious (Benedict XIV).

Islamic teaching gives a parallel view through the concept of riba. The Qur’an (2:275) states directly: “Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest” (Qur’an 2:275). The difference is key. Trade involves risk, effort, and value creation. Interest is a guaranteed profit without effort (Islamic Finance Guru).

The Qur’an warns that those who continue in usury face “war against you from Allah and His Messenger”.

This is the last writing from god and it could not be clearer – you face war with your creator if you do not stop this behaviour.

---

Arabic (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:279):
فَإِن لَّمْ تَفْعَلُواْ فَأْذَنُواْ بِحَرْبٍ مِّنَ اللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ ۖ

Translation (Sahih International):
“If you do not, then be informed of a war [against you] from Allah and His Messenger.” (legacy.quran.com, surahquran.com)

---

These classical definitions give us a clear test: if lending money brings a return purely because of the loan, it is usury. By this measure, government bonds are a direct example of usury.

Venice: Creditor Rule and the Birth of State Usury

The Doge’s Palace in Venice, a historic site connected to the first government bonds (prestiti) issued in the 13th century to fund wars and state expenses.

In 1262, the Venetian Great Council (made up of only the city’s most richest merchant families) created a new finance system called the prestiti (Academia.edu).

The Great Council passed a law.

Ordinary revenues could cover up to 3,000 lire per month. Any spending above that had to go first to pay 5 per cent annual interest on loans already taken.

This meant paying the money lenders came before everything else. The government first priority had to be paying back interest. That meant the government promised, in law, that creditors would always be paid first over the needs of citizens (Academia.edu; Oxford Academic).

The loans were forced onto citizens. Officials at the time presented them as temporary. In practice they became permanent. Lending turned a levy into a passive income stream for the ruling class. Contemporary accounts describe these loans as “preferred to higher taxation” because they paid returns to the lenders (Tontine Coffee-House).

Administration sat with the Ufficiali agli Prestiti. These were the Loan Officers. Surviving records show they swore an oath to take revenues under their control and pay interest to creditors, manage repayments, and register transfers of the debt. Debt service was a sworn office of state (Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Giuramento degli Ufficiali agli Imprestiti).

The design settled quickly into a bond market that is recognisable today:

• Perpetual debt with no fixed end date. Redemption happened only if the state chose to redeem.
• Fixed interest paid to creditors each year.
• Transferability so creditors could sell their claims to others, which created a market for debt (Tontine Coffee-House; EconStor, Public Debt in Venice 13th–16th c.).

By 1299 the interest rate paid to creditors rose above 8 per cent. The largest bond holders were the same patrician families who ruled in the Great Council. Lawmaking power and creditor power sat in the same hands (Tontine Coffee-House; EconStor, Public Debt in Venice 13th–16th c.).

The Doge: Ritual Authority for Creditor Rule

Doge comes from the Latin dux, meaning leader or duke. The Doge was the elected head of state of Venice from 697 to 1797. His seat of power was the Palazzo Ducale. He was the head of a creditor merchant republic that ran on forced public usury and maritime power (colonial shippping) (Oxford Academic, Handbook of Venetian History).

The symbol matters. The Doge stood in ritual as the face of the state. The creditor class held the levers. Venice tied state authority to finance, oligarchy, and ceremony. The system extracted public money to pay private lenders, by design (EconStor, Public Debt in Venice 13th–16th c.).

The British Model: Permanent Debt and Imperial Finance

The Bank of England was created in 1694 under the Tonnage Act, also known as the Bank of England Act. The law carried royal assent on 25 April 1694, and the charter was signed on 27 July that year (Bank of England FOI document).

A Scottish merchant, William Paterson, proposed the idea: the bank that would lend to the crown and manage debt (William Paterson). The Bank was presented as a tool for war finance,but from the start, The Bank of England was a private company.

Shares were sold to whoever could subscribe. That included King William III and Queen Mary II themselves (Parliament research briefing). These subscribers became the owners many were already wealthy merchants and gentry.

The Tonnage Act said the money was “to carry on war against France, while giving “recompences and advantages” to those who subscribed” (Legislation.gov.uk; Bank of England Museum).

The deal worked like this. Wealthy people were invited to lend money to the Crown. In return they got a guaranteed interest payment, secured by taxes. This was called a “fund”. The money raised from taxes was locked in to pay back interest to the gentry from the plebs, indefinetly .

The first loan was £1.2 million. The Crown promised to pay 8% interest every year. New duties on shipping (tonnage duties) were assigned to cover this interest (Bank of England FOI).

Parliament told the public that the £1.2 million loan of 1694 was “to carry on the war against France.” This is what the Tonnage Act declared, and what the subscription was sold on. War was the theatre, this is the narrative that justified taking money from the public and funnelling it to a new class of investors.

The real effect was different. The loan locked the Crown into permanent interest payments to a private group of subscribers. Taxes on shipping and excise were earmarked to guarantee the creditors their 8% return. The war gave urgency and cover. The mechanism created something lasting: the system we still live in where the first call on public revenue is debt service.

The subscription created what William Paterson himself called a “Society of Money’d Men” an organised class of creditors with a legal claim over the state.

In 1694, the Crown sold its future revenue to private lenders, and finance became the backbone of the Empire. This is why every later conflict from Marlborough to Napoleon was pre-financed.

Once the model was set, the war could be whatever story the bond market. The structure is the same today: interest first, taxpayers second.

The subscription opened on 21 June 1694. Within about 11 days, all the money had been subscribed (Bank of England Museum).

We know who subscribed. The full list is here:

Original Bank Subscribers

It show 1,268 names: merchants, landed gentry, titled aristocrats. Women made up less than 10% of the subscribers.

This was the dawn of permanent national debt to fuel colonialism. The government could redeem the loan if it chose, but in the 500 years since it has only ever rolled it forward.

The “funded debt” became a fixed feature of the modern British state. By 1834, the debt to the Bank had grown to £11 million and stayed at that level until 1946 (Bank of England FOI).

Slave Owner Compensation by Private Debt Bondage

Slavery ended in Britain in 1833, but money went to slave owners. The British Treasury borrowed £15 million from Nathan Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore to pay off slave owners (Hansard, 3 Aug 1835).

The British government did not repay Rothschild and Montefiore with money in hand. Instead, it created a package of long-term promises (bonds) that locked the tax payer into decades of usury.

The core of this package was something called a Consol, short for ‘consolidated annuities‘ which is a bonds that pays 3% interest every year but never repays the original sum.

It is effectively a perpetual rent on the repayments for slavery, that has been paid by British taxpayers to the Rothschild family ever since.

The package also came with a smaller share called “Reduced 3% Consols” another form of the same endless bond on slightly altered terms.

On top of this, Rothschild and Montefiore were granted a 25-year annuity worth £101,875 per year (Hansard, 3 Aug 1835; Bahamianology, 2020).

That £101,875 annuity written into law in 1835 equals about £12.2 million per year in today’s money and taxpayers had to pay it every year for 25 years, on top of the perpetual interest streams from the bonds.

£12.2 million a year for 25 years comes to about £305.6 million in today’s money.

So the commission alone drained the modern equivalent of just over £300 million from taxpayers, separate from the perpetual bond interest.

The 1835 slave-owner compensation package totals

• Total compensation to slave-owners: £20 million in 1835 ≈ £2.4 billion today.
• Loan arranged by Rothschild & Montefiore: £15 million in 1835 ≈ £1.8 billion today.
• Their annuity commission: £101,875 per year for 25 years = £2.55 million in 1835 ≈ £305.6 million today.
• Annual interest on the Reduced 3% Consols: £450,000 in 1835 ≈ £54 million per year today.
• Total over 180 years (1835–2015): about £81 million in 19th-century money ≈ £9.7 billion in today’s terms.

Total: over £12 billion in modern money.

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Suez Canal Control by Private Debt Bondage

In November 1875, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wanted Britain to seize control of the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company. The canal was a vital trade route and a core imperial asset. But Parliament was not in session and Disraeli said he “could not wait for approval because the Khedive of Egypt was under financial strain and might have sold the shares elsewhere if Britain hesitated”(Hansard, 14 Feb 1876).

What he did not tell parliment is that Khedive had been driven into debt deliberately by British bankers first (Rothschild included) through high interest railway loans for Egypt, palatial building projects, and encouraging military spending. These debts were then used as leverage to strip him of Egypt’s assets.

Britain’s interest was not only “to protect the India route,” as Sir Stafford Northcote told MPs (Hansard, 14 Feb 1876) and the media repeated. By the 1870s the Canal was also the only modern route into the Eastern Mediterranean that could serve the rising oil interests in Mesopotamia and Persia. Knox D’Arcy’s 1901 concession in Persia makes that link explicit, but the jockeying for Middle Eastern access was already under way in the 1870s.

Disraeli turned to N. M. Rothschild & Sons for money. Rothschild advanced the government £4 million in cash to buy the canal. The deal was struck privately between the Prime Minister and Nathan Rothschild, with no parliamentary debate, agreement or awareness.

When Parliament reconvened Disraeli and his cabinet presented the deal as a fait accompli (already complete). The Commons debates of 14 and 21 February 1876 record members of the commons protesting the secrecy, but by then the shares were already Britain’s, and the Treasury was already bound to Rothschild’s usury terms (Hansard, 21 Feb 1876; Legislation.gov.uk, 1876).

Final total paid by taxpayers

Original 1875–76 money

• Purchase price: £3,976,582. The Chancellor told the House the price was cut from £4,000,000 because the Khedive had fewer shares than first stated (176,602 not 177,642). (Parliament API)
• Commission to Rothschild: £99,414 (2½% on the purchase money). (Parliament API)
• Incidental expenses: about £4,004 to “make up a round sum” in the Supply vote. (Parliament API)
• Interest on the bridge advance: £144,658 if you carry the 5% on £4,000,000 from the contract date 25 Nov 1875 to the Act date 15 Aug 1876 (264 days). Hansard records the term as 5% per annum until the date of repayment. (Hansard, Legislation.gov.uk)

Grand total (original): £4,224,658.

Today’s value (order-of-magnitude CPI scale ≈ ×120)

• Purchase £3,976,582 → ~£477m
• Commission £99,414 → ~£12m
• Expenses £4,004 → ~£0.48m
• Interest £144,658 → ~£17.4m

Grand total (today’s scale): ~£507m

From Imperial Seizures to Legal Shackles

The Suez deal shows how deep private finance had advanced into the core of state power.

In the decades that followed, the model was hardened. What began as forced loans in Venice, then permanent debt through the Bank of England, then imperial transfers and asset grabs financed by Rothschild syndicates, became something deeper and far more insidious. The violence of conquest and the machinery of debt bondage finance were fused into legal form.

By the 20th century, the rules of usury were no longer only contracts or ministerial bargains. They were written into constitutions, treaties, and statutes. Governments were stripped of the right to draw on their own monetary authority. The law forced them to go through private markets, to pay bankers’ fees, and to submit to interest dictated by creditors.

This is a slow disintegration of public finances from war loans, to slave-owner payouts, to the Suez Canal, to modern treaty law. Each step is a continuation of the same logic: state power has been subordinated to creditor power.

Usury in Law: The Treaty Framework of Forced Dependency

In the modern era, no government is free to finance themselves directly through their own central banks. Global laws and treaties make this illegal and we are all forced instead to borrow from private bankers.

In Europe, the rule is written into Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The article states:

“Overdraft facilities or any other type of credit facility with the European Central Bank or with the central banks of the Member States in favour of Union institutions… central governments… shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the European Central Bank or national central banks of debt instruments.” (EUR-Lex, TFEU, Article 123)

In other words:

• European governments are banned by EU law from borrowing from their own central banks.
• If a government needs money, it cannot ask the institution that issues its currency.
• Instead, it must sell bonds to private banks and investors, and pay them interest.
• Even if the central bank wants to help, it is forbidden from lending directly. This does not only forbid direct loans. It also blocks attempts to get around the ban. The rule adds that “secondary-market purchases of public debt instruments… must not be used to circumvent the objectives of the prohibition on monetary financing.”

The United States has the same structure. The Federal Reserve Act, Section 14 states that the Federal Reserve may only buy government securities “in the open market.” It cannot buy directly from the Treasury. The statute gives the Federal Reserve power to buy and sell bonds between private banks, but forbids it from lending straight to government.

Federal Reserve Act, Section 14 says:

The Federal Reserve may buy and sell government securities only “in the open market.” It cannot buy them directly from the Treasury. (Federal Reserve Board, Section 14)

In other words:

• The U.S. government cannot borrow from its own central bank.
• If the Treasury needs money, it cannot go to the Federal Reserve for a loan.
• Instead, the Treasury must first sell bonds to private dealers (banks, brokerages).
• Only after that sale can the Federal Reserve buy those same bonds back on the “open market.”
• This creates a middleman structure: private banks take a cut and dictate terms, even though the Fed could create money at zero cost.

This is not unique to the U.S. or the EU. Versions of the same rule appear in many systems, written into law after World War II under IMF and World Bank influence:

• United Kingdom: The Bank of England is legally barred from granting credit directly to the Treasury except for a tiny “Ways and Means” account. Since 2000, even that has been effectively closed, replaced by bond issuance to markets. (UK National Audit Office, 2020)
• Canada: Until the 1970s, the government borrowed directly from the Bank of Canada at near-zero cost. Legal reforms in 1974 ended this. Now, like the U.S., Canada must issue bonds to private markets. (Bank of Canada background)
• Japan: The Bank of Japan cannot directly underwrite government bonds. It can only purchase them on the secondary market. This restriction dates from U.S. occupation reforms after WWII. (Bank of Japan Act, 1997)
• Global South: Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s–90s forced dozens of countries to enshrine similar prohibitions, forbidding central banks from financing deficits and mandating bond issuance instead. IMF “conditionality” documents make this explicit. (IMF Working Paper, 2005)

The horror in plain terms

Everywhere this structure exists, governments are prohibited by law from using their own central bank to fund hospitals, schools, or infrastructure. They must instead sell debt to private creditors, who then earn interest year after year.

This is not “neutral market discipline.” It is a legal straightjacket that guarantees a constant transfer from taxpayers to bondholders.

The first step toward alternatives is abandoning the fiction that government bonds represent ‘necessary financial instruments’. They are usury contracts that enrich a parasitic class private bankers whilst constraining public policy. Naming this reality accurately is the foundation for reclaiming our global democratic sovereignty from the bond markets.

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