The Underground Wealth of Nations

Download or read book The Underground Wealth of Nations written by Jeannette Graulau and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silver mining was a capitalist business long before the supposed origin of modern capitalism Hundreds of years before a sixteenth-century crisis in European agriculture led to the origins of capital, investment, and finance, the silver mining industry exhibited many of the features of modern capitalism. Silver mines were large-scale businesses that demanded large investments and steady cash flow, achieved by spreading that risk through fungible shares and creating legal structures to protect entrepreneurs from financial disaster. Jeannette Graulau argues that mining preceded agriculture as the first true capitalist enterprise of the modern world.