The Underground Wealth of Nations
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
On the Capitalist Origins of Silver Mining, A.D. 1150-1450
Jeannette Graulau
View Inside
Format: HC - Paper over BoardPrice: $85.00
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.
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.
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.
Jeannette Graulau is associate professor of political science at Herbert H. Lehman College, The City University of New York.
"Jeannette Graulau shows how mining was an important locus of the emergence and evolution of economic and political institutions that have come to be understood as capitalist. Mining was not just a feudal backwater, but a dynamic sector in which bankers were able to organize corporations that eventually played a central role in the emergence of modern nation-states."—Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside
"A meticulous excavation of capitalist silver mining in feudal Europe. An original contribution to the study of early modern capitalism and the origins of the specie."—Robert Schaeffer, California Polytechnic State University
ISBN: 9780300218220
Publication Date: October 8, 2019
Publication Date: October 8, 2019
392 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
40 b/w illus.
40 b/w illus.
