Jeannette Graulau. The Underground Wealth of Nations

Scholars have long puzzled over the origins of capitalism. Some trace it to tapping (or trapping) land’s natural fecundity, others to harnessing labor, others to the rise of the firm, often in relation to long-distance shipping. Some suspect religious or other cultural drivers. Others see a productive tension between violent competition and innovation. A few see capitalist sparks in medieval Asia or in parts of the Islamic world, but for most, capitalism as we know it is said to have emerged in late-medieval Western Europe, where it sprouted from the soil, that is, from farming. The trick was explaining how agrarian feudalism gave way to agrarian capitalism. In The Underground Wealth of Nations: On the Capitalist Origins of Silver Mining, A.D. 1150–1450, Jeannette Graulau challenges this superficial view, arguing instead that it was medieval Western and Central European mining (in particular, silver mining) that gave rise to the world’s first capitalist enterprises. Mining is nothing if not risky and is typically plagued by uncertainties. Profiting from mining has thus never been easy beyond first finders. For this reason, investors formed mining societies or corporations to share the burdens of risk and uncertainty in hope of profit. According to Graulau, groups of shareholders first pooled capital in parts of Italy and Bohemia by the late twelfth century, rejecting feudal lords’ claims to underground wealth.

Economic history · Economics · Mining engineering · Political science · Geology · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies