The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.7

Capital and Credit: How Trust in the Future Creates the Present

This episode opens with a Genoese notary's register from 1154 to 1164, the oldest surviving in Europe, showing you how merchants pooled money and risk for voyages to Sicily and Alexandria, and how credit turned a believed future into present purchasing power. It recalls the narrow claim of David Graeber, already laid out by numismatist Philip Grierson, that no economy is documented moving cleanly from barter to money to credit. It corrects Max Weber's 1905 thesis linking capitalism to Protestant asceticism by dating the Genoese register more than 350 years before Luther. Along the way it revisits historian Anne Goldgar's finding that the 1637 Dutch tulip mania caused far less ruin than the popular story claims.