Who Were the Capitalists?
Before I come to my story of how and why this happened in the western edge of Eurasia, we also need to ask: who were these merchants and why were they universally despised in the ancient agrarian civilizations? The answers are also relevant in explaining the ongoing cultural hatred of capitalism and in particular of its supreme embodiment—the United States of America. The first point worth noting is that these merchant capitalists were a minority in agrarian economies. Their calling necessarily involved assuming risks and valuing novelty, behavioral characteristics that were not common among the settled agrarian communities, who over the centuries would have learned and adapted to the cyclical risks associated with variations in the climate and other quirks of nature. This learned behavior was fixed through social custom (see chapter 6). Novelty seeking and risk-taking behavior could have endangered these socially accepted ways of making a living. But these are precisely the behavioral
