Sublime

publicly visible.

On Europe’s Inner Asian frontier, demographic expansion long seemed as hobbled as it was in mainland North America until the 1750s.

These are all highly contestable statements.

Recognizing that capital is made, and not simply the product of superior skills, shifts attention to the processes by which different assets are slated for legal coding and to the states that endorse relevant legal modules and offer their coercive powers to enforce them.

Realizing the centrality and power of law for coding capital has important implications for understanding the political economy of capitalism.

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.

Following Hernando de Soto, we see capital as “economic potential energy”; a stock of crystallized and stored time; the memory of experimentation and discovery; a tool allowing us to not need to work completely from scratch, and shared in a common language to spare us equally from isolation.