Business
Beneath everything lies a vast layer of everyday subsistence: farming for one's own table, village barter, goods made and used locally. Above it sits the market of towns, fairs, shops, currencies and transport. Only at the top is capitalism proper, a thin layer of large operators seeking monopoly and control over whole trade networks.
Open, competitive exchange in markets and fairs is a different thing from capitalism, which tries to escape competition through monopolies and control of entire trade circuits. The two sit on separate levels, and the big players at the top work to dominate the ordinary trading below them rather than simply join it.
Early capitalists prized the ability to shift money quickly from one trade, region or venture to another above any single line of business. Their advantage came from staying mobile and uncommitted, ready to move wherever profit appeared.
Before industrialization, large capital largely failed to take hold of agriculture and early manufacturing. It stayed instead on its home ground of finance and long-distance trade, where returns were higher and money could move freely.
The capitalist layer of finance, merchant partnerships, companies and long-distance trade was tiny compared with the whole economy. Yet its influence was vastly disproportionate to its size, because it controlled the channels through which money and goods moved over long distances.
Banking and a system of credit, including bills of exchange that moved value without moving coin, were the real engine of early capitalism. They let merchants operate across distances and timescales that cash alone could never support.
Markets, pedlars, fairs, shops and early stock exchanges were not background scenery but the real motors of change. The physical tools of trade, such as stalls, roads and means of communication, shaped how whole societies lived and developed.
Economic life cannot be explained alone, because society is a "set of sets" in which the economy is bound up with social rank, the state and culture. Whether capitalism thrives depends on politics and, above all, on society, not on money by itself.