Artifacts of Capitalism in the Pre-Modern World
This repository curates and investigates artifacts of capitalism in the pre-modern world.
We define an artifact of capitalism as any as any object or text that reveals how pre-modern subjects thought about, engaged with, or responded to their own economic life. These artifacts might be husbandry manuals, guild rules, personal letters, legal documents, or sermons—but they also include tools like sextants, ships, and calculators. We’re interested in anything that sheds light on the workings of early modern capitalism.
But what do we mean by capitalism? That’s one of the central questions this project explores. Rather than starting with a fixed definition, we begin with the artifacts themselves—gathering, comparing, and questioning. From there, our understanding of capitalism will emerge, shaped by the voices who experienced early forms of our modern economic system. This project, then, is not a search for the “origin” of capitalism, but an effort to document the experience of early modern economic life. It is a phenomenological endeavor rather than an epistemological, teleological, definitional, or theoretical project. In fact, we want to leave open the possibility that whatever is captured in these documents may not be described as capitalism at all. What emerges may not be an early or embryonic form of capitalism but a historically specific economic formation that defies modern terminology and challenges modern assumptions about how economic life can be organized.
As an open-source project, this repository invites anyone to share artifacts that document the economic experience of pre-modern subjects. Just as we don’t want to offer a prefixed definition of capitalism, we also don’t want to dictate when modernity arises. That said, this project focuses on early modern English culture and is run by early modern English scholars, so we will be privileging artifacts from 1500-1700 found on the English archipelago. However, we are also aware that economic activities often transcend geographical and political boundaries, so we are also interested in artifacts that capture global economic experiences.
To submit an abstract, click on the submissions tab.
Page of the Day
Petition to Build Fortune Playhouse
This petition to build a playhouse (the Fortune) offers a glimpse into the way that new businesses were started in the early modern era. The petitioners highlight the remote location of the building and its potential to help the poor.
Newly Added Artifacts
These recent additions illuminate how early modern people navigated work, law, leisure, and exchange—the everyday textures of capitalism taking shape.
- Ruffs - An artifact of pageantry is actually a locus of early modern labor practices.
- All is not gould that glisters — A moral warning against false appearances and deceptive value.
- The Book of Orders — Royal edicts regulating grain trade and price control under Elizabeth I.
- Petition to Build Fortune Playhouse — Documents the commercial ambitions of early modern theatre.
- Elizabethan Vagabonds Acts — Legal definitions of idleness and labor in sixteenth-century England.
- Horse Racing — Chronicles the emergence of racing as both aristocratic pastime and proto-capitalist spectacle.
