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  |title=Artifacts of Capitalism in the Pre- Modern World
  |title=Artifacts of Capitalism in the Pre-Modern World
  |description=An archive of early modern artifacts that illuminate how people experienced, represented, and resisted capitalism.
  |description=An archive of early modern artifacts that illuminate how people experienced, represented, and resisted capitalism.
  |image=https://www.artifactsofcapitalism.org/images/artifacts-logo.svg
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<div style="max-width:860px; margin:0 auto 24px auto; font-size:1.2em; line-height:1.75; text-align:center;">
This repository gathers texts and objects that reveal how pre-modern people understood work, exchange, obligation, risk, and material life.
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<div style="font-size:1.08em; font-weight:bold; margin:0 0 8px 0;">Defining "artifact"</div>
An artifact may be a husbandry manual, guild rule, personal letter, legal document, sermon, sextant, ship, calculator, or any other trace of economic experience.
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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.
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<div style="font-size:1.08em; font-weight:bold; margin:0 0 8px 0;">Defining "capitalism"</div>
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Not as a fixed definition, but as a question. We begin with the archive itself and let the evidence reshape the language we use to describe early modern economic life.
  <img src="https://www.artifactsofcapitalism.org/images/QRSCS.png"
      alt="Submit an Artifact QR Code"
      style="width:100%; height:auto; border:0; box-shadow:none;">
  <div style="font-size:0.85rem; color:#444; margin-top:0.35em;">
    Submit an artifact
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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.  
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<div style="font-size:1.08em; font-weight:bold; margin:0 0 8px 0;">Narrowing focus</div>
The archive centers on Anglophone materials from 1500-1700 while also welcoming artifacts that illuminate wider networks, cross-border exchange, and global economic experience.
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To submit an abstract, click on the [[Submit an Artifact|submissions tab]].
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== Page of the Day ==
{{Preview|Petition to Build Fortune Playhouse|Copperplate map Finsbury Field}}</big>


== News ==
<div style="max-width:860px; margin:0 auto 24px auto; line-height:1.8;">
{{Preview|Sixteenth Century Society Conference 2025|Portland_Oregon_Aerial_Sunrise,_June_2025}}
<p>Our aim is not to locate a single origin story. It is to document how economic life was lived, imagined, and contested in the early modern world. In that sense, the project is phenomenological before it is definitional: it begins with experience, then asks what concepts can adequately describe what the archive shows.</p>
__INDEX__
 
== Newly Added Artifacts ==
<p>The archive may confirm the language of capitalism, complicate it, or point toward economic formations that do not fit modern categories at all. That openness is part of the method.</p>


These recent additions illuminate how early modern people navigated work, law, leisure, and exchange—the everyday textures of capitalism taking shape.
<p>As an open-source project, Artifacts of Capitalism invites scholars, students, and interested readers to contribute artifacts that help document the economic experience of pre-modern subjects.</p>
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* [[All_is_not_gould_that_glisters;|''All is not gould that glisters'']] — A moral warning against false appearances and deceptive value.
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* [[Book_of_Orders|''The Book of Orders'']] — Royal edicts regulating grain trade and price control under Elizabeth I.
<div style="font-size:0.88em; letter-spacing:0.08em; text-transform:uppercase; color:#6c5837; margin-bottom:6px;">Join the archive</div>
* [[Petition_to_Build_Fortune_Playhouse|''Petition to Build Fortune Playhouse'']] — Documents the commercial ambitions of early modern theatre.
<div style="margin-bottom:10px;">Browse the collection, read the featured entry, or submit an artifact of your own.</div>
* [[Elizabethan_Vagabonds_Acts|''Elizabethan Vagabonds Acts'']] — Legal definitions of idleness and labor in sixteenth-century England.
'''[[Browse_Artifacts|Browse the archive]]''' · '''[[Submit_an_Artifact|Submit an artifact]]''' · '''[[About_the_Project|About the project]]'''
* [[Horse_Racing|''Horse Racing'']] — Chronicles the emergence of racing as both aristocratic pastime and proto-capitalist spectacle.
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== Featured Artifact ==
{{Featured Artifact}}
== Newly Added Artifacts ==
{{Recent Artifacts|limit=6}}
=== Download Data ===
You can also export artifact data as a CSV file:
{{#cargo_query:
tables=Artifacts
|fields=Title,Artifact_type,Creator_author,Date,Start_date,Period,City_and_country_of_origin,Economic_theme,Keywords,Latitude,Longitude
|format=csv
|limit=1000
}}
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Latest revision as of 21:09, 2 April 2026


This repository gathers texts and objects that reveal how pre-modern people understood work, exchange, obligation, risk, and material life.

Defining "artifact"

An artifact may be a husbandry manual, guild rule, personal letter, legal document, sermon, sextant, ship, calculator, or any other trace of economic experience.

Defining "capitalism"

Not as a fixed definition, but as a question. We begin with the archive itself and let the evidence reshape the language we use to describe early modern economic life.

Narrowing focus

The archive centers on Anglophone materials from 1500-1700 while also welcoming artifacts that illuminate wider networks, cross-border exchange, and global economic experience.

Our aim is not to locate a single origin story. It is to document how economic life was lived, imagined, and contested in the early modern world. In that sense, the project is phenomenological before it is definitional: it begins with experience, then asks what concepts can adequately describe what the archive shows.

The archive may confirm the language of capitalism, complicate it, or point toward economic formations that do not fit modern categories at all. That openness is part of the method.

As an open-source project, Artifacts of Capitalism invites scholars, students, and interested readers to contribute artifacts that help document the economic experience of pre-modern subjects.

Join the archive
Browse the collection, read the featured entry, or submit an artifact of your own.

Browse the archive · Submit an artifact · About the project

Featured Artifact

From the archive
Cloth industry - 1538 - Oxfordshire
A useful entry for thinking about rural industry, investment, and the expanding world of cloth production in early modern England.


Newly Added Artifacts


Download Data

You can also export artifact data as a CSV file: View CSV

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