Cape of Mad Hope 
Neal Ascherson
- The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations by Douglas Watt Buy this book
Most of the institutions around us seem to have infancies – or at least paths of evolution along which they staggered in order to become what they are today. Representative democracy, a civil service, even contemporary war descend to us through strange-looking ancestors: the executioners of kings, the treasurer keeping the royal gold under his bed, the marquis riding with his tenantry into the cannon. But capitalism is different. Like Athena born in armour, it bursts on the scene already mature. The sort of joint-stock venture capitalism that swept over north-western Europe in the 17th century lacked the refinements of a 21st-century public limited company. But its cast of characters, and the manic-depressive psychology of speculative investment, were there from the first day.
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Neal Ascherson’s books include The Struggles for Poland and Black Sea. He is an honorary lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
Other articles by this contributor:
Diary · Neal Ascherson among the icebergs
The Media Did It · Neal Ascherson remembers the Wall
Hitler’s Teeth · Berlin 1945
Imagined Soil · The German War on Nature
Oo, Oo! · Khrushchev the Stalinist
On with the Pooling and Merging · The Incomparable Tom Nairn
Law v. Order · Putin’s strategy
After the Revolution · Neal Ascherson reports from Georgia
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