Capital Learns to Travel: Credit Empire and Global Dependence

Capital became transformative when claims on future wealth could move across oceans, survive distance, and bind producers to remote investors. Following credit, insurance, chartered companies, plantations, ports, and industrial finance, this account explains how global networks concentrated opportunity and distributed risk unequally. It connects economic innovation with empire and coerced labor rather than presenting finance as an isolated technical achievement. The result is a history of mobility, dependence, and the institutions that made accumulation scalable.