ABSTRACT
Knowledge about capital arose from and in numerous domains, assuring that the resulting term would be sufficiently rich to epitomize the complex capitalist system and become central to Western self-definition. The mode of production emerged during the early modern period as a result of the many transformations analytically bundled together into the portmanteau terms primary, primitive, or original accumulation. Before the advent of mechanized factory industrialization, economies were land and labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive. Capital was predominantly liquid or circulating, and most was employed in moneylending and commerce in the form of credit, specie, financial instruments and obligations, and inventory. The prominence of capital in medieval and Renaissance Italy occasioned early terminological experiments to apprehend and construe its meaning, particularly in commercial ventures and partnerships. To establish capital as a comprehensive term that signifies at once the core and the motor of the rising mode of production took, in fact, a process that can appropriately be called conceptual original accumulation.
