ABSTRACT
The development of the modern colonial system and the establishment of the modern State are two phenomena dependent on one another. The one is inconceivable without the other, and the genesis of modern capitalism is bound up with both. In 17th and 18th centuries the Jews had already achieved renown as army-purveyors. Under the Revolutionary Government, under the Directory, in the Napoleonic Wars it was always Jews who acted as purveyors. The Jews themselves were not the least who aided the growth of this new system of borrowing, and thus they contributed to the removal of their own monopoly as financiers. In so doing they participated to a greater degree than ever before in the work of building up the great States. The transformation in the public credit system was but a part of a much vaster change which crept over economic life as a whole, a metamorphosis in which also the Jews took a very great share.
