ABSTRACT
A great deal of unprofitable discussion has taken place about the date at which the capitalist system came into being. Some writers refuse to speak of Capitalism as existing before the machine age which began, broadly, towards the end of the eighteenth century, and thus regard Capitalism as the child of the "Industrial Revolution." Others, tracing back its development from the nineteenth century, find it already in existence in a rudimentary form at the latter end of the Middle Ages, gradually superseding and pushing out of existence the localised economy of the medieval city and the manorial system. Yet others, connecting it with the wars of religion, credit it with a birthday somewhere in the sixteenth century; and another school of thought, working back from the great age of mechanical inventions and discovering that the "Industrial Revolution" did not, after all, begin in 1760, lands up somewhere in the seventeenth century—perhaps about the date of the foundation of the Bank of England.
