[quote=@Dinh AaronMk] I want to say something about guilds too. But I don't think guild practice was ever heavily competing with someone. At least not at a local level. And they wouldn't but out anything. Then again, I think guilds were fairly internalized in their structure. The apprentices would be doing the menial shit required to produce what it was the guild produced, which would pass on to the higher skilled journey men who worked on more complex shit while the masters directed it all. So it's probably not a viable model of comparison either. [/quote] The important thing to remember is that nobody was mass producing here, so there was always a demand. The guild would control its membership so that there was no trouble. The nice think about skilled labor, especially in a market where there is no cheap unskilled equivalant, is that skilled labor can always bargain. If somebody tries to bring the blacksmith down to the level of the wage worker, he won't be able to find blacksmiths who are willing to work for him. [quote=@Spoopy Scary] By small businesses, I was thinking that perhaps a farmer with acres full of vegetables goes into the market to sell. I was thinking that perhaps by investing in this farmer, the investor can put that farmer in a more lucrative position and gives his farm more attention and is able to sell off more of his product. The investor makes money off of shares, and the farmer makes money because he is selling more of his cabbages than he ever did before. Though I could be far off, since I am not super familiar with medieval trade practices. Also assuming that someone is in possession of a mineral rich location full of metal veins, my hypothetical merchant can either wrest control of it by buying it out. Or that the person who has it on their property doesn't have the money or means to mine the valuable metal, so the merchant can invest in that and supply miners and equipment. Your examples of taverns, brothels, and ships are also good! Nothing smells as good as the exploitation of your people. [/quote] Yeh, i'm afraid this is all too modern. Farming was much more straight forward back then. Most land would be owned by wealthy land lords who collected rent from the farmers who lived on his land. They would grow the crops and keep a percentage to eat, or sell in their local markets. Some of this land would be communal so the peasants could grow whatever they felt like, or could keep livestock. The land lord owned the land by right and didn't have to pay anything for it. There was no paying for seed, or gas, or utilities. And they didn't have to compete so much, because a lack of industrialism meant that the output of farms was relatively low since everything had to be done by hand. There wasn't really a place for an investor to swoop in and invent "Chiquita Potato". These weren't consumer cultures. The wealthy would buy rare oriental clothe and the like, but there was not enough wealth being created as a whole for any sort of consumer culture to evolve. Because everything takes more work to make, everything has more value. A guy is just happy he can afford shoes, so "Ye Olde Nike's" doesn't really have a market. Also, in this time period tenant law was sort of peculiar. I think in theory you could sell land like that, but it wasn't really done. I suppose part of it is that land was worth too much. For an investor to buy land, he would have to somehow pay the owner more than he could get out of it. It doesn't help that land was attached to social standing. When a guy sells his land, what happens next? He can't move into the suburbs because there are no suburbs. Does he just become a rich peasant? Does he move in with his wifes family and content himself as a vassal to his father-in-law? And too, its not like the miners are needing bulldozers or anything. They can make most of their equipment by themselves. Hell, this was true as recently as the gold rushes of the 19th century, and is why most of the investors of that time were more into land speculation than equipment. This is why I tend to say that what we think of as capitalism is actually a recent invention. Sure, the mechanics have been there since the first guy traded seashells for a handjob, but modern capitalism hinges on the effects of industrialization.