Artifacts of Capitalism in the Pre-Modern World
This repository gathers texts and objects that reveal how pre-modern people understood work, exchange, obligation, risk, and material life.
An artifact may be a husbandry manual, guild rule, personal letter, legal document, sermon, sextant, ship, calculator, or any other trace of economic experience.
Not as a fixed definition, but as a question. We begin with the archive itself and let the evidence reshape the language we use to describe early modern economic life.
The archive centers on Anglophone materials from 1500-1700 while also welcoming artifacts that illuminate wider networks, cross-border exchange, and global economic experience.
Our aim is not to locate a single origin story. It is to document how economic life was lived, imagined, and contested in the early modern world. In that sense, the project is phenomenological before it is definitional: it begins with experience, then asks what concepts can adequately describe what the archive shows.
The archive may confirm the language of capitalism, complicate it, or point toward economic formations that do not fit modern categories at all. That openness is part of the method.
As an open-source project, Artifacts of Capitalism invites scholars, students, and interested readers to contribute artifacts that help document the economic experience of pre-modern subjects.
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