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Because we take it for granted |
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we tend to underestimate the extent to which our entire civilisation is based on the borrowing and lending of money |
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No, it doesn't literally make the world go round |
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But it does make vast quantities of people, goods and services go around the world from Babylon to Bolivia |
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The puzzle is that the early moneylenders got so little thanks for their services |
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On the contrary, they were widely reviled as pariahs |
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Why was that? |
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Welcome to Northern Italy in the year 1200AD |
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A land divided into multiple feuding city states |
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a land where trust was in rather short supply |
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Among the many remnants of the defunct Roman Empire |
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was a numerical system singularly ill-suited to complex mathematical calculation |
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let alone the needs of commerce |
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