A Brief History of Entrepreneurship

The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World

Joe Carlen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542814
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

A Brief History of Entrepreneurship charts how the pursuit of profit by private individuals has been a prime mover in revolutionizing civilization. Entrepreneurs often butt up against processes, technologies, social conventions, and even laws. So they circumvent, innovate, and violate to obtain what they want. This creative destruction has brought about overland and overseas trade, colonization, and a host of revolutionary technologies—from caffeinated beverages to the personal computer—that have transformed society.

Consulting rich archival sources, including some that have never before been translated, Carlen maps the course of human history through nine episodes when entrepreneurship reshaped our world. Highlighting the most colorful characters of each era, he discusses Mesopotamian merchants' creation of the urban market economy; Phoenician merchant-sailors intercontinental trade, which came to connect Africa, Asia, and Europe; Chinese tea traders' invention of paper money; the colonization of the Americas; and the current "flattening" of the world's economic playing field.

Yet the pursuit of profit hasn't always moved us forward. From slavery to organized crime, Carlen explores how entrepreneurship can sometimes work at the expense of others. He also discusses the new entrepreneurs who, through the nascent space tourism industry, are leading humanity to a multiplanetary future. By exploring all sides of this legacy, Carlen brings much-needed detail to the role of entrepreneurship in revolutionizing civilization.

1

“One Shekel of Your Private Silver”

Here’s an excerpt from a letter to the editor titled “History Lesson,” published in 2014 in Entrepreneur magazine: “I was stunned to read your editorial in which you stated: ‘It is only within the last 20 years that entrepreneurship has become the aspirational journey and holy grail of…inspired and fearless youth.’ I hope you meant the last 200 years. The railroads opened the West to thousands of entrepreneurs who made their fortunes with shops, restaurants and services they built.”¹ The central point of that letter is valid, but entrepreneurship reaches back much further than the writer realizes. In fact, the “aspirational journey” of the entrepreneur is neither twenty nor two hundred years old. Rather, it is a voyage that began at least twenty thousand years ago.

Primitive Barter

Evidence exists of barter, in various forms, and even small-scale trade of luxury items as far back as twenty to thirty thousand years ago, well into prehistoric times. During this era, known as the Upper Paleolithic period and the end of the Stone Age, human life was brief, transient, and mostly carnivorous. The primary social unit, the tribe, organized most of its activities around the principal objective of hunting game. This often involved extended treks following the seasonal migrations of the tribe’s prey. During this period, as the earth emerged from an ice age, some regions teemed with deer, mammoths, bison, and other game animals. The meat of these large mammals was the primary staple of the human diet.

Clearly, the advent of agriculture, let alone urban commerce, still lay thousands of years ahead. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, it seems that the entrepreneurial impulse still found expression among some of the more enterprising tribes. This is illustrated in a study of prehistoric south and southwest Asia, focusing primarily on the region that is present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The study indicates that, in the Upper Paleolithic period, “the occurrence of marine shell and ostrich eggshell in the Tapti valley, far from the sea and the habitat of ostriches, indicates that exchange of luxury items from distant regions was initiated in some regional sub traditions.”²

However, such exchanges were not limited to luxury items. In modern usage, the anthropological term “Stone Age” usually connotes savagery and backwardness. While there is plenty of evidence to support the first association, the same archaeological record actually reveals a time of technological progress, not stagnation. In fact, the Stone Age and the Upper Paleolithic period in particular, was when human ingenuity molded stone, wood, and other elemental materials into devices for hunting prey and waging war against rival tribes. To this end, spears, knives, chisels, and rudimentary fishing equipment were invented and continually improved upon.

In twenty-first-century global business, financial survival can depend upon a technological advantage, even a seemingly slight one, over a company’s competitors. In the late Paleolithic era, the physical survival of one’s tribe could hinge upon a technological edge in any of the vital tools and weapons of the time. So, among friendly tribes, such tools were bartered, alongside hunting dogs, luxury items, and a certain essential prized by the men of these tribes—women. There is evidence to suggest that men would sometimes barter their mates with other men, as deplorable as that may seem from a modern-day Western perspective.

For thousands of years, the scorecard for entrepreneurial performance has been money. Nonetheless, the historical record of the late Paleolithic era reveals that a primitive form of entrepreneurship preceded the advent of currency or even protocurrencies like unstamped gold and silver. After all, it is likely that the tribe with the highest quantity and quality of tools, weapons, hunting dogs, and ornamental items, and the most desirable women was more enterprising than a tribe that lacked one or more of those coveted “goods.”

The Fertile Crescent

An expanse extending from the southwestern edge of modern Iran to Egypt’s Nile valley, the Fertile Crescent was the scene of two critical developments: the agricultural revolution that enabled the first permanent human settlements and the advent of urban commerce that followed. Due to the arc of its course—extending northwest through much of modern-day Iraq, eastern Syria, and southern Turkey, then turning southwest through western Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and, finally, the Nile valley—the region is referred to as a “crescent.” However, it is the first part of its name, “fertile,” that speaks to its more significant attribute.

The region was home to abundant sources of fresh water, large grasslands and forests, and soil rich in silt from the frequent springtime flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Blessed with such plenty, it is not surprising that the Fertile Crescent was where sustained domestication of vital food sources, both plant and animal, first took place. Most likely beginning in modern-day Kurdistan/northern Iraq and then, over time, spreading to other parts of the Fertile Crescent, men began to domesticate the goats and sheep that grazed on the region’s bountiful grasslands. Meanwhile, women of the same tribes, no longer compelled to accompany their men on long migratory hunting voyages, began domesticating plants.

The plants of choice were the wild, yet nourishing grains that grew tall in the fertile soil along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in the ancient region of modern-day Iraq known as Mesopotamia. Soon, these hearty varieties of barley and wheat, along with lentils and other legumes, would be domesticated by the women of the region. Nourishing crops could now be grown successfully and more or less predictably. Over time, particularly in southern Mesopotamia, the agricultural yield improved considerably with the advent of irrigation and related processes, such as flood control.

Meanwhile, other nearby sources of food, domesticated animals, their by-products, and fish, were also being harvested. Consequently, a domestic human experience characterized by permanent agricultural settlements began to replace the nomadic hunting of previous generations. The profound implications of this more settled lifestyle would soon become apparent. No longer forced to hunt all day for subsistence, these more sedentary humans began developing the specialized skills that laid the basis for a more sophisticated society, including a larger and more diversified economy.

Regarding the latter, the archaeological evidence reveals that as early as the fifth millennium B.C.E., Mesopotamia was already importing goods from (and presumably exporting goods to) such distant regions as the Caucasus Mountains and modern-day Afghanistan. However, it was not until the latter half of the fourth millennium B.C.E. that Mesopotamia, beginning with the nation of Sumer, developed into an advanced civilization. Subsequently, for more than two thousand years, Mesopotamia was home to the dominant economic and military powers of the Middle East, rivaled only by another highly advanced civilization on the opposite edge of the region, ancient Egypt. A military and economic juggernaut and the site of unparalleled feats of engineering, during its heyday, the latter was one of the region’s two great civilizations.

However, it was the other, older, civilization, Mesopotamia, where entrepreneurship evolved during this period of antiquity. This, in large part, is due to the distinction that it was the Sumerians, not the Egyptians, who developed the first cities. Moreover, while the economic activities of ancient Egypt were considerable, they were not only regulated but directed by a government that in modern terms would be described as totalitarian. The administration of the pharaoh controlled not only the means of production, but distribution and even consumption were tightly run bureaucratic operations as well. There was little tolerance, let alone incentive, for individual initiative in Egypt. Yet such initiative was encouraged and often rewarded handsomely in the more autonomous city-states of Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia: Land of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria

In the span of time addressed by this chapter, Mesopotamia was home to four successive, and in some instances overlapping, civilizations—Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Each had its moment as the leading power in the Fertile Crescent, with the latter two attaining dominance over the wider region as well. Emerging from the prehistoric period, early Mesopotamian history revolves around the Sumerians, a people distinguished by an unusual language and a highly sophisticated culture. Settled in lower Mesopotamia, this distinctive ethnic group established the land of Sumer and dominated the region for several hundred years until a Semitic people, the Akkadians, emerged from the west.

At its zenith under Sargon, Akkad vied with Sumer for supremacy over Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, a hybrid Mesopotamian culture developed, incorporating both Sumerian and Akkadian influences. Toward the end of the third millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians reclaimed their regional supremacy from their rivals, thereby ushering in the Neo-Sumerian period. Soon afterward, during the early stages of the second millennium, the Sumerians would blend in with the emerging civilization of lower Mesopotamia, Babylonia. Descendants of the Akkadians, the Babylonians established one of the most powerful civilizations in the region—one that preserved many aspects of the Sumerian culture they supplanted.

Meanwhile, the northern city-state of Ashur was expanding into the nation-state of Assyria. During the first half of the first millennium, both Babylon, as the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Assyrian Empire would reach their respective pinnacles of military and economic power. Within the various Mesopotamian realms, the city-states of these civilizations exercised varying degrees of autonomy and often conducted their affairs more in the manner of a confederacy than a unified nation-state. Nonetheless, there were definite ties of language, culture, religion (e.g., the Babylonian god of justice, Shamash), commerce, and during some periods, ties of common legal practices and military service that bound the peoples of these affiliated city-states together.

Another common thread of Mesopotamian civilization throughout its lengthy and ethnically varied heyday was inventiveness. The Mesopotamians pioneered a sophisticated system of measurements and weights, in part to accommodate their civilization’s expanding level of commercial activity. Some aspects of this sexagesimal system have proved enduring, such as the 24-hour day, the division of an hour into sixty equal parts, and purchasing goods by the dozen.

However, it was the conception of the first system of writing that was, arguably, the most significant intellectual breakthrough of antiquity. There is evidence that some form of etched pictorial representation emerged in prehistoric Mesopotamia and Persia, albeit for a limited set of symbols, such as earth and water. Moreover, it is a later civilization, the Phoenicians, who are believed to have invented the first Western-style or “phonetic” alphabet, composed of symbols representing each letter that could then be combined to represent the full range of linguistic sounds.

Nonetheless, circa 3300 B.C.E., long before the Phoenicians even existed, it was the Mesopotamians who developed a set of syllable symbols. This innovative leap, well beyond the bounds of mere pictorial art but not as efficient as letter symbols, is known as cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) script. The basis of the first viable writing system, cuneiform facilitated many of this ancient civilization’s great advances in commerce and finance.

As well, the implementation of this ingenious new communication tool involved clever use of the region’s abundant clay, molded into writing tablets, and marsh reeds, fashioned into writing styluses. A highly imaginative civilization, it is not surprising that Mesopotamia proceeded to elevate writing into the fine art of literature. Its literary classics include captivating legends that reveal much about its view of the universe, from its unique pantheon of deities, to the Mesopotamian creation story, to perhaps most intriguingly, the first written account of the Great Flood.

The Mesopotamian account is remarkably similar to the story of Noah’s Ark in the book of Genesis, written several hundred years later. In fact, the Epic of Gilgamesh still stands as the best illustration of Mesopotamia’s mastery of storytelling and its society’s fascination with metaphysics:

Anu granted him the totality of knowledge of all.

He saw the Secret, discovered the Hidden,

He brought information of (the time) before the Flood.³

With respect to the “hidden secrets” of life, Western astrology is deeply rooted in the works of this ancient civilization. In fact, hundreds of years after Mesopotamia’s demise, the Romans would still refer to astrology as “Babylonian numbers.” Mesopotamia’s contributions to the less esoteric discipline of astronomy were just as significant; the seven-day week, with a day dedicated to each of the seven planets (including the sun and the moon) is a Mesopotamian invention that was adopted in Mediterranean Europe and then spread throughout the continent during the early first millennium C.E.

Mesopotamia was also the site of great advances in sculpture, masonry and carpentry, architecture, plaque engraving, gem cutting, leather working, textile production and garment design, basket making, glass working, and other crafts. Some of these were older occupations that the Mesopotamians merely refined, but others, such as brewing beer (another enduring Mesopotamian invention), were entirely novel. Weaponry and other forms of metalworking also grew far more sophisticated in the able hands of these inventive people.

In fact, bronze, the alloy of copper and tin for which this historical period is named, was the brainchild of Mesopotamian metallurgists, likely discovered around 2900 B.C.E. Roughly five hundred years earlier, Sumerian pottery makers revolutionized their craft with the potter’s wheel, an invention with ramifications extending well beyond the realm of pottery making. Considering that the earliest evidence of the wheel being used for transportation purposes is from Mesopotamia circa 3200 B.C.E., it is likely that this more celebrated application of the invention is yet another enduring legacy of this extraordinarily creative civilization.

There are not many inventions as foundational to modern civilization as writing and the wheel, but the city, the primary setting of civilization’s social, technological, and commercial development, is certainly one of them. Remarkably, Mesopotamia lays claim to the advent of urban life as well. It was in these ancient cities, now buried in the sands of southern Iraq, that the entrepreneur emerged as a leading, often determining, influence on the course of history.

A Bustling Metropolis

Toward the eastern edge of the Fertile Crescent, in what is now southeastern Iraq, the abandoned remnants of the “cradle of civilization” can be found. These are the ancient dwellings (royal and otherwise), cemeteries, temples, and other structures from the majestic city-states of ancient Mesopotamia. Although some of these communities did not develop into what we would describe as cities until the fourth millennium B.C.E., town-sized settlements in the vicinity of the future sites of the great cities of Uruk, Ur, and others date as far back as the later centuries of the sixth millennium B.C.E.

An impressively fertile society, Sumer required the implementation of increasingly productive agricultural methods to support its growing population. The most significant and lasting of these were irrigation and drainage. Given that a large and well-disciplined workforce was required to execute these methods effectively, this innovative society developed a more powerful regional government, a communal temple-centered religion, and a well-defined social hierarchy. These institutions ensured that this new “miracle” of regimented, large-scale food production would be adequately supplied, staffed, and supervised. In the process of organizing society to better harness the region’s agriculture, an urban civilization was born. The transformation from rural agrarianism to urban commerce took place during the Uruk period of Sumerian history, an era that began almost 5,500 years ago.

Most importantly, during that period, small settlements steadily expanded into the urban centers of Uruk, Nippur, Kish, Lagash, Larsa, Adab, Isin, Eridu, and the most renowned Sumerian city of all, Ur. As the late Mesopotamian scholar Leo Oppenheim observed, “The center of urbanization lay in Southern Mesopotamia…there alone within the entire ancient Near East spontaneous urbanization took place.”⁴ A number of elements of Sumerian city life stood in stark contrast to previous forms of human settlement. Some of these were visual, like municipal planning and groundbreaking architectural achievements such as the ziggurat (“to build higher”) and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Others, though less immediately apparent, were equally momentous. Among the most significant of these was the new urban workplace, the setting of unp...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction
• 1. “One Shekel of Your Private Silver”
• 2. The Pirates of Phoenicia
• 3. The Reluctant Romans
• 4. An Enterprising Faith
• 5. Flying Money and Capitalist Monks
• 6. Western Europe and a “New World” of Profit
• 7. Captains of the Revolution
• 8. The Land of (Entrepreneurial) Opportunity
• 9. Flattening the World and Colonizing Space
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index