The next great leap ahead was the advent of double-entry accounting in Renaissance Italy.

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Banking and double-entry bookkeeping, first created 500 years ago, enabled proto-capitalists to hide their wealth in a myriad of ways.

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Throughout history, human beings have invented representational systems writing, music notation, double-entry bookkeeping to grasp with the mind what human hands could never touch.

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Whereas business institutions in the Islamic world remained atomised, the West developed ever more resilient corporations limited liability became widely available in the mid-19th century as well as a penumbra of technologies such as double-entry book-keeping and stockmarkets.

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Once again, my more ponderous thoughts were featured in an essay being published tomorrow in The Los Angeles Review of Books, in which I analyse Double Entry : How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by Jane Gleeson-White.

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