This book has opened my eyes to depths and meanings of risk, risk transfer, insurance, and a great array of related topics, I never grasped at anything like this level before. (I'm a law teacher of some 3 decades' experience, without a formal finance background.) In this sweeping canvas, we also witness a seafaring adventuring people transforming into the land-based capitalists of the great emerging American cities. This is a great example of those books on the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that give such deep insight into the formation of our modern ideas and ways. The explanations here are well-researched and well-crafted, sailing far above so much dreck clogging the bookshelves these days. This is a skilled and erudite author. Vignettes of the lives of the participants, from capitalists to laborers, alongside examples of transactions, court cases, and a big picture of the flow and development of business, are masterfully blended and paced. If the title seems to your liking, I feel assured the whole book will be.I finish at least a book per week, and this is my favorite discovery of the last year, alongside two others in law and finance history: "Novus Ordo Seclorum" by Forrest McDonald (I got in audio form) on ideological and legal origins of the U.S. Constitution, and "The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets" by various authors. All these books have that high-quality value of building deep history-based insights into things we might otherwise see only shallowly. If only every book I start into could be this good!