[notahacker]

> Modern capitalism was not invented by the British. It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders. The British adopted the system and amplified it, just like the Industrialisation that came from the Netherlands.

I nearly qualified the original sentence with a reference to Dutch trading companies who built stock exchanges to fund colonies alongside us and apparently used the word "capitalist" to describe the sort of person that invested in them before us, and obviously the basic concept of markets and trade goes back long before the Venetian republic. But the Industrial Revolution and economic growth going exponential - the modern bit of capitalism - was definitely a British quirk