[sdenton4]

Yeah, it's nice to overlay this with Graeber's Debt - there's cyclic chunks of history where no one has little bags of coins to buy the 10ft poles needed to explore the dungeon. (par example.) Sometimes because the monetary system collapses entirely, sometimes because the nobles have hoovered up all the available silver, and don't have the means to make more.

In those periods, people work more on credits and debts, which shade directly into systems of social obligation and caste when extended over time.

(As you note) It's also very historically recent that 'making money' was seen as any kind of reasonable choice for someone with power. The political and merchant classes are typically quite separate (the exceptions prove the rule); the merchants are picking up an under-explored source of power that is mostly uninteresting to the the ruling class.