Err, are we forgetting Gregory Clarke’s thesis here on selection of bourgeois traits due to Malthusian pressures allowing (finally) the skyrocketing of productivity (i.e. the Industrial Revolution)?

Modernity is not an era in the history of society, but a phase in the development of subjective rationality.

Most of our difficulty in seeing past the Singularity is because our thinking is so welded to those (wrong) common sense patterns that we literally cannot perceive anything except through the lens of humanism. Another lesser reason is that we think we live in an universe that is resource constrained (despite the fact that with our understanding it should not exist in the first place) so we try to come to grips to it by increasing scale of our vision linearly (for example, interstellar colonization via robots instead of Universal Manipulation.) This second reason is not a problem by itself, but it does not bring clarity to the table, instead it diverts thinking into useless areas.

I dispute that the merchant caste is a natural predator of the warrior caste. Conflict ran both ways, mercantilism was popular, and when the merchant pushed too far with “I demand you uphold your end this contract that I fast-talked you into signing while maliciously mis-explaining it”, the warrior lords were quite happy to respond with “I’m expelling you, and keeping all the benefits from your end, because you have forfeited your rights to recompense.” And in some cases, when the warriors bought debt they couldn’t afford, the warriors just took the merchants’ stuff. Repeatedly.

In 1306, Philip the Fair expelled the Jews from France and, in 1307, he annihilated the order of the Knights Templar. Philip was in debt to both groups and saw them as a “state within the state”.

His financial victims also included rich abbots and the Lombard merchants who had earlier made him extensive loans on the pledge of repayment from future taxation. Like the Jews, the Lombard bankers were expelled from France and their property expropriated.

Your remark about merchants not scamming their partners too badly only holds for merchants who are tied down or part of large, well-established merchant houses, I figure, making them something like stationary bandits. Roving-bandit-merchants probably existed too, professional scammers who sucked up much of the wealth in a community, moved on a few miles with their superior traveling skills, and repeated until they settled down and retired in another country.

Nah, most people’s natural caste is some kind of worker, like a peasant or a craftsman. Only a small percentage of those actually make good merchants. Most are pretty terrible at it.

Which is why a few [s]happy[/s] crafty merchants can (and did) easily end up owning a whole town through the combination of usury and alcohol sales.

An obvious remedy for this situation tends to present itself to the peasants, but certain ideological constructs consider that sort of thing to be poor sport.