" Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company. "

― Yanis Varoufakis , Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present