GROWTH BREAKS LOOSE

EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES
BRING EXPONENTIAL GROWTH
After about 1480

Capitalism* destabilizes the backwater that borders the Atlantic, 
with a speed that its relatively primitive states
cannot contain 

* Not a term of combat, but the only one that fits the search for profit with no other goal.

• Behind each vessel is a whole chain of production,

like that the trans-Saharan exchanges 
bring the African savannah 

The tempest by Bruegel the elder, 1568

Ship-building requires planks, sails, nails, ropes, tar, supplies, barrels like the one that has fallen into the sea. They in turn need warehouses, wagons, tools, donkeys, horses... 

Those chains of production have been developing since about the year 1000, especially around the Mediterranean. Growth in the rest of Europe has been gradual.

Now proximity to the Atlantic means that trade and production there expand with unprecedented speed.  

• Investing those revenues would be explosive,
so they are dispersed

Springtime by Pieter Breugel the younger, about 1600

In the background, a medieval castle.
  
The owner is either a noble by birth or a wealthy merchant who has bought land to join a caste he reveres.

Though nobility exempts him from taxes, his choice is not mercantile: economic growth has brought an inflation that diminishes the value of revenues from land, and he loses his status if he remains in trade.  

He can't invest his gains -- so he spends them.  

"The Renaissance:"

A cultural transformation that the new revenues bring.

  

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Next, 

Renaissance kings devour surplus