History of capitalism
The history of capitalism has diverse and much debated roots, but fully-fledged capitalism is generally thought to have emerged in north-west Europe, especially in the Low Countries (mainly present-day Flanders and Netherlands) and Britain, in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Over the following centuries, capital has been accumulated by a variety of different methods, in a variety of scales, and associated with a great deal of variation in the concentration of economic power and wealth, and capitalism has gradually become the dominant economic system throughout the world. Much of the history of the past five hundred years is, therefore, concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms.