In a society that is resource-constrained, it has always been important to imagine ways in which to mobilize the people of that society into a deployable resource as a means of ensuring the survival and even thriving of such a society. In Buganda, for example, a big family was considered a sign of wealth. In fact, the Baganda have a special title given to the parents of twins and special ceremonies made at the birth of twins in order to encourage and bestow a special sense of pride, so that people within society can hope for twins. Because of the abundant land, beautiful weather, and also the risk of disease, a big family in Buganda meant access to human resources that could hunt, till the soil, and also herd livestock—tasks that were necessary for the prosperity of the family. But big numbers also made the society statistically more resilient, as it made families more immune to diseases like malaria and the flu. Even during the worst infections, bigger families were likely survived by more productive members than smaller families.
But the structure, like any other, was restricted by laws of scale. While men were the more productive providers in a family, they also made the family more prone to conflict, as they were naturally more expressive of their aggression than Baganda women. So, in situations where the father or eldest man in the family passed on, succession was highly contested, and the sharing of responsibility and power was a major cause of conflict. This is beside the typical day-to-day conflicts due to envy, jealousy, etc. A big part of how this was resolved was through a strong mother or mother figure within the family. Since Baganda men typically married many women (mostly to increase chances of having bigger families), the mothers in the home used what was mostly psychological manipulation through rumors, gossip, and other rituals to tame the wildness among the males in the family as a major way of allowing the family to grow. This is obviously a simplification, but it was this tactic of family strength that allowed the Baganda and most other traditions within Africa to persist in the Africa that we know of now.
But as scale has it, at some point in time, families grew enough to start interacting with other families and also aliens from cultures very distant from what one was familiar with. As René Girard argued in most of his work, man being mainly memetic, some of these practices were interchanged between these cultures. Some of the practices challenged core beliefs among families that had harmonized and kept those families together for long. Some new beliefs made the men aware of the manipulations that their mothers had used to keep them tamed. Other beliefs introduced entirely novel abstract thoughts that brought an entirely new form of existentialism into the mind of Africans. Some of these new thoughts included religion and the norms that came with them; others included political organization, central governance, and a new kind of competition for social power, especially over strangers.
With the broadening mind of the African family man, other challenges came along. These were mostly categorized well in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The modern man at the time had knowledge of, and sometimes access to, superior forms of violence, new and sometimes fatal diseases, and also technologies that promised a future of glory and abundance. With this, the man of that time also had to learn new ways of immunizing and curing himself of the new diseases, ways of acquiring or defending himself against the new means of violence, and the new skills needed to harvest the promise of the new technologies.
At some point, the society had outgrown the family structure. Centralized power mongers could recruit sons from families into their armies with stories and promises of glory or with threats of enemies. Some chiefs and other traditional rulers could trick the strong men of their societies into ambushes that led them to be trapped or hunted down to labor as slaves and property of other men in far-off societies.
In the foreign societies that were able to exploit the greed, stupidity, and insecurity of the power mongers in other societies, the people within those societies were freed from the hard labor required to keep the society alive. Consequently, most of these people dedicated their lives to exploration and mind expansion through the manipulation of symbols and other sigils. These societies would eventually invent mental structures that allowed them to formalize the way they ordered themselves, invent a myth called objectivity in order to coerce their communities to agree on rules of engagement, and mercilessly—and with a lot of cruelty—eradicate any form of decentralized power. They did this especially by killing those who disagreed with the established so-called objective truths, or those with superior spiritual talent who were able to cultivate the innate power of human attention. These societies would later discover mechanical thinking and invent machines that would eventually take on their burden of hard labor. This was a much-needed invention because many descendants of slaves were starting to wake out of the fear of their forefathers and were beginning to challenge their station as eternally condemned slaves. Because of this great awakening, slaves had become very high-risk property, and many of their owners were losing nights of sleep worrying whether the slaves would slit their throats and use their daughters on any given night.
The acceleration of the exploitation of mechanical thought is what would eventually require a new form of social order. Because even in the foreign lands of men that had owned men, they still structured their societies around families, their biggest invention being the ability to imagine hierarchies of families. At the bottom were families of so-called commoners, and at the top were families of so-called royals, with everything in between. This structure was mostly sustained by violence, deceptions, and superior storytelling. But with advances in mechanics, the requirements to acquire the skill to manipulate and innovate machines had a secondary side effect of disenchanting the masses from the stories that mystified and justified royalty. After a few experiments here and there, royalty was relegated to a symbolic gesture in most of these societies, and the practical, pragmatic need for skilled machinists became the highest virtue of human achievement. This skill was accessible to both royals and commoners almost equally, because it required the novel cultivation of thought and discipline through effort that neither group held a natural advantage in. Therefore, the relevant question was what kind of reward system was necessary to incentivize the continued growth of machine exploitation. That is eventually what gives birth to capital.
Today, capital is the most accepted way to organize labor. It is considered superior to other forms of coercion like violence (as in slavery), myth-making and storytelling (as in feudalism), and goodwill (as in communism). With capital, one man provides rewards upfront and assumes risk. They pay for the skill required to make machines do the work, and in return, their capital is expanded from the outputs of those machines. This gives the capitalist more upfront capital to do the investment somewhere else. And as you can imagine, the initial capital owners were already the royals in the social hierarchy.
As you can tell, if all circumstances are equal, capitalism will inevitably work to enrich the initial capital owner. Since an investment birthed by capital usually produces outputs that are consumed by the same laborer paid by the capitalist to produce that output, with the right amount of cleverness, leverage, and threat of violence, the initial capital owner can pay the laborer just enough to be able to afford the outputs of their capital investment, just so their capital can grow indefinitely.
But that trick is not a trick one can play forever. As laborers got more familiar with their skills, they realized that they could compete effectively with capital owners by establishing competitive investments where their skills and labor also gained from the output of the investment, therefore offering their skills and time not just as labor but also as initial capital. Making machine investments competitive actually opened the playground to innovation, where investments not only competed on how much capital could be converted into an output, but also in differences in skill. Labourers attempted to beat bigger capital pockets by creating new, more efficient ways of generating a similar or superior output than capital-heavy businesses, sometimes taking those capital-heavy businesses entirely out of the market.
The capitalist wasn’t sleeping either; he was not about to forfeit his station in the social hierarchy to mere skilled laborers. This is when capitalists experimented with collaborative frameworks like cartels, syndicates, violently enforced monopolies, and other capital-protective measures that prevented skilled laborers—who did not have similar access to violence—from effectively competing with or disrupting the initial capital owners. But as you can imagine, violence, like any other arena, is also not immune to competition, so the capitalist instead moved the competition from machining to violence: the strongest owned the business. This significantly derailed the machining movement, as more effort was put into the ability to exercise violence than in the ability to produce genuinely useful outputs, since the market rewarded the stronger over the productive.
Finally, a British witchdoctor named Isaac Newton started the movement that would later become what we today know as Finance. He achieved this through a brilliant paradox at the Royal Mint: by ruthlessly standardizing the physical coin to make it mathematically perfect and universally trusted, he inadvertently made the physical coin unnecessary. Once people completely trusted the standardized measure of wealth, they could leave the metal in a vault and trade paper promises instead. This was magic at its highest, removing capital allocation from any predictable physical system into a speculative practice that made the persuasion of the promise—not the skill, or labor, or access to investment, or even the superiority of output—the most valued part of any investment. A man who had never made a shoe in his life was able to mobilize significant capital if he could dream up a story that would persuade a good number of people to bet on whether his promise of a shoe that walks on water was feasible. And as you’ve already guessed, this witchcraft from Newton took the world back to a social order that is inherently organized around storytelling.
So, with superiority in the art of storytelling and promise engineering, the British were able to make their way to Africa, conquer the Baganda, and modify Buganda and other African societies into structures that are indistinguishable from the British social structure. But perhaps their greatest contribution to Buganda was the entire alteration of the internal compass within the Muganda’s mind to always look up to the British as the way. The British convinced the Muganda that he was inferior, and that he shouldn’t waste his inferior mental capacity cultivating an original future for himself; it was enough to look up to him (the British) for the way. This is called colonization, and to date, it is the most successful form of social conquest known to man.
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