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and so you now have classes or groups of people
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who have interests rather different from
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those of the most primitive polis you could imagine.
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Some scholars early on in the century,
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moved by Marxist theories,
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suggested that you had a capitalist class growing up,
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there's just no evidence of that;it's just wrong.
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My guess is that
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the earliest traders of any scope were probably noblemen
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who also had land and estates back home,
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but who had the opportunity,the know-how,
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the connections to make it possible to make a lot of living in trade.