I think part of it is that corporations hadn't really been invented yet. So for any venture too expensive for one person, you needed to gather backers... and th

I think part of it is that corporations hadn't really been invented yet. So for any venture too expensive for one person, you needed to gather backers... and they had to gather somewhere. Maybe we should think of this as the slime mold stage of capitalism, before real permanent multi-cellular entities got going.