Jeannette Graulau is associate professor of political science at Herbert H. Lehman College, The City University of New York.

"Jeannette Graulau shows how mining was an important locus of the emergence and evolution of economic and political institutions that have come to be understood as capitalist. Mining was not just a feudal backwater, but a dynamic sector in which bankers were able to organize corporations that eventually played a central role in the emergence of modern nation-states."—Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside  "A meticulous excavation of capitalist silver mining in feudal Europe. An original contribution to the study of early modern capitalism and the origins of the specie."—Robert Schaeffer, California Polytechnic State University