They even supported poets in order to create fiction and propaganda about the amazing things and riches that were abroad. Making young people travel also relieved demographical pressure.
If you lost a ship by shipwreck, you lost it all, but it was very profitable if the ship returned. Like anything in life, the were "naturals" that will return and succeed, people that were really good at it for whatever reason.
>As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.
The former itself seems to have a few different but related uses, but generally it is often a matter of modeling.
The latter is generally that act of the intellect that draws out something from a whole. So it's kind of an opposite process, in a very loose sense. The concept "greenness" is abstracted from images (or phantasms, in classical parlance) of particulars we encounter through the senses. We never encounter "greenness" in the world as a thing, only things which are green.
Where risk is concerned, I would expect the intellect to seize on the concept through abstraction (2), but any modeling of risk would involve the use of (1).
The article misses the point. He's describing the beginnings of marine insurance. The goal was to make commerce routine and at fixed cost. Before this, shipping was a high-risk, high-return, low-volume enterprise. Marine insurance converted it, gradually, into a low-risk, low-return, high-volume enterprise. From silks and spices to bulk salted herring in casks.
This is how shipping changed from "ventures" to "boring, but profitable".
I expect someone to point out that opacity is natural given the sensitive nature of the subject. Consider how much commonly known history is made up of once dire secrets.
Then again, perhaps it's all out there. I guess a good place to start would be US, UK and French treasury reports on actuals. Maybe with python that becomes a more manageable task.
