The Click of the Abacus is the personal blog of Brenton Kenkel, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.
The title comes from my favorite passage in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, in which Thomas Cromwell responds to Henry Percy’s claim that “Bankers have no armies”:
How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
