Patrick Wyman, who received a PhD in history from the University of Southern California, is the host of the popular history podcast The Tides of History, which examines, for the most part, premodern societies and how their influences have echoed down to the modern period. Wyman has spent much of his career as a public historian making the premodern past relevant and accessible to popular audiences. His new book, The Verge, emanates from that same impulse: to write highly readable and engaging biographies that hook readers with compelling stories about historical figures whose lives demonstrate his central thesis. Here, Wyman argues that the forty-year period between 1490 and 1530 was a pivotal turning point in world history marked by the rise of nation states, global colonization, banking technologies, and the spread of ideas via the printing press. The chapters within serve as biographical microhistories that allow us to see how these developments began to reshape society dramatically. At its core, however, The Verge is a history of the origins of capitalism. In this respect, it shows the deep relevance of the Renaissance period to capitalism, which, as a set of relationships between capital, commodity, and corporations, is typically traced, at least among the lay public, to the time of the industrial revolution.

Each chapter covers nine (mostly famous) personas: Christopher Columbus, Isabella of Castile, Jakob Fugger, Götz von Berlichingen, Aldus Manutius, John Heritage, Martin Luther, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Charles V. One of the many strengths of Wyman's book is to show how the biographies of rarified politicians and intellectuals can convey the palpable cultural shifts that occurred within two generations in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Some of the most insightful chapters are of lesser-known figures. For those not familiar with Christopher Dyer's A Country Merchant (Oxford, 2012), John Heritage may be a more obscure figure whose biography is fuzzier than that of royalty or religious iconoclasts, but the chapter that features Heritage's everyday capitalism is perhaps Wyman's strongest, given that the tools and strategies Heritage used to grow his wool business transport us to the world of an ordinary merchant, closer to the experiences of everyday people rather than the high-stakes political gambles involving major capital investments in war or overseas voyages.

Wyman shows us here that he is as great a storyteller in print as he is through audio, and though his book aims for the lofty goal of explaining how the dominance of capitalism—through new technologies and the consolidation of state power—was seeded in this period, his engaging prose allows these figures to come to life in visceral ways. Each chapter begins with an evocative vignette that immediately places us at the scene and in the mind of the person. In his excellent analysis of soldier-for-hire Götz von Berlichingen, Wyman inserts the reader at the moment von Berlichingen's arm was severed in battle and then, throughout the rest of the chapter, explains how von Berlichingen was a kind of archetype of the many mercenaries who began to conform to new practices that allowed them to accrue considerable capital over long military careers and seemingly endless warfare in Europe. War, it seems, was good business for men such as von Berlichingen.

Wyman's overall argument hinges on an understanding of the boundaries that separate the early modern from both the medieval and modern periods. Perhaps because of Wyman's training as a historian of the medieval and late antique periods, his deep contextualization of these forty years suggests that they were the tip of a proverbial iceberg with flows and undercurrents originating much further back into the Middle Ages—i.e., that capital's reach had deeper roots. Wrapping up his summary of King Charles V's reign as emblematic of the period, Wyman concludes that “capital lives as the heart of this story” (342). In this exemplary book, Wyman shows us the possibilities of using biography to tell engaging stories about the rise of capitalism and its far-reaching consequences on societies, eschewing the easier option of facile or lurid portraits of famous men and women found in popular media. Wyman never underestimates the intelligence of his readers, and as a result, the book is incisive, vivid, and often devastating.