The Week That Was
When your roommate leaves you an inordinate amount of gin for the weekend, you will make good decisions. You will slice up some lemons and limes (not pictured) using those amazing knife skills you picked up watching Masterchef Australia [quick aside: Masterchef Australia is better than any other cooking show on TV]. You then pull the armchair to the weirdest part of the living room where it’s placement makes no aesthetic sense whatsoever. You realise you’ve left your phone in the other room. Three sips of gin in, your limbs are too languid to make the ten-foot trip to fetch the phone. So you don’t even attempt to make ‘fetch’ happen. And for the first time, in a long time, you’re revel in the utter perfection that is boredom.
The Week That Is
Exactly a week later, a few hours aside, I’ve traded the gin in for ginger iced tea. Instead of enjoying the luxury of boredom I’m over-caffeinated, jittery, and hysterical. I’m looking out of the my window at all the happy people taking advantage of the beach weather while I try to answer the question: “What lead to the the emergence of capitalism?”
Twenty pages in, and I still don’t have an answer.
riddledom 
I have found Gertrude Himmelfarb’s ‘The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age’ to be an excellent (but elliptical) point of departure.