[...] Financiers wanted a way to access the potentially unlimited western gains they read about. Like the forty-niners who chased easy, transformative wealth, speculators were looking to get their hands on yields that weren’t yoked to the magnitude of the investment, all without having to do any actual work. Here again is the real impersonal demanding force that built the West—not hunger for bread but hunger for increased profits. Of course they could buy businesses, or invest in founding their own firms the way the Associates themselves had, but ownership was so restrictive. Converted to productive capital, money ceased to be liquid; it was tied up in machinery and other concrete assets. To make the best use of the opportunities to finance settlement in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century—in California in particular, but also throughout the colonized world—capital needed a middle road between a bonded loan and a partnership, an instrument with the tradable liquidity of the former and the speculative upside of the latter. The answer was the joint-stock corporation.