Also, the emergence of modern capitalism (Banks, publicly traded companies, insurance) is a phenomenon of the XVIIth, not the XVIth century. In the XVIth, the economy still worked mostly like it had in the late middle ages. Ergo, captialism appeared a century after protestantism.
Actually you had medieval insurences (at the point you had treaties on it, as On
Insurance and Merchants' Bets).
They were often named
securitas, as they were originally safe-conducts, evolved from trust of merchant goods, against a given sum, in order to guarant them being carried, up to (in the XIVth/XVth centuries) having individual distinction between ship owners and insurers.
It's at the point some companies specialized on such things, as Francesco di Prato's in Pisa.
As for publically traded companies, at least for what matter to stocks, it existed enough for that medieval exchanges (appearing in the XIVth/XVth from permanant market exchanges :
bourse is a medieval word, should it be remembered) could allow transmission of parts (more than stock parts than share parts). Toulousains
uchaus were freely sold (and were such often) with these parts representing no longer part of mills but part of mill society since the late XIVth century.
Again, I stress that's not an isolate exemple.
As for changers (in order to distinguish them from later banks, as for exemple, one couldn't buy a debt from someone else), they were basically the most important "men of the trade", before merchants. Trough several features (as
rechange, but not only) they were able to fund from peasantry investement (buying a new labor animal), urban investement (political) and eventually trade (which was by far one of the more risky business, than interests guaranteed by a commune or a prince)
I mean no offense, but I think you have a rather primitivist conception on late medieval economical/financial structures. Not that these were the same than what existed later in the XVI/XVIIth centuries (neither structurally or mentally), but there's a clear continuity and what you point as moderns structures simply pre-existed).
I concur with fi11222. Max Weber has been quite influential with this hypothesis, I think it has its merits, there may be some mutually strengthening effects, but it shouldn`t be exaggerated, either.
It's to be remembered, furthermore, that Weber wasn't an historian and made his religious-economical statement in a period where study of historical economy was at best poor. History, as any science, evolves; and one should be careful to not use XIXth century statements/early XXth as if they were the final word on a situation we know clearly better since.
Of course all of these areas were also at some point likely to go Protestant, but the point is, they didn't, and stayed capitalist. Hence my argument. Protestantism is a religious expression of capitalist society, but not the only possible one. Social institutions predate it. F**k, I sound like a Marxist, but it really is true this time.
That doesn't explain, if you allow me, why many non-capitalist (in the sense of clearly market driven regions) as Scotland or Hungary went Protestant without this capitalist base. Protestantism, as you said, is more of an social expression than social tutelage, but it's not (by far) a capitalist-based expression but rather a "catch-it-all" expression where traders, changers, peasants, nobility could find its own social salvation.
For exemple, French Protestantism expansion abided more
to political concerns than economicals (even if these existed of course, but weren't always that tied up to traders or changers, but to proximity with trade roads that are obvious ways of ideological transmission)