It is safe to say that entrepreneurship was born at a time when people invented natural exchange. Handicrafts, highly primitive technologies and community ways of life have led to the need to change one product to another. The most enterprising citizens quickly realized that by creating a deficit for a particular commodity, its value could be greatly increased, thus making it more liquid. That is when the world was differentiated between rich and poor.
Entrepreneurship developed together with humans. Of course, the modern image of a typical entrepreneur is very different from what it was, for example, during the formation of the state and the institution of private property. With the emergence of capitalism, the image of a business enterprising person gradually developed into what we are now used to understand as "businessman ".
The history of Russian entrepreneurship began with a great delay in relation to America and Europe, despite the fact that the profession of merchant appeared in the IX-XIII centuries. At that time, merchants were not only a profession, but also a certain social class. The "third class" - merchants (after the nobility and clergy) - was divided into three guilds. Based on the size of the capital. The occupation was determined by the class origin, not only by the desire to create their own business.
Basically, merchant activity was reduced to trade and resale. Everything was traded: raw materials, fur, food, timber. There were a lot of natural resources, the country was a big country, and the need to provide logistics has led to the emergence of shipowners and transport companies.
This was the end of private business in Russia. There were still moneylenders, but in Russia their activity was considered immoral at all times, and the excess of a certain interest rate by a moneylender was prosecuted by law. In Russia, it was almost impossible to become an entrepreneur from scratch.
Entrepreneurship originated in the times of Kievan Rus in the form of trade, as well as in the form of various trades - hunting and bortnikhestvo. Russian merchants can be called the first mass representatives of Russian entrepreneurship. Forestry, developing rural and urban crafts, wood and metalworking together with trade formed large areas of Russian entrepreneurship. Already in the XI century. in Russia was adopted the first document regulating entrepreneurial activity and relations between entrepreneurs - the code "Russian Pravda". It enshrined the principle and right of inviolability of property and provided for the possibility of bankruptcy. The Tatar-Mongolian yoke delayed the development of entrepreneurship in Russia for centuries. Until the XV-XVI centuries entrepreneurship was manifested mainly in the form of rural crafts. Then the trade in resin, wax, flax, hemp, leather and metal products, etc., flourished. In the 16th century, the Nizhny Novgorod Fair was born. Monastery colonies and Cossacks contributed greatly to the development of business in Russia. Since the XVI century in the Moscow state flourished commercial and industrial entrepreneurship, supported by the capital's merchants. Generations of entrepreneurs were born. The first of them is considered to be the Stroganov family, which gave birth to the largest merchants and industrialists in the period of the XVI-XX centuries.
At the same time when serfdom was abolished in Russia, the war between the slave-holding South and the capitalist North began in the USA. The South, where slavery and agrarian system of management were widespread, and the industrial North were separated into two separate economic regions. Entrepreneurs and the bulk of emigrants fleeing the worst financial conditions sought the North with one thought - to earn money. There were enough workers in the North, the demographic situation was stable and the standard of living was good. It is not surprising that enterprises of mechanical engineering, metalworking and light industry were concentrated in the North. The main labor force was numerous emigrants from other countries, who worked in factories, factories and other enterprises, receiving salaries. In the South, labor was free, slave labor, and as a consequence, inefficient. With a large amount of available land, there was a severe shortage of workers. The North was stronger economically and therefore won the civil war.
The embodiment of success and the American dream was "Uncle Sam" (Uncle Sam - a joking decipher of the abbreviation US (United States), which was stamped on the packages of meat). The real prototype of Uncle Sam's collective image was the meat merchant Samuel Wilson, who embodied the American idea of honesty, labor and patriotism. He began his independent life at the age of 14 without a cent in his pocket, and then became a thriving businessman. Over time, "Uncle Sam" has become synonymous with a hundred percent American and America itself as a symbol of life on the principle of self-reliance.