The pressing question is: how did the cloudalists finance all this? The early industrialists funded their factories, steamships and canals with the blood and sweat of African slave labour and loot from American and South Asian lands and peoples. Later, the Edisons, the Westinghouses and the Fords used monies conjured from thin air by private bankers who morphed into Big Finance in the process. The cloudalists did something subtler and more impressive: they helped themselves to the rivers of cash that were being printed by the central banks of developed capitalist states.
