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“Profit” begins in the ancient past, with humanity’s earliest impacts on the environment. Mining, we learn, dates back more than a million years, to the first-known flint quarry, in Morocco. Early humans dug open-pit and subterranean mines, searching for red ocher, leading to the “earliest known demand for consumer goods.” The presence of human beings affected populations of large animals, introduced new species into ecosystems and altered the land with fire. Even thousands of years ago, the ingredients of capitalism, from the manipulation of resources to trade, consumption and competition, were already in place around the world. “Humans had carried fundamental elements of modern capitalism to the ends of the inhabitable earth,” Stoll writes.