David Graeber's Debt, The First 5,000 Years ideas on this can be summarized that around 1500 or so, money gained autonomy from the leviathan. Where it once mattered that you could use money to get things and use things to get money, but when money is used only to get money, things go berserk.

The result was someone like Cortez could conquer Mexico, gathering all the gold there was to be had, even enslaving thousands to work in mines, murdering thousands more by working them to death, and still be completely broke. Cortez was capitalized at a rate point where he could never break even.