The year is 1427, and it is a warm spring day in Florence, Italy. An excited merchant, the head of his rapidly growing import and export business, holds in his hand the crisp paper guaranteeing that he will be paid for his goods once they have been safely received by his buyer in Genoa, just two hundred kilometres away. That paper the merchant holds in his hands over half a century ago is a letter of credit, and it helped unleash global trade.
Fast forward nearly six hundred years, and we find another merchant, sitting in her office in a high rise office in London, having just sold a shipping container's worth of aerospace components to a buyer on the other side of the world. She, too, is holding that same piece of paper, a letter of credit, virtually unchanged in over half a millennium.
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