No, it's actually not unique at all. If you look at the history of any civilization - in its broadest sense, as the change of human society from hunter-gatherer tribes to fixed settlements to development of cities to the modern urbanized society - you'll see that "archetypical businessman" existed pretty much since forever. In fact, if you remember the story of Abraham - the one from the Bible, the first Jew - his father was a businessman, namely the idol trader. There was no word "businessman" back then, but the concept of trade - which necessitates the surplus (you need something to trade) and follows from it (you need to do something with that surplus) existed in the history of every civilization and is widely covered in virtually every historical work, of course. If anything, the idea that we could ignore all the civilization history and go back to hunter-gatherer subsistence model is something that would be "a pretty unique take". It sounds good when we're sitting in our comfortable chairs, with bellies well filled and our other needs taken care of, and wax fashionably nostalgic about "simpler times". But somehow most people moved away from this paradise as soon as they were able to. I wonder why?
David Graeber and David Wengrow would like a word with you regarding your simplistic, monotonic version of human history.
"The Dawn of Everything" covers, with multiple redundant stories, why this concept of "the way human civilizations evolved" is wrong. That doesn't mean that none of them did, but absilutely not all of them. It certainly wasn't a straight path from hunter-gatherer to <what came next> more or less anywhere in the world.
I never claimed it was a straight uniform path. I only claimed whatever path there was, the concept of production surplus likely played a role, and the concept of trade too - and the tradesmen, aka "businessmen" - were somewhere nearby to facilitate it.
By force of what? Alien invaders from space? Random natural phenomena? Or some other humans, who somehow became more powerful and numerous? How did they manage to achieve that and why they chose to achieve that, instead of staying in their own paradise?
