When the Earl of Cumberland and a group of merchants from the City of London secured a royal charter in 1600 to trade “to the East Indies … and parts of Asia and Africa”, they might have been surprised if someone had described what they were doing as “investing in emerging markets”.

But the East India Company was an early effort in channelling private capital to such markets and the charter's description of its members still applies to EM investors - they were known as "adventurers", which then, as now, had connotations of taking risk.