Bret Devereaux

*most of them, post c. 500 B.C. I think we might better define it as 'economies where capital is distributed by market mechanisms rather than political violence' - those being, as near I can tell, the only two options - but then, obviously, I have a preference for the former.

Your definition still, I think, begs a huge number of questions and elides a huge amount of historical contingency! Capitalism isn't coterminous or synonymous with the exchange of goods in a money economy.

I mean, does it? One of the standard definitions of capitalism is "a system based on private (read: not state) ownership of capital, operated for profit." For agrarian/post-agrarian societies, "have no capital" is not an option. So the question is "how is capital distributed."

It seems to me there are fundamentally three options: 1) privately owned and thus distributed by individual interactions (which we call 'markets' - seriously, that's all markets are), 2) state-owned and thus distributed through political power, or...

3) Collectively owned by the community. The last system has *never* been scaled up above very small group sizes, despite repeated attempts. The reasons for those issues have been studied exhaustively and don't bear repeating. I don't see a fourth potential distribution system.

There are, of course, hybrid systems - but the three core systems remain the basis of them; for large societies, that drops to just two. I think you can talk about *our current form* of capitalism as deeply contingent...

...but capitalism *generally* - private ownership, profit motives, market interactions, that's a system that springs up independently in multiple non-connected sophisticated cultures.

I'd say, honestly *most* of what has happened in the study of ancient economies in the past 30 years has been recognizing that private ownership was a bigger slice of a wide range of economies - even into the bronze age - than we used to think.