Taking that context, capitalism - at this bedrock definition 'private property for personal profit' - appears contingent only to a very limited degree. About as contingent, say, as farming, or the development of the state - also things which sprung up several places.
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I guess my caution is that a lot of modern theory about that comes from a time when it was assumed that the ancient world emphatically did not have institutions that looked like early modern capitalism. Your Polanyi/Weber/Marx, etc. But...
...we now know that many similar institutions did exist in the ancient world - this is the modernist/primitavist debate in the ancient economy, and it's fair to say the modernists have largely won. And I don't get the impression that the theories have been revised to reflect...
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...that their ancient basis - which esp. for Marx and Polanyi is quite important! - have functionally collapsed. In that context, I think it is possible to argue that early modern capitalism is just one form of a very common, largely non-contingent form of human organization.
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The thing is, even if we stipulate that you are right, that the refined definition of capitalism is still not unique to modernity (and well we might), I think that would still be distinct from saying that capitalism is every time a coin was exchanged for a good.
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