How much of history is accidental?

[La Comédie Noire]

I've been reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and he was talking about how Hunter/gatherers chose farming for various reasons, sometimes as just a supplement to hunter gathering, and sometimes not even at all. Now that got me thinking how much of history is set in stone? Did Western Europe adopt an aggressive style of capitalism because of material conditions or are markets just how humans organize scarce resources? Would capitalism have developed as fast without colonialism? Would we have seen a more slow development like that of Germany and Japan?

Sorry if the question seems a little muddled, pretty tired from work.

[Blake's Baby]

Very important questions. Hard to give simple answers.

I don't think 'markets are how humans organise scarce resources'. They're one of doing it but not the only way. There's no real evidence for 'markets' in many parts of the world at many times in history; other systems such as gift-exchange and redistributive chiefdoms (where local leaders control the distribution of external goods) are very much a normal feature of other ways of organising an 'economy'.

I do think that the development of western capitalism was due to 'material factors' but these include previous historical developments; part of the reason for the development of capitalism in Europe was to do with maritime trade in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, partly to do with raw materials, partly to do with historical developments in the Roman Empire and the Church, and indeed the the relationship between the Christian and Islamic states. All of these (and other factors) determined the form that capitalism took as it developed in Europe.

Again, colonialism was certainly a factor in capitalist development, but capitalism began to develop before there were colonies. The first 'capitalist countries', England and the Netherlands, began to develop capitalism before the discovery of the Americas, say from the 1300s. Even earlier in the Italian and German city-states, arguably banking goes back to the 1200s.