Re: Capitalism hasn't existed that much longer than 200 years
At this point, we get into the discussion of what capitalism really is. In the most basic sense, you give me that and I give you money and you take the money to whoever's got the thing you want, there's been a market economy for millennia. There has been very ancient money from 2000 B.C.E. and likely there was money before that. Other concepts that play into capitalism are much newer. Corporations which exist as a shared operation owned in part by many people, as opposed to the organized operations of some powerful people beholden to nobody, is maybe four to five centuries old. Organized stock exchanges are from the late 18th century C.E. Governmental regulations promoting competition are really new, having started around 1850 or so. Which of these four things are central to capitalism? Which ridiculously obvious things did I forget to mention? Everyone is going to have different ideas, so everyone will have different ages.
I think one thing we can point to that was necessary for what we call capitalism is the removal of a government-imposed monopoly or prohibition. This took several forms. In the middle ages, there were guilds who got their permission to restrict who could do what job from some government they viewed as worthy of dictating that. Later, there were laws about what people were allowed to spend money on and how much they could be paid, laws intentionally written to prevent people in lower castes from doing things. Then there were the colonial monopolies where someone got the rights to most of the economic activity in some chunk of the world in return for going there and claiming the rights to own that chunk for the monarch involved. Slavery and a ethnic caste system were similar in that people were born into a situation which the law did not permit them to leave. When this craze ended is a little tricky to estimate, as we still have some government-supported monopolies today, but I think that's a useful point to use when establishing when modern capitalism really became what we think about. At least that's my opinion on how we go about finding our answer.