ABSTRACT
The rise of the capitalist world system resulted from a set of more or less fortuitous historical conditions. Almost all of the great pre-capitalist civilizations, such as the Roman Empire, the Arabic Empire, the Mughal Empire, and the Chinese dynasties, were centralized redistributive empires. In the medieval era, the European economy relied upon traditional forms of renewable energy resources, such as wood, water, wind, and animal power. In nineteenth-century global capitalism rested upon British hegemonic power. The conquest of India provided the rising British hegemony with huge demographic and financial resources, when British consolidated its colonial rule in India. Coal provided the material foundation for the expansion of the global capitalist economy in the nineteenth century. The industrial working classes in the West and the indigenous elites in the non-western world became the social foundations of the twentieth-century 'anti-systemic movements': the social democratic movements, the national liberation movements, and the communist movements.
