Matt argues that the steps that would lead to capitalism, in particular the empowerment of bourgeoisie, came out of as a ‘hammer to many nails’ solution to several independent political crisis, because the economic model, on a smaller scale and based mostly in trade, not industrial development, had already been developed and morally justified by the dutch. He argues that it likely would have come about even earlier if it hadn’t been for the crisis period, but the political crises themselves came out of wealth growth (and subsequent feelings of independence) seen by the German princes who were interacting with this model. Essentially, the thirty years war was an attempt to prevent the spread of political and economic power caused by what was already occuring, but the political crises itself proved that such conflict would be unending unless the large powers also adopted those economic methods to sustain the structural changes that they had made in responding to the crisis.

Idk if he would say it was ‘historically inevitable’, it’s just that it was likely ‘inevitable as of the Thirty Years War’ and the fact that the crises couldn’t get rid of it meant that it was here to stay. Hence the references to birth and midwifing, the fetus is already fully formed, it just has to survive the ‘first trauma’.

Edit: I also want to be clear that a) it has been at least half a year since I listened to this (though I have listened to it fully twice) so I could be very wrong here, and b) I don’t know enough about this period of history to really know who is correct or incorrect here.