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The Emergence of Capitalism in the Perspective of Global HistoryThis article examines the question of the nature and concrete beginnings of capitalism. The essential core of agricultural, craft, commercial and military technologies which make up the context for its European emergence derive from Asia, and were sometimes linked to market economies. Does this mean that capital was therefore at work, elsewhere than in Europe ? Wallerstein dates the capitalism of the modern world-system back to the emergence of European hegemony. Frank and Gills postulate capitalism’s pluri-millenial existence, whereas for Braudel, going beyond Marx and Weber, it does not really affirm itself before high-seas trading achieved its positions of monopoly and domination over state authorities. In order to focus the debate on the places and epochs of the birth of capitalism, Morel here proposes to distinguish between « active merchant capitalism », market systems, and capitalism. He therefore proposes a more complex model, based on the interaction between merchant logic and state or territorial logic, which eventually leads, in line with the approach of Arrighi or Mielants, from the diffuse capitalism of the merchants to the modern concentrated capitalism.