To quote from above:

But all these depend on a beautiful, delicate, graceful web of public goods humanity has learned to weave, with great difficulty, over millennia. The true story of progress is about how all those fragile public goods mesh, interlock, intersect, sparking incandescent, explosive chain reactions of epiphany, spreading in waves across societies, which we’ll later call “revolutions”

Nicely put but wrong.

our capitalist system has existed for millenia. It was restricted only by access to cheap surplus energy. The weaving over those millenia was ultimately the acquistion of capital and still more capital. just like now

Here in Europe, wars ebbed to and fro over territories as men died on the whim of their rulers.

rulers who coveted the assets and resources of others and fought endlessly over them. (Religion was the usual excuse)

The fought for acquisition of capital, land mainly, because land produced wealth and allowed the building of fortress and supported armies with which to go out and grab more capital.

Much of this had burned itself out by the 18th/19th c, napoleon was the last gasp of it

Then the Americas opened up — -a whole new range of capital to be grabbed and exploited. American capitalism isn’t an American phenomenon, it’s European capitalism writ large.

Driven by the availability of cheap fuel and iron which forged the nation itself

The USA is being bought sold and fought over just as Europe was. Soon the fighting will break out in real terms as resources go into depletion