You make salient points as usual. Yet, in total I remain unconvinced. Capitalism was just begining to form in the 19th century and by no means represented the bulk of economic activity in any nation.
What does this world market represent in history? What historian has named such an institution? Keep in mind that factories and rgos are suppossed to be abstractions representing huge economic activity. ALL of this activity is then funneled into a fanciful world market.
This is just fuzzy thinking. "Capitalism" was already well established when Victoria starts (between 65 and 125 years old depending on your definition of the term), and even taking a narrow definition of it (ie. mechanized factory production for profit as in the classical marxist definition) it already accounted for the lions share of exports in England, Belgium and Switzerland, and was a significant and growing component in other advanced economies. But, in any case, its probably best to drop the loaded terms: whether the world market is realistic depends not on capitalism but rather on the degree to which global markets where integrated by trade.
By the early 1700s, global markets already existed, albeit imperfectly, for a host of high value items, eg. sugar, cotton textiles (mostly from India until the 1790s), tea, tobacco, silk, etc. The British economy, and to a lesser degree the Dutch and French economies, relied on the reexport trades in these products. Even this far back however, there where important long-range markets in bulk commodities, like grain and iron. On the eve of the American revolution, nearly 10% of American exports consisted of pig-iron and associated products (with another significant chunk being foodstuffs, mostly grain, exported to the Caribbean); Sweden and Russia exported massive amounts of iron to England and the Netherlands. And grain markets where very well developed: the low countries had depended on Baltic grain since the XV century, and late in the XVIII England became a substantial importer. And, of course, raw cotton was big export for the US and Brazil towards the end of this time-frame.
As the Victorian period began these trends only increased... by the mid XIX century Imports+Exports amounted to a large fraction of GDP in America and Western Europe, and goods could be exported and imported freely. By the 1840s, the chief activity of England was in exporting intermediate products and capital goods for continental factories and reimporting finished goods (e.g. cotton yarn replaced cotton cloth as the chief export, followed by machinery). By the mid 1870s, there where global markets for all commodities: i.e. the markets where sufficiently unified that after adjusting for transportation costs, the price of iron was the same everywhere. Moreover, other than tariffs there where few barriers to trade in the XIX century (and even these where modest compared to the 1930s or the XVIII century). To me this sounds like an integrated world market.
Was this a perfect market? No, freight costs and tariffs represented important barriers. But given the extraordinary degree of international trade in the period it seems asinine to insist that there was no world market. And besides, the game could easily incorporate a "freight cost" modifier on the price of exports/imports (driven by tech and infrastructure), and a stronger model for tariffs (like the ability to set different rates for different broad classes of goods e.g "foodstuffs", "consumption goods", "commodities" etc).
You don't need 10 billion local markets for this.
Most of this is from the work of Findlay and O'Rourke btw.
Highly recommended.
