Anglo-Portuguese bourgeois alliance shaped how the Atlantic slave trade developed

Evidence

As C. R. Boxer would have it, these Portuguese “kings” were, of course, “half-English princes.” War had brought these two nobilities together. War had indeed been the very basis of their existence. War, finally, had so enlarged their political alliance until it achieved what could pass for historical proportions, surviving several centuries despite “temporary ruptures.” Regardless, in the fifteenth century—when the necessary conditions for the Atlantic slave trade were being laid down—the link between the emerging bourgeoisies resident in (but not always native to) the two countries provided the basis for a North Atlantic commerce and the mercantilisms that would dominate their economies for the next three hundred years. This would prove no small matter for the directions in which the slave trade would develop. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 527

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s interest in the causal origins of the slave trade economy, foundational to the Black radical tradition’s genesis. — connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766