Capitalism was expanding before Marx as colonial extraction

Evidence

This is where the long history of colonialism’s entanglement with capitalism helps us move beyond the sound and fury of contemporary scandals and grasp the longer pattern of resource appropriation that gives shape to today’s developments. Long before Karl Marx identified it as a force in the world, capital was already expanding in the sixteenth century, in the period most commonly identified with historical colonialism and the emergence of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires. Capital was acquiring new territories from which to extract resources and new bodies from which to extract labor. Those close relations between colonialism and capitalism (indeed, between colonialism and modernity in general) are important to our story; they help us grasp what is distinctive about the current expansionary phase of capitalism. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 41

Categorization

• XREF: This reading of capitalism as continuous with sixteenth-century colonial resource appropriation maps directly against the attention-school’s more recent origins story; key divergence point for the rival-school essay. — connects to: Colonial capitalism already created a world labor market before globalization — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3873; Colonialism created the conditions for modern capitalism’s emergence — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 251; Capitalist expansion did not reduce colonized nations to Marx’s two-class bourgeois model — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 848 (+6 more)
• SEED: The claim that the ‘current expansionary phase’ of capitalism extracts data the way earlier phases extracted land and labor is the seed of a comparison piece on what changes when the appropriated resource shifts from bodies/land to data flows.

Broader Connections

• Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement. #corroborates (0.90) — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82
• Colonial capitalism already created a world labor market before globalization #corroborates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3873
• Slavery powered European merchant capitalism and American expansion #corroborates (0.85) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 19
• Marx held slavery as central to capitalism’s primitive accumulation #corroborates (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 568
• Colonialism created the conditions for modern capitalism’s emergence #corroborates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 251
• Capitalist expansion did not reduce colonized nations to Marx’s two-class bourgeois model #qualifies (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 848
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #expands (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434