Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement.

Evidence

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’ thesis, usefully re-rooted as colonial-conquest history rather than economic theory. — connects to: US conquest of the Sioux followed the classic stages of colonialism — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 480; Colonists survived by seizing what Indigenous peoples had already built. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 113; Colonial states engineered morality by harnessing affect in their agents. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 426 (+27 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82

Related

• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial power export freed capital accumulation from all economic and ethical laws (similarity 0.88)
• Overaccumulated wealth drove imperialism by enlisting an unprincipled surplus mob (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply (similarity 0.86)
• Slave-created colonial wealth financed British commercial and industrial growth (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism was expanding before Marx as colonial extraction (similarity 0.83)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production (similarity 0.83)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.82)
• Colonization from the fifteenth century constituted capitalism’s original accumulation. (similarity 0.82)
• The colonial export economy locked the freed colony into sugar and coffee production. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonialism created the conditions for modern capitalism’s emergence (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial capitalism arises from conquest and unfree labor, not free markets. (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism and capitalism have been entangled since the sixteenth century (similarity 0.80)
• European colonialism freed capital accumulation from Europe’s material limits (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on #expands (0.92)
• Colonists survived by seizing what Indigenous peoples had already built. #expands (0.85) — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 113
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance #expands (0.85)
• Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms #expands (0.78) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434