Columbus’s success depended on three centuries of Genoese capitalist infrastructure, not personal qualities

Evidence

The use of slave labor in the New World of the sixteenth century by the Spanish Crown (and soon after the Portuguese) and its merchant concessionaires was consequently a most natural step. Slave labor had been a basis for colonial trade in the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Indies; it was already the foundation of colonization in the Canaries, the Azores, and the Madeiran islands. At first, the relationship between capitalism, colonization, and slave labor had appeared almost coincidental. … As Italian capitalism matured, however, this emphasis on trade was to change for three reasons. Briefly, they were the expansion of the power of the Ottoman Turks in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century, the extension of sugar-cane cultivation from Asia Minor to Cyprus, Sicily, and the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores) at the end of that century, and the collaboration of Genoese capitalists with the ruling classes of Iberia. These events transformed the incidental relationship between capitalism and slave labor into the very foundation of New World enterprise. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Columbus was a product of Genoese bourgeois trade and manufacturing; Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556

Related

• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism (similarity 0.90)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.88)
• Columbus’s voyages were the financial project of Genoese merchant capital (similarity 0.87)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production (similarity 0.87)
• Sixteenth-century sugar plantations required enormous capital and labor investment. (similarity 0.87)
• Italian capitalist networks enabled the Portuguese Empire and its slave trade (similarity 0.85)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval Mediterranean slavery foreshadowed Atlantic colonial slavery (similarity 0.84)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.83)
• The Iberian colonizations were financed and enabled by Italian merchant capitalism (similarity 0.83)
• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on (similarity 0.82)
• Slave trading rescued the Mediterranean bourgeoisie from eclipse by northern merchants (similarity 0.82)
• Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• The Spanish Crown backed Columbus to gain capital independent of its aristocracy (similarity 0.82)
• Europe could not supply the labor force sugar production demanded (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism #corroborates (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556