Columbus’s voyages were the financial project of Genoese merchant capital

Evidence

With only the barest of exaggeration, then, it might be said that Columbus’s achievements of 1492—beginning with the extraordinary concessions he acquired from his royal partners in April of that year at Santa Fe, and ending with the arrival of the ships under his command in the West Indian islands in October—amounted to one more level on the extraordinary financial scaffold that Genoese and other Italian capitalist families had been constructing in the Iberian peninsula for nearly 300 years. When Columbus came to terms with Ferdinand and Isabella, the road had been paved for him by Genoese admirals who had served Portuguese and Spanish kings for centuries; by Genoese, Piacentine, and Florentine merchants who had assumed the primary financial risks in colonizing the Portuguese Azores and Madeiran islands, and Spain’s Canary Island group; by Italian factors and money lenders who had strung their capital from Algiers and Ceuta in north Africa, to Elmina and Luanda on the west coast of that continent, and east to the Moluccas and Nagasaki; and by an Italian bourgeoisie whose financial and technical character and business affairs had become totally assimilated to the interests of the Spanish and Portuguese states and their most adventurous aristocracies. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 552

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the argument about merchant capital and slavery’s origins running through Robinson’s chapter on the slave trade; parallels Eric Williams’ work on capitalism’s slave foundations.