Europe’s expulsion of Jewish and Italian capitalists shifted the capital driving world system domination

Evidence

In freeing itself from Muslim colonization, Europe once again had a vigorous bourgeoisie and the state institutions to begin the construction of its own extra-European colonialism. From the fifteenth century on, that colonialism would encompass the lands of Asian, African, and New World peoples and engulf a substantial fraction of those peoples into the European traditions of slave labor and exploitation. Capitalists were, from this point on, no longer dependent upon the material restraints Europe presented for the primitive accumulation of capital. What Genoese, Pisantine, and Jewish capitalists accomplished for Portugal and Spain in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, on their expulsions from Iberia they transferred to northwestern Europe. Soon after, an English bourgeoisie succeeded those of Belgium and the Netherlands in the domination of the now-extensive world system. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Frankfurt School work on capitalism’s primitive accumulation and to how capital transfers across expelled merchant communities, parallel to diasporic merchant networks discussed elsewhere.