European capitalism emerged from particular national states, not an universal sequential order

Evidence

Hegel’s dialectic of Aufhebung, Marx’s dialectic of class struggle and the contradictions between the mode and relations of production, Darwin’s evolution of the species and Spencer’s survival of the fittest are all forged from the same metaphysical conventions. The declining European bourgeoisies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were not, for the most part, the lineal antecedents of those that appeared in the sixteenth century. The universality of capitalism is less a historical reality than a construct of this “language of error.” These “distant and separate class[es] of capitalists” were less the representatives of an immanent, rational, commercial order than extensions of particular historical dynamics and cultures. They were not the “germ” of a new order dialectically posited in an increasingly confining host—feudalism—but an opportunistic strata, willfully adaptive to the new conditions and possibilities offered by the times. Not only did different western European bourgeoisies appear in the sixteenth century, but these new bourgeoisie were implicated in structures, institutions, and organizations that were substantively undeveloped in the Middle Ages. … The city, the point of departure for the earlier bourgeoisies and their networks of long-distance trade and productive organization, proved to be incapable of sustaining the economic recovery of those bourgeoisies situated where the merchant town had reached its highest development: northern Italy, western Germany, the Netherlands, and the Baltic. The Absolutist State, under the hegemony of western European aristocracies, brought forth a new bourgeoisie. The territories of Castile (Spain), the He de France, the Home Counties and London (England), the expansionist and colonial ambitions and policies of their administrations, and the structures of their political economies organized for repression and exploitation, these constituted the basis of this bourgeois’ formation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 174

Categorization

• XREF: This attack on the teleological universal narrative of capitalist development is foundational and echoes the reader’s interest in understanding what distinguishes the Black radical tradition — it roots capitalism in racialized and national particularism rather than a neutral economic logic.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Robinson later show the Black radical tradition as resisting precisely this ‘universal’ capitalist narrative, and if so how does his periodization here link to the tradition’s rise and fall?