European colonialism freed capital accumulation from Europe’s material limits

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. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’ and connects to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. — connects to: Colonialism created the conditions for modern capitalism’s emergence — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 251; Luxemburg traced capitalist limits into war, colonialism, and unfree labor — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 115; Colonialism and capitalism have been entangled since the sixteenth century — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 41
• ADDENDUM: The forced expulsion and migration of Genoese, Pisantine, and Jewish capitalists parallels the migration stories in my article on trees as infrastructure — displaced actors transplanting productive systems to new ground.