Genoese and Italian capitalists bankrolled the Portuguese slave-trading empire

Evidence

Without them and the complicity of part of the English aristocracy and of the Portuguese and English merchant classes, and, of course, the clerical nobility of Rome, it is doubtful that a Portuguese Empire would ever have come into existence. Without that empire, nothing would be as it is. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 538

Categorization

• QUESTION: Robinson makes a counterfactual claim (no Italian capital, no Portuguese Empire). Worth probing whether other historians converge on or contest this causal weight.