Italian capitalist networks enabled the Portuguese Empire and its slave trade

Evidence

The use of slave labor in the New World of the sixteenth century by the Spanish Crown (and soon after the Portuguese) and its merchant concessionaires was consequently a most natural step. Slave labor had been a basis for colonial trade in the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Indies; it was already the foundation of colonization in the Canaries, the Azores, and the Madeiran islands. At first, the relationship between capitalism, colonization, and slave labor had appeared almost coincidental. … As Italian capitalism matured, however, this emphasis on trade was to change for three reasons. Briefly, they were the expansion of the power of the Ottoman Turks in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century, the extension of sugar-cane cultivation from Asia Minor to Cyprus, Sicily, and the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores) at the end of that century, and the collaboration of Genoese capitalists with the ruling classes of Iberia. These events transformed the incidental relationship between capitalism and slave labor into the very foundation of New World enterprise. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Slave trading rescued the Mediterranean bourgeoisie from eclipse by northern merchants; The nation “Portugal” masks a mix of supranational capitalist forces; Italian merchant capital more than politics drove Portugal’s slave-trade role (+6 more)

Related

• Slave trading rescued the Mediterranean bourgeoisie from eclipse by northern merchants (similarity 0.88)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism (similarity 0.88)
• Italian merchant capital was indispensable to the birth of the Portuguese Empire (similarity 0.86)
• Columbus’s success depended on three centuries of Genoese capitalist infrastructure, not personal qualities (similarity 0.85)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.85)
• Genoese and Italian capitalists bankrolled the Portuguese slave-trading empire (similarity 0.84)
• Venice organized the first capitalistic commerce in human beings (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Mediterranean slavery foreshadowed Atlantic colonial slavery (similarity 0.83)
• The nation “Portugal” masks a mix of supranational capitalist forces (similarity 0.83)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production (similarity 0.83)
• Italian merchant capitalism preceded and colonized the Iberian economies (similarity 0.82)
• Sixteenth-century sugar plantations required enormous capital and labor investment. (similarity 0.81)
• Pious and commercial motives fused in the Portuguese imperial venture (similarity 0.81)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves (similarity 0.81)
• Italian colonial systems in the Mediterranean foreshadowed Iberian and Dutch empires (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism #expands (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556
• Italian colonial systems in the Mediterranean foreshadowed Iberian and Dutch empires #expands (0.50)