Italian city-states pioneered colonial methods later copied by Iberian and Dutch empires

Evidence

The Italian city states developed a colonial system in the Mediterranean, a system which was a precursor and a prototype for Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and even for Holland in the seventeenth. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1841

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the Mediterranean colonial system as the institutional template for Atlantic colonialism — key to the book’s origin story of racial capitalism.