Italian merchant capital was indispensable to the birth of the Portuguese Empire

Evidence

It was in this way that Italian capitalists situated themselves to play a critical role in determining the pace, the character, and the structure of the early trans-Atlantic slave trade of the next century. 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

• XREF: Connects to the historical materialist account of mercantile capital origins; echoes the role of Italian financiers described in discussions of early modern state formation.