Portugal’s imperial role masks a web of supranational commercial interests shaping African labor exploitation

Evidence

Fifteenth-century “Portugal,” the singularly ambitious historical agent one encounters in countless scholarly studies, is a metaphor. It is, as we have already seen, largely a convenience, an appropriately deceptive categorical referent to what in actuality was a mixture of political and economic forces, both national and supranational in origins. The term “Portugal,” while symbolizing a nation, has as well obscured these forces and their significance for what was a little nation of less than one million people. Moreover, Portugal was to play a critical role in exploiting the transfer of African labor to the New World. Consequently, for those concerned with the slave trade and its ultimate significance for Black people, a better understanding of the Portuguese nation is imperative. This is so, as I shall argue, because the same but not identical interests and dynamics that slowly formed Portugal into “an important pawn on the chessboard of European history,” were also implicated in the transformation of African labor into capital. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 521

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that nation-state labels like ‘Portugal’ obscure the actual supranational coalitions that drive capital accumulation.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier deconstruction of ‘England’ and to Hobsbawm-style nation-as-convenience historiography.