The Iberian colonizations were financed and enabled by Italian merchant capitalism

Evidence

With only the barest of exaggeration, then, it might be said that Columbus’s achievements of 1492—beginning with the extraordinary concessions he acquired from his royal partners in April of that year at Santa Fe, and ending with the arrival of the ships under his command in the West Indian islands in October—amounted to one more level on the extraordinary financial scaffold that Genoese and other Italian capitalist families had been constructing in the Iberian peninsula for nearly 300 years. When Columbus came to terms with Ferdinand and Isabella, the road had been paved for him by Genoese admirals who had served Portuguese and Spanish kings for centuries; by Genoese, Piacentine, and Florentine merchants who had assumed the primary financial risks in colonizing the Portuguese Azores and Madeiran islands, and Spain’s Canary Island group; by Italian factors and money lenders who had strung their capital from Algiers and Ceuta in north Africa, to Elmina and Luanda on the west coast of that continent, and east to the Moluccas and Nagasaki; and by an Italian bourgeoisie whose financial and technical character and business affairs had become totally assimilated to the interests of the Spanish and Portuguese states and their most adventurous aristocracies. Whether Columbus was the extraordinary seaman that Samuel Eliot Morison has persisted in making him, whether his obsessive personality and religious zeal were so compelling as to have cast a spell over Isabella and her religious advisers, are all of secondary significance to the single fact of his origins and the legacy to which he was heir as a Genoese. This was the structural means of his accomplishment: the two-centuries-long apogee of Genoese influence in Spain and Portugal. … Thus, when Columbus and the others with him (and those who followed) came face to face with the Arawaks, the Tainos, the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Quechuas, and all the other inhabitants of the western hemisphere, it was this complex mixture of feudal authority and privilege, comingled with the appetites of emergent merchant capitalism, national ambitions, and missionary compulsions that stood at their backs. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 552