I have complained about it before but I heard on of the guests from guerrilla history on the deprogram make this argument and it made me want to gouge my eyes out. This kind of trans historical argumentation is both stupid and unmarxist, just stop! Sorry I felt the need to vent.
These states were not imperialist and they weren't settler colonies. This framing doesn't make any fucking sense when transfered to a medieval context. Like the best you could say is that the Italian city states represented an early firm of merchant capital, but even then that is an incredibly complex phenomenon that has only a tenuous connection to modern capitalism. Calling these city states early capitalism is just a fancy way of saying "lol u hate capitalism yet you exchange good or service! Curious!"
Seriously just stop. I don't know why this set me off but it was like a week ago and I am still mad about it.
it's what happened in Crete under Venice but many others were seized as personal property of various italian/frankish lords, with an ambiguous relationship to the metropole & other latin authorities in greece. compare Negroponte or Naxos to Candia. direct rule from Venice was the exception, not the rule of the division of the empire.
really? i'd rather assumed they used their surpluses to fund their military expansion like the hospitallers, maybe sending money to the catholic church. any good books on them & the livonians?
the reconquista bleeds right into real-shit colonialism at the end and at least i think it's pretty sloppy to try and put it in the same bucket as the first crusade because participants used some of the same words. even in the reconquista itself the things most characteristic of colonialism, the expropriation, ethnic designation and deportation of groups is at the very end when Granada folded. the christians didn't do that for 200 or more years of reconquista (depending when you say the reconquista 'started'). when Portugal took Ceuta they already had rounded the Cape, when Spain took Melilla America had been discovered.