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.
I think the crusades are an important "stepping stone" in developing later western ideals and had a lot of influence on imperialist ideas and desires, but you're right, they absolutely aren't imperialism or settler colonies.
I would argue the West as a concept really started with the crusades. Back then, everything was packaged under "defending Christendom," but from the way they mistreated Christians from the east, cultivating in the sacking of Constantinople, it's quite clear they didn't actually care about Christendom in the sense of the global community of Christians but only a certain type of Christian.
Keep in mind we are talking about a material historical process that lasted hundreds of years and then effectively died out several hundred before the material advent or European empires, which in turn reinterpreted and repurposed the history of the crusades for its own ideological justification. If the crusades created the concept of a unified conception "west" it sure didn't keep Europeans from creating hundreds of political formations to better kill each other over the next thousand years.
They were at best used as an inspiration in a very anachronistic way. The one place you could say the medieval idea of crusade blended into the modern concept of colonization was through Spain and the reconquesta. But that movement was very different, and had many different material and ideological factors driving it, than the medieval crusades to the holy land.
Yeah, I don't mean in any sort of 1:1 sense, but an idealised (or anachronistic) view of the crusades was often used to justify later colonial efforts and to create distance between the west and the rest of the world. It was a process taking place over centuries, capitalism didn't emerge from nowhere, it came out of late feudal attitudes and ideas, and late feudal ideas were inspired by earlier feudal ideas. History is complex and multi-faceted, and historical events bleed into and cause each other. I would go so far as to say that if the crusades hadn't existed and Christian Europe had sought peace with the Muslim world instead, capitalist imperialism as we understand it likely wouldn't exist.