It is impossible to separate the history of capitalism from colonialism and the European slave trade. They are co-extensive. Colonialism was the mechanism by which most of the world was roped into the Europe-centered capitalist economy. We need to face up to this fact.
We like to think that capitalism is about "markets". But markets existed for thousands of years before capitalism. The history of capitalism is defined not by markets but by appropriation.
This can be difficult for people in the global North to grasp. But for most of the global South, for the better part of 500 years, the encounter with capitalism was experienced as invasion, genocide, enslavement and dispossession.
The argument about markets vs appropriation is demonstrated brilliantly, by the way, by Patel & Moore in "A history of the world in seven cheap things", which I highly recommend: versobooks.com/books/3139-a-h…
And, as Varoufakis has argued, we can have markets without capitalism, for an economy that's organized around human well-being rather than around elite appropriation.
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