inadvertently naturalize more recent phenomena and histories and amplify their power and their hold on the present.  
The Spanish and Portuguese empires were based on classic 'primitive accumulation', theft and expropriation of people, labour and resources, and especially of indigenous American and African societies. The Spanish were more successful in disrupting and colonizing core States in the New World than the Portuguese were in most of Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, together with their numerous contemporary European city-States and burgeoning empires, codified slavery and plantation capitalism as the core of the international capitalist economy, instituted the first stock exchange, and cultivated insurance industries and other modern banking practices. Throughout the expanding global capitalist system, Africanity and especially blackness were consolidated as the basis of racial chattel slave status in both Dutch and other imperial realms. This remained true and even intensified during the combined British and French imperial periods, which saw the extremes of the transatlantic chattel slave system. Later in this combined period, with partial and self-interested abolition under way in the Atlantic to make way for the more economically efficient exploitative system of colonialism, chattel slavery was still expanding under European proxies into eastern and some northern and north-eastern parts of the African continent. After a brief and devastating period of expanded racial/chattel slavery throughout the nineteenth century, the so-called 'scramble for Africa' laid the groundwork for colonization at the turn of the century, and for subsequent 'scrambles' for southwest Asia (at Sèvres) and the rest of hitherto uncolonized Asia.