If the opium wars dont shock you try this.
Once again, the state mattered: It imposed tariffs to prevent imports from India, whose thriving textiles industry—far more advanced than Britain’s—needed to be suppressed. It monopolized trade routes to and from Africa and the Americas, where slaves produced the cotton that got shipped to Glasgow, and Manchester produced the textiles that got shipped to Africa and the Americas.
Nowhere in Europe, Asia, or Africa could capital owners remake production as quickly or as dramatically as they did on the plantations of the New World. The Americas “unlocked the radical potential of urban capital to transform the countryside,” Marx writes, “and with it, the world economy.”
Cape Verde in 1460. Completely uninhabited and unclaimed, thrust a few hundred miles into the Atlantic, the islands of Cape Verde offered merchants, settlers, and financiers a different kind of distance than the one Engels routinely invokes. With essentially free arable land, isolation from competing social groups, and an absence of political scrutiny they could put enslaved laborers, bought and sold in Africa, to the most punishing forms of work producing sugar and cotton. Cape Verde would be the first of many such capitalist utopias, repeated on São Tomé, in the mining city of Potosí in the Andes, on Barbados, and elsewhere. Wherever land and labor could be stripped of any consideration other than profit and accumulation, capitalists were free to use both without interference from above or below.
Islands and headlands as the tactical pivot. Agriculture ( and mining ) as the strategic pivot. State capitalism as their prize. Marx and Engels agreed.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
". . . Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Why most of the tens of millions of victims of Marxist communism were from the peasantry in Russia, China, Africa, Cambodia and Korea.
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