In the fifteenth century, Mediterranean trade reached out to China, the Levant and India. Slaves were central to that trade. They were, Cedric Robinson writes, “Tartar, Greek, Armenian, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Circassian, Slavonic, Cretan, Arab, African and occasionally Chinese”. But it was religion, and not slavery, that led to the first emergence of racial thinking. In Spain suspicion of the authenticity of the Christianity professed by the descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts introduced a fantastical discourse about the purity of blood – a discourse that has recognisable links to modern conceptions of race. And it is in Spain that the root of the English term ‘race’, which first entered the language in the 16th century, is to be found. The Italian term razza, used to describe breeds of dogs and horses, was adapted, as raza, to describe Jews and Muslims as fundamentally separate from Christians.

There was also a gendered dimension to the violence and appropriation that enabled the development of European colonialism, and then, later, capitalism. That violence included the witch-hunt – the public torture and execution of many thousands of women across Europe from the 15th through to the 18th century. As Silvia Federici has shown, the witch-hunt was not only used to police the bounds of authorised religion. It was also an organised attack on the autonomy of women that functioned to subordinate women to a new and patriarchal form of society in which the commons were steadily appropriated by elites.