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16th century England wasn't even capitalist. It was mercantilist-- strong central control over a zero-sum economic system focusing primarily on lopsided international trade as the means of building wealth.
It was mercantilist-- strong central control over a zero-sum economic system
It became mercantilist when the English, French, and Spanish colonial empires began to abut one another, and state actors identified stateless trade as a threat to state sovereignty. But the original process of chartering ships for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade came out of the private financing system pioneered by the Dutch and rapidly adopted across Western Europe.
Capitalist expansion was what allowed the English piracy fleets to leapfrog the originally better-financed and better-equipped Spanish state navy. While the Aztec gold that Spain brought home devalued their currency and destroyed their economy, the Dutch/English/French system of reinvestment and economic expansion swelled their capital stock by continuously circulating the specie, commodities, and chattel slaves that would make Trans-Atlantic trade so lucrative.
Mercantilism was a step backwards, inhibiting economic growth in the colonies, that colonial powers at home deliberately imposed on those territories as a means of preventing colonial governments from getting rich enough to revolt. And the economic theories of Adam Smith were transgressive in large part because they embraced domestic industrialization and economic expansion as a form of political rebellion.