I would consider ol Christo Colombo to be an early capitalist. His project in the Americas was explicitly one of resource and labor extraction for export to the metropole, I mean he literally started the slave trade and it doesn't get more capitalists than literally buying and selling labor. Like you didnt have 'capitalism' but you did have emerging capitalists who already had a bourgeois view of the world. In fact I would say that it was the project of European conquest's in the Americas that allowed these capitalists to come to dominate society as it was largely the source of their initial capital stock that allowed the for the consolidation of the capitalist social system in Europe. You can have 'capitalists' in a non capitalist society, they are just contained and limited by the structures of the society that they live in, just as we are socialists stuck in a capitalist society.