The other day, I was arguing with someone israel and Palestine, and they brought up the whole "everybody has done settler colonialism before" trope. While it's an idiotic argument even if true (directly contradicting their whole "rules based international order" sthick), it did get me wondering.
I've assumed up until now that settler colonialism is a phenomena unique to the capitalist phase of history, but how true is that exactly?
They're confusing migration (violent or otherwise) and imperial urban rule with settler displacement and the annihilationism that goes with it
Also the defining character of settler colonialism has been its use of industrialization and market building to shore up a racialized ideology and vice versa
That was rarely or never the case with the old empires which were agrarian tribute systems that usually relied on their subject peoples being semi autonomous to relive pressure on imperial bureaucracy, that's not to say there wasn't settlers, it simply means the ruling mode of production didn't always cater or center around them
For instance, if the Roman Empire had been settler colonialist in the capitalist sense of today, Greek wouldn't have remained the lingua franca of the eastern half of the empire, and every Roman emperor would've remained an Italian or "ethnic" Roman