I tend to rankle when people compare the colonialism of the last few centuries with the pre-capitalist expansion and settlement of ancient societies. It seems like there's a lot of daylight between the English founding Jamestown and ancient Ionians founding Massalia or w/e.
But what do Hexbear's historians think? Is it fundamentally the same social phenomenon across time or is capitalist settler-colonialism its own unique thing?
It's not fundamentally the same phenomenon until the early modern era imo
What differentiates them, in your view? There's obviously less of a profit motive in pre-capitalist settlement, but would some form of the indigenous / settler dichotomy as we understand it still apply in how the newcomers and native people interacted with each other?
in short, systems of colonization under different modes of production are difficult to directly compare
You have to ask yourself if that isn't the case with any human migration. Unless you are literally the first Cro-Magnon in a part of France then someone displaced someone else for you to be there. It was also not a new world that was being explored, like Greeks knew Egyptians intimately for centuries by the time Naucratis popped up. That and many of these colonies didn't belong to anything resembling an empire or coherent state back home. Syracuse had a close relationship with the Peloponnese sure, but it was not an expansion of Korinthia. Hell it occurred during the Greek Dark Ages.
I recommend "1177; The Year Civilization Ended" as a good intro to the Late Bronze Age Collapse and how thoroughly interconnected much of the Bronze Age world was. We have evidence of people from the Hellas fleeing to Anatolia and the Levant, and vice-versa. These are not clear cut distinct peoples moving into a completely foreign place and dominating it. It could be extractive for sure, and easily lead to violence over resources, but it is not exactly comprable to the kind of planned displacement and domination of our modern Colonialism.
Personally I would put these colonies in a different category from Scandinavian ones. Mostly since those started explicitly as a means of creating a base for the slave trade. The relationship to the native population also sometimes hitting close to home. The Ostmen in Ireland had special privileges even once they became localized, eventually being left in their segregated housing in Dublin by the British. There had been claims of it being expulsion but modern scholarship disagrees. Point is Scandinavian colonialism was more comprable to modern versions than Phoenicians forming Carthage