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?
In my experience it's almost always to try to justify modern colonialism. I'm sure lots of academics and theorists make legitimate comparisons, but in the wild I've mostly encountered it in the context of people saying "People have always done this so we're not doing anything wrong".