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 everyday life, people either use it to either justify actually existing colonialism (Assyrians conquering the Levant justifies Israel stealing land from Palestinians because that's what people in that region of the world has always done) or to diminish victims of actually existing colonization (the Qing dynasty commited genocide against the Dzungar Khanate so we shouldn't feel bad when the Japanese empire commited genocide against Chinese people). Occasionally, both would be used at the same time (the Aztecs had a brutal empire, so they shouldn't bitch about getting owned by the Spanish).