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?
I think the key here is modes of production. The forces of production in a slave society are not as developed as in a feudal society, and feudal productive forces are not as developed as those of capitalism. Settler colonialism definitely took place in the ancient world and definitely sucked but was not on the same level of suckiness as under capitalism because the settlers were limited by the productive forces. Medieval Christians would slaughter Jews and steal their shit, for example, but were unable to exterminate them without barbed wire, poison gas, trains, IBM’s computing technology, machine guns, etc.