I would consider ol Christo Colombo to be an early capitalist. His project in the Americas was explicitly one of resource and labor extraction for export to the metropole, I mean he literally started the slave trade and it doesn’t get more capitalists than literally buying and selling labor. Like you didnt have ‘capitalism’ but you did have emerging capitalists who already had a bourgeois view of the world. In fact I would say that it was the project of European conquest’s in the Americas that allowed these capitalists to come to dominate society as it was largely the source of their initial capital stock that allowed the for the consolidation of the capitalist social system in Europe. You can have ‘capitalists’ in a non capitalist society, they are just contained and limited by the structures of the society that they live in, just as we are socialists stuck in a capitalist society.

The operation of sailing ships necessarily tended to take a capitalist form. Not only were the ships expensive, necessitating partnership forms that presaged the joint stock company [Banaji, 2016], shipping was, in the precapitalist economies, the main instance of production by means of powered machines. The sailing ship used wind power to replace what would otherwise have required a large number of galley slaves. In this it shared one of the archetypal traits of capitalist industry—the replacement of human labor with powered devices. The anomaly of merchant capital existing in antiquity and the Middle Ages should be understood as arising from shipping being the first field to which such machines were applied. The profit of merchant capital should then be understood as a special early and precocious case of the production of relative surplus value.

By using sail-power shippers in, say, first-century Italy could convert grapes for wine into Egyptian corn for sale in Italy such that the labor that would go into growing the grapes, plus the labor of shipping, was less than the labor that would be required to grow the same amount of corn in Italy. To the extent that the corn imported from Alexandria entered into the subsistence of slaves exploited in Italy, the cheapening of corn would have decreased the fraction of time that slaves had to work to produce their subsistence, increasing the number of hours a week that yielded an income for the slave owners. A portion of this increased surplus was then appropriated by the sea captains and shippers as monetary profit.

-Paul Cockshott, How The World Works

It’s a difficult subject and there’s no right answer, because it depends on how you personally define things like “colony” and “settler”. It’s easier to keep it at a modern conception, but because capitalism has exited for only a sliver of time, these conceptions will often not match against an ancient/classical/medieval conception, and result in general anachronistic madness.

Here’s a couple of historical examples I can think of, note that these are not meant to be me epically owning you with facts and logic, I’m some asshole on the internet, what I think doesn’t matter, what does matter is what answers you come up to these things for yourself, I can’t really tell you what view you should hold, because I don’t think there’s a good case either way.

1. The greek colonies of the ancient and classical era. These settlers would all leave from a mother-city (which they called a megalopolis) and settle some other place along the coast. The entire coast of the Black Sea is dotted with ruins from such settlements, everything from modern Turkey, Georgia (where the myth of the Argonauts was placed), Urkraine and so on. Were these settler colonies?

2. The period of great migrations. The various flavours of goths, bulgarians and hungarians that came across the pontic steppe at various points after the collapse of the western roman empire. Most of them were escorted by a warhost, as this was an exodus of an entire people. Oftentimes the locals were none too happy with their new neighbours and repelled them if they could. Were they settlers? Did ancient Hungary did an Israel/Palestine on the native Pannonians?

3. The Rurikid conquest of Novgorod. A Norse invasion of modern day Novgorod coupled with an open invitation to all Norse people of coming over to this new kingdom of Novgorod, that eventually resulted in the many Russian Principalities, (including the Kievian one). The ruling families and settlers eventually adopted the ways of life, customs and religion of the natives, but on one hand, they had a long time to do so, and the Norse were very fond of taking slaves (the children of thralls were also thralls, thralls were traded for, the works). Were the Rurikids, the people that invaded native russians and then raided them for actual chattel slaves settler colonists?

Now as an aside on the First Crusade, not a lot of settling happened, mostly because serfdom did not allow it. Peasants were tied to their land and barons weren’t about to let people leave willy-nilly without then getting a say, in the end they’re losing a tax base. Christians that did remain in the crusader kingdoms were noting how a generation in, they all took native spouses and their kids speak arabic now. Settling if only limited by political factors did not happen in any notable scale.

Moving on to colonialism, this is a tricky one, because the main draw of modern era colonialism has been the vast extraction of raw materials in order to bring back home, turn into consumer goods and sell them off to the now growing middle class of people. All of this is exacerbated by a capitalist mode of production, aka “market imperatives”:

• competitive production
• profit maximization
• the compulsion to reinvest surpluses
• the relentless need to improve labour-productivity

All of this led to more expansion, ever cheaper slaves, ever more extraction and so on. However, before the enclodure movement in England had started, such a mode would not exist. Commerce was dominated by merchants, whose means of enrichment was very much different, as it was limited by the boating technology of the time: you could not carry a great weight of goods and you could not carry them for very long distances. Moreover there was no budding consumer economy to sell most things to. Peasants were mostly self-sufficient petty producers. Note that I didn’t say “commodity producers” because most of the things they made were for use value, not trade value (and commodities are created specifically for their trade value). This meant that merchants were “limited” to trading luxury goods (which cost a lot per tonnage) for the consuption of local elites which used non-economic means to extract wealth out of the peasantry (political, religious and military). In essence the merchants were doing endless arbitrage between local, isolated unconnected markets, and a lot of their rising profits were not a result of “market imperatives” but of commercial “innovations”:

• monopoly privileges
• superior shipping
• sophisticated commercial practices and instruments (financial institutions and arbitrage)
• elaborate commercial networks
• far-flung trading posts
• military might

Each and every one of these stifled one or more of the aforementioned “market imperatives”. In fact, merchants would resist the initial creation of more connected markets (things such as a national market) as their entire profits were predicated on there being separate markets and them owning monopoly rights to certain routes.

So if there were no settlers, no large scale economic extraction of wealth (there were extra-economic extractions of wealth, but that’s just feudalism for you) in order to enrich the motherland, then in what way were the crusader kingdoms settler-colonialist. In the same regard was something like the Aglabid conquest and ensuing settlement of Sicily also settler colonialist?

edit: i know this is structured like i’m trying to “just asking questions” / whatabout you into saying “no, the crusader states were not colonialism” but you can say “the economics don’t matter, these are all some form of setter and / or colonialism” or “these are their own thing but belay early experiments into colonialism” and i think those are fair positions to have, just that i can’t make that case for you, for what it’s worth i don’t think “this has nothing to do with settler colonialism actually” is the correct takeway from this dumb post i made, just that historically, things are fucky and there’s rarely 1 to 1 comparison to modern things

The most current understanding of the crusades is the context of the pilgrimage. This differs from the capitalist concept of colonialism and settler colonialism in that the crusades were not a expansion for the sake of acquisition of either sources of labor or resources for a metropole. Yes people made money and some people conquered land, but this was in a very different economic context and much more limited than that of commodity relations. The classical European view that most people still cling to of the nobles of Europe exporting their surplus sons in an attempt to conquer land to increase economic spheres of influence just doesn’t hold to modern data analysis. Additionally the crusades’ weren’t distinct projects that started and stopped but a continuous process that waxed and waned over centuries. Yes there were heightened periods of crusading in which powerful European figures led large expeditions around which historians have periodized “the crusades,” eg the First Crusade etc… But this periodization doesn’t reflect the lived reality pf people but rather a modern academic framework placed on the history to understand it. Their main “goal” was the control and maintenance of the holy sites in Palestine which had been closed to Christian pilgrims after the defeat of the Romans at Manzikert at the hands of the Seljuks, and the subsequent conquest of the levant by the self same seljuks who began massacring Christian pilgrims; something that they quickly realized was a bad idea because pilgrims are good money.

One of the striking things about the crusades, as alluded to above, was the fact that the main figures who ended up crusading were wealthy and important people who, to use a bourgeois framing, made no profit on the venture and most importantly seemed not concerned with it either, in fact the returnless expenditure on crusade could be said to have been the point, as it was a service to Christendom for the sake of ones soul. The overwhelming majority of people who “took up the cross” as it was termed, because again crusading is a modern historiological concept that was never used by medieval people, were just pilgrims who traveled to the holy sites and then left. In fact, for those nobles that did take up rulership in Outremer their inability to retain western Christian men at arms, as while there was a constant influx that ebbed and flowed over the centuries corresponding with the crusading fervor in Europe the overwhelming supermajority of these Europeans LEFT to return to Europe, was a serious problem that was probably a driving factor in the accommodation and assimilation with the Muslim neighbors, many of whom, after centuries, they ended up identifying with more than the srange pilgrims from the west. And this is another important thing to emphasize is that it was a bilateral relationship in which people and ideas, and yes conflict, went both ways.

Long story short it was a complex and interesting sociological phenomenon that bears only passing resemblance to anything like capitalist colonialism let alone settler colonialism.