@distel I feel like often in the US when we talk about colonialism we put a big emphasis on the British colonial model which was mixed settler colonialism with a heavy emphasis on extraction via trade (and the Atlantic slave trade to facilitate said extraction). And so we frame the basis of colonialism as being part of the age of exploration/sail which then fits in very neatly with the US conception of manifest destiny which is in part based on the concept of “right of discovery”

It wasn’t until I got to college that I had a professor actually talk about the history of Spanish & Portuguese colonialism, which was largely based on the techniques they perfected during Reconquista—where Christians, many of whom were of Iberian descent, justified the violent conquest of the Muslim states in the Iberian peninsula through the justification that Christians had always lived there and that fact made it a “kingdom of god” which they were entitled to

I am not an expert so I don’t know if theres a definitive argument for if Reconquista was a form of colonialism or merely a predecessor which set the patterns much of European colonialism later followed, but I definitely found thinking of it as being at least quite like colonialism helpful when it came to understanding its cascading effects throughout history