ABSTRACT
The chapters collected in this first section demonstrate that many of the expanding polities of the ancient world relied on settler colonialism as a mode of domination. This part opens with the contribution of Mark W. Graham, which tracks the movement of Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans across the Near East and Mediterranean. Multiple sites of settler colonialism are identified here, and the picture is far from simple. As Graham reveals, the settler polities of the ancient world came in all shapes and sizes, and they were connected to central governments, and often each other, in complex ways. These are the contexts that provide us with so much of the modern language of imperialism, though it remains telling that no political qualification equivalent to ‘settler’ is straightforwardly detectable in Greek or Latin. That we do not speak of a ‘settler polis’ or a ‘settler colonia’ suggests, perhaps, that ancient settler colonialism often went without saying.
