Settler colonialism in the context of "Generalplan Ost"

Colonization (British English: colonisation) is a process of establishing control over areas or peoples for foreign people to advance their trade, cultivation, exploitation and possibly settlement. Colonization functions through establishing a differentiation between the area and people of the colonized and colonizers, establishing metropoles, coloniality and possibly outright colonies. Colonization is commonly pursued and maintained by, but distinct from, imperialism, mercantilism, or colonialism. Conquest can take place without colonization, but a conquering process may often result in or from migration and colonizing. The term "colonization" is sometimes used synonymously with the word "settling", as with colonization in biology.

Settler colonialism is a type of colonization structured and enforced by the settlers directly, while their or their ancestors' metropolitan country (metropole) maintains a connection or control through the settler's activities. In settler colonization, a minority group rules either through the assimilation or oppression of the existing inhabitants, or by establishing itself as the demographic majority through driving away, displacing or outright killing the existing people, as well as through immigration and births of metropolitan as well as other settlers.

Colonialism is the practice of extending and maintaining political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a territory and its people by another people in pursuit of interests defined in an often distant metropole, who also claim superiority. While frequently an imperialist project, colonialism functions through differentiating between the targeted land and people, and that of the colonizers (a critical component of colonization). Rather than annexation, this typically culminates in organizing the colonized into colonies separate to the colonizers' metropole. Colonialism sometimes deepens by developing settler colonialism, whereby settlers from one or multiple colonizing metropoles occupy a territory with the intention of partially or completely supplanting the existing indigenous peoples, possibly amounting to genocide.

Colonialism monopolizes power by understanding conquered land and people to be inferior, based on beliefs of entitlement and superiority, justified with beliefs of having a civilizing mission to cultivate land and life, historically often rooted in the belief of a Christian mission. These beliefs and the actual colonization establish a so-called coloniality, which keeps the colonized socio-economically othered and subaltern through modern biopolitics of sexuality, gender, race, disability and class, among others, resulting in intersectional violence and discrimination.

During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and early 19th century. The Norse settled areas of the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short-term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by Europeans, after Christopher Columbus’s voyages, is more well-known. During this time, the European colonial empires of Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden began to explore and claim the Americas, its natural resources, and human capital, leading to the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and genocide of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the establishment of several settler colonial states.

The rapid rate at which some European nations grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 15th century because it had been preoccupied with internal wars and it was slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the Black Death. The Ottoman Empire's domination of trade routes to Asia prompted Western European monarchs to search for alternatives, resulting in the voyages of Christopher Columbus and his accidental arrival at the New World. With the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide the Earth in two, with Portugal having dominion over non-Christian lands in the world's eastern half, and Spain over those in the western half. Spanish claims essentially included all of the Americas; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas granted the eastern tip of South America to Portugal, where it established Brazil in the early 1500s, and the East Indies to Spain, where It established the Philippines. The city of Santo Domingo, in the current-day Dominican Republic, founded in 1496 by Columbus, is credited as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Americas.

Colonialism's emphasis on imperialism, land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural destruction frequently resulted in genocidal practices aimed at attacking Indigenous peoples and existing populations as a means to attain colonial goals. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.

States have practised colonialism during various periods in history, even during progressive eras such as the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, a period in the history of 17th- and 18th-century Europe which was marked by some progressive reforms, natural social hierarchies were reinforced. Europeans who were educated, white, and native-born were considered high-class, whereas less-educated, non-European people were considered low-class. These "natural" hierarchies were reinforced by progressives such as the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), a French mathematician, who believed that slaves were savages due to their lack of modern practices, despite the fact that he advocated the abolition of slavery. The colonization process usually starts by attacking the homes of its targets. Typically, the people who are subjected to colonizing practices are portrayed as lacking modernity, because they and the colonialists do not have the same level of education or technology.

Native Americans (also called American Indians, First Americans, or Indigenous Americans) are the Indigenous peoples of the United States, particularly of the lower 48 states and Alaska. They may also include any Americans whose origins lie in any of the indigenous peoples of North or South America. The United States Census Bureau publishes data about "American Indians and Alaska Natives", whom it defines as anyone "having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America ... and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment". The census does not, however, enumerate "Native Americans" as such, noting that the latter term can encompass a broader set of groups, e.g. Native Hawaiians, which it tabulates separately.

The European colonization of the Americas from 1492 resulted in a precipitous decline in the size of the Native American population because of newly introduced diseases, including weaponized diseases and biological warfare by colonizers, wars, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement. Numerous scholars have classified elements of the colonization process as comprising genocide against Native Americans. As part of a policy of settler colonialism, European settlers continued to wage war and perpetrated massacres against Native American peoples, removed them from their ancestral lands, and subjected them to one-sided government treaties and discriminatory government policies. Into the 20th century, these policies focused on forced assimilation.

The Plantation of Ulster (Irish: Plandáil Uladh; Ulster Scots: Plantin o Ulstèr) was the organised colonisation (plantation) of Ulster – a province of Ireland – by people from Great Britain during the reign of King James VI and I.

Small privately funded plantations by wealthy landowners began in 1606, while the official plantation began in 1609. Most of the land had been confiscated from the native Gaelic chiefs, several of whom had fled Ireland for mainland Europe in 1607 following the Nine Years' War against English rule. The official plantation comprised an estimated half a million acres (2,000 km) of arable land in counties Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Donegal, and Londonderry. Land in counties Antrim, Down, and Monaghan was privately colonised with the king's support.

Wine is an alcoholic drink made from fermented grape juice. It is produced and consumed in many regions around the world, in a wide variety of styles which are influenced by different varieties of grapes, growing environments, viticulture methods, and production techniques.

Wine has been produced for thousands of years, the earliest evidence dating from c. 6000 BCE in present-day Georgia. Its popularity spread around the Mediterranean during Classical antiquity, and was sustained in Western Europe by winemaking monks and a secular trade for general drinking. New World wine was established by settler colonies from the 16th century onwards, and the wine trade increased dramatically up to the latter half of the 19th century, when European vineyards were largely destroyed by the invasive pest phylloxera. After the Second World War, the wine market improved dramatically as winemakers focused on quality and marketing to cater for a more discerning audience, and wine remains a popular drink in much of the world.