system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
I should’ve been more explicit and appreciate your nudge to that note.

I’m adding this context because notions of race/ superiority were vital to colonization in the first place. Notions of superiority used to justify land theft and attempted genocide of Indigenous nations . Colonization was always intentional, and slaves were always treated as less than/kidnapped, etc, no?
gpt
I've been doing a lot of reading about how different colonizing European nations justified their conquests. One interesting thing I read is that the English used what's known as Lockean Labor theory as their justification. To put it shortly, they believed that ownership of land depended upon the "improvement" of the land, and that the indigenous peoples in eastern North America could not justify their use of land because they were not cultivating it. Note that this refers to a very specific sort of cultivation (namely fertilizing, plowing and tilling land and also animal husbandry). Many indigenous peoples were growing food at the time but not in such a way that the English saw it as "cultivation" in the European and near-eastern sense of the word.

Just something interesting I have been reading up on. Another cool anecdote is that the Spanish used a tool called "the Requirement" which was a an appropriation of a tactic that they learned from Muslim colonizers in Spain that basically justified conquest where local inhabitants would not submit themselves to the superiority of the Catholic god. Note that it required submission to, but not acceptance of, the Catholic god. Really, really, crazy stuff.