Colonization

Etymology

From Latin "colonia" (a settlement, farm), from "colonus" (farmer, settler), from "colere" (to cultivate, inhabit). The agricultural root reveals the founding fiction of much colonization: the framing of occupied land as empty ground to be "cultivated," which erased the people already living on it.

noun · /kol-uh-nih-ZAY-shun/
The act of establishing settlements and control in a territory, typically by an outside power.
What it names
The concrete process — settling, occupying, extracting — as distinct from the ideology that justifies it.
Example
The colonization of the coast began with a trading post and ended with a displaced nation.
Related idea
Colonization is the process of settling and controlling a territory; colonialism is the system of belief and policy that justifies and sustains it — one is the act, the other the doctrine behind it.
noun · /kol-uh-nih-ZAY-shun/
In biology and medicine, the establishment and spread of a species or microbe in a new host or habitat.
What it names
organisms taking hold in a new environment
Example
Bacterial colonization of an infant’s gut begins within hours of birth.
Related idea
Successful colonization usually depends on adaptation — the newcomer must already fit, or quickly come to fit, its new surroundings.