> While people displaced by a colony are obviously disadvantaged, the colony itself and its residents are not.

I think you may be confusing the pattern of colonization in British North America with colonization more generally; the pattern elsewhere was more often of subordination to an imported elite rather than displacement.

Good answer, but you’ve made me realise I made an even deeper error — I was thinking like Civilization: cities as the fundamental unit, not the productive capacity of the nearby land they control.