Why did colonialism happen "from" Europe?
One obvious thought is that in order to "do colonialism", you need to be powerful enough to dominate other cultures, and Europe got to a technological / military advantage first.
That is obviously part of the story: Many cultures couldn't have pulled of colonialism, even if they wanted to, because of technological limitations.
But it also can't be the whole story. For most of the last millennium, China has been much more powerful and technologically advanced than Europe. Europe was basically a backwater. There was a long period in which China could have conquered the world Europe-style, but didn't.
China has historically been largely inward-facing. It (not unreasonably) considered itself the center of the world, around which everything else revolved. They didn't see much to be gained by going out to the fringes of the universe to enforce their will on lesser peoples.
(Although, I note that I have a cached belief that China invaded Vietnam over and over, so they must have had some motivation for conquest.)
In fact, maybe the reason for European colonization, ironically, IS China.
Europe was already buying (via long and expensive trade routes), awesome stuff from China and India: silk, porcelain, spices.

So it was obvious, to Europeans, that there was good stuff to be got out in other parts of the world.
This wasn't obvious to China, because it wasn't TRUE for China. The best stuff in the world was Chinese, so the benefit of going out into the world to get stuff is nil.
Another possible reason: Europe had a balance of power system: a number of nation states, no one of which was strong enough to establish hegemony, because if one tried, all the other nation states would combine forces to oppose it.
This setup makes a multi-state world a stable equilibrium.
But, as Kissinger points out in _Diplomacy_, this is a somewhat rare condition of international relations. More typically, one nation will become powerful enough to establish an empire, and that empire is the international system.
So one reason why European-style colonization might have been attractive is that there were a bunch of states vying for power.
It is hard to get an edge on your rivals in Europe, but if you can acquire resources from territories outside of Europe, that will give you power at home?
Maybe if you'e Spain, beating France at war is hard, but beating the Aztecs at war is easy, and so that is the more tractable path for gaining predominance over France?
Where as, if you are China, you're not vying with anyone in your weight class. You don't have rivals that you need to best, and so you don't have a need to get resources to beat them.
This might tie in with my other question as well.

Maybe the reason European Colonialism was worse than that of other historical empires has something to do with European empires competing with EACH OTHER?

I'm not sure why this would make them more extractive though?

Do competitive pressures push you towards command economies instead of organic markets? Even if you're competing with your European rivals, is it better to extract resources than to just tax the cultures you conquer?
Oh!

I guess that the obvious reason is the tech difference. If the cultures you've colonized are below you on the tech tree such that almost none of the final products that they produce are valuable to you, you're better off just enslaving them and taking their resources.
Roman tech was close enough to the people that they conquered, that the conquered social / economic systems were still productive on Roman terms. Not much point in completely dismantling them.
Whereas the native social / economic systems in European colonies were not productive enough compared to European production, to be worth the trouble? Might as well scrap them and establish a command economy?

Is that right?

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