With all these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory.

Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe termini for trade routes.[181] Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain.

Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove.
The first Punic War had a like commercial origin--rivalry for the trade of _Magna Graecia_ between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean.

Such wars result in expansion for the victor.
[Sidenote: Commerce.] Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of historical movement.

It both causes and stimulates great movements of peoples, yet it differs from these fundamentally in its relation to the land.