Examples may make this clearer: around 750 B.C., Greece was engaged in large-scale colonization efforts, planting daughter states in Italy and Spain, on islands around the Mediterranean, on the western coast of Ionia, and on the shores of the Black Sea. Yet historian often fail to use the word 'imperialism' to describe this era, in part because Greece gave its daughter states great freedom, in part because the efforts were primarily economic and not motivated by a lust for hegemony, and in part because the daughter states were not seen as socially inferior. In fact, at certain times, they seemed culturally superior - consider the birth of philosophy in Miletus.
By contrast, the Islamic empire of the Ottomans colonized in a more dominating manner. Muslim armies expanded Ottoman borders into the Balkans, not for economic advantage, but for sheer exercise of power. William Duiker writes:
Beginning in the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Turks had expanded from their base in the Anatolian Peninsula into the Balkans, southern Russia, and along the northern coast of Africa. Soon they controlled the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea.While there were, in fact, economic gains to be had by ruling some of these territories, the effort as a whole included taking regions which were not particularly profitable - and often taking and holding them at a significant price. The non-Islamic residents of southeastern Europe were seen, and treated, as something inferior.
It is worth noting that various regions under the Muslim control of the Ottomans sought their freedom and independence - sometimes successfully, sometimes not, always at a bloody cost, like the Greece independence war of 1830 - while the Greek colonies around 750 B.C. did not work hard to sever their ties with the motherland: a very different type of imperialism indeed.
