Nope, I don't mean "which country started colonialism" or anything, I mean when did people start to refer to European expansion overseas using the word 'colonialism'? I assume that it's some sort of intentional allusion to the colonies planted by the ancient Greeks and Romans, but that's just a guess on my part.
An extremely interesting book on this issue is 'Post Colonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital' by Vivek Chibber.
In short, the bourgeois revolutions of England (1660) and France (1789) created a new capitalist class, and allowed those under the yoke of feudalism to generate their own wealth.
This was then turned into a 'universalising drive' to plant capitalist systems (with varying degrees of success and similarity) in other countries (notably India, which the book focusses on a lot). This gave the capitalist classes in the UK and France more access to raw materials around the world.