Yes, the Romans practiced colonization quite profusely during the times of the Republic and Empire. They had outposts they called colonia (which is the origin of our own term, colony).

During the Republic, after conquering another rival town, they would then send their own citizens and grant them land there. The citizens would immediately become part of the local ruling gentry. This helped cut costs, as they would otherwise need to establish a standing army to garrison the town, and at the time the Romans only raised an army as needed, and even then usually only seasonally.

After the time of Marius (and his Marian Reforms), they increasingly used retired Roman legionnaries (who, if not already citizens would have been granted citizenship) to settle in conquered territories. This was during the late Republic, when Rome had by then essentially a standing army.

Also during the late Republic, the brothers Gracchi (Tiberius and Gaius) both attempted reforms to allow the vast horde of landless citizens in Rome land in conquered territories, but the reforms never fell through, owing to staunch (and often violent) opposition, mostly by the more conservative, landed elements of society.

More reading:

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1-11

Procopius De Aedeficiis 3.4.6-7

Also check out A.N Sherwin-White's The Roman Citizenship which can be found here

One of the issues with this question is that there seems to be a mistaken or vagueness to what exactly the concepts of colonialism or capitalism pertains to.

Colonialism, defined simply, refers to when one country is controlling another country directly. The country under control has limited or no political rights or autonomy, they're an administered territory. It should be noted that the colonizer typically needs to recognize that the other country is not naturally a part of their nation or state.

Capitalism is not simply a market economy. Capitalism, in conjunction with the market economy, requires a financier providing capital as the main means of economic transfer or growth. Effectively, all economic activity revolves around money. All economic value is sized up in terms of money. Compare this to a agrarian or feudal society were the main means of economic activity revolved around farming or military protection.

Colonialism began in the ancient world, the most famous colonizers being the Romans, long before capitalism existed. While in the ancient world these colonial ventures were indeed for economic benefits, it was mainly to find new slave populations or to find new areas for farming and natural resources.

The problem with a question like this is that both of these terms are very vague. European colonialism had multiple motivations, starting with easier access to India, plunder in the case of gold from the New World, and later on as the capitalist economy got going sourcing raw materials/slave labor to provide Sugar and Cotton. You could add to this Settler colonialism, but that also had very different sets of motivations: fleeing religious persecution in the case of the Puritans, cash crops in the case of the early south, and sending convict in the case of Australia.

Were any of these things fundamentally new in world history? Conquest itself is as old history, as is slavery. The Romans obviously practiced both of these things, as did the Arabs. The Arab conquests brought with them Arab settlers, and for many of the lands they conquered acculturation into Arab culture. Same with the Turkish conquest of Anatolia.

If you're talking about capitalism, different people will have different definitions, and it's not clear that there's some fundamental economic system that emerged in Europe in 1500 that had never existed before. There had been extensive trade going on over the silk rode for millennia. The purpose of the early explorers was to get to India so that they could buy goods there and sell them in Europe and avoid all the middlemen and costs of that come with shipping goods overland. There had also been sea trade routes in the Indian Ocean and in the Mediterranean going back millennia. The only thing the Portuguese did different there was to sail directly from Western Europe to India.

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In terms of industry, China and India had been centers of production for textiles, spices, pottery etc. since antiquity. That was the reason Europeans wanted to get there. No, they didn't have coal and consumer goods were much more luxury items, but then you're talking about the industrial revolution which is much more of a specific technological thing rather than an economic system.

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So the answer to this kind of claim in my opinion is not that it's true or false, but that it depends on two ideas which are very vaguely defined.