settlerism

Noun

settlerism (uncountable)

1. An ideology extolling the virtue of bettering oneself by becoming a settler in undeveloped lands.
   • This informal settlerism echoed some elements of a well-known English folk Utopianism: 'a vision, let us call it "Merrie England", in which squire, parson and people were locked together in an embrace of authority, deference and mutual dependency.'2011, James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939, →ISBN
   • Settlerism marked a significant change in the attitudes of people, especially the English, towards migration. Migration within the Anglophone world, particularly to America, was no longer perceived as a desperate act that lowered one's status, as was common in the colonial period. Rather it was a...2012, Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson, Donald M. MacRaild, Locating the English Diaspora, 1500-2010, →ISBN, page 71
2. The process of converting desolate lands into settlements.
3. (colloquial, derogatory, often) The replacement of native populations with nonnative populations.
4. (historical) Group identification among settlers (as opposed to indigenous people or imported slaves), coupled with an ideology of freedom and social participation that applies exclusively to members of that group.
   • Class contradictions in the U.S., in time, came to be defined largely in the context of race and settlerism.2004, Michael Zweig, What's Class Got to Do with It?, →ISBN, page 38
   • Those ideologies of nationalism with which the elites wage war against white settlerism emphasised military battles fought 'against' white settlerism and never 'for' an alternative vision that would displace the hated ideas that hedged around and sustained most areas of the contemporary systems of...2011, Abebe Zegeye, Maurice Vambe, Close to the Sources, →ISBN