settlerism

English

Etymology

settler +‎ -ism

Noun

settlerism (uncountable)

1. An ideology extolling the virtue of bettering oneself by becoming a settler in an undeveloped new country.
   • 2011, James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939, →ISBN:

     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.'

   • 2012, Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson, Donald M. MacRaild, Locating the English Diaspora, 1500-2010, →ISBN, page 71:

     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 hopeful act, a more positive move than simply escaping hardship, which raised one's status.

   • 2012, Julie McIntyre, First Vintage: Wine in colonial New South Wales, →ISBN:

     This, joined with Enlightenment philosophies about progress and prosperity, led to a rise in formal settlerism (where governments encouraged migration to colonies) and informal settlerism (individuals encouraging family and friends to join them in the colonies) along with a new desire by people of the middling and lower classes to transform these new countries into homelands.

   • 2014, Tom Brooking, Richard Seddon: King of God's Own, →ISBN:

     The notions of 'recolonisation', or growing New Zealand's economy through massively increased dependence on the British market, and 'settlerism', or the ideology of settling that accompanied the massive demographic and economic growth of the Anglophone world in the nineteenth century, provide frameworks for understanding how the two strands interconnected and overlapped.

2. 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.
   • 2004, Michael Zweig, What's Class Got to Do with It?, →ISBN, page 38:

     Class contradictions in the U.S., in time, came to be defined largely in the context of race and settlerism.

   • 2011, Abebe Zegeye, Maurice Vambe, Close to the Sources, →ISBN:

     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 oppression.

   • 2011, Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, →ISBN, page 234:

     These public intellectuals sought to reassemble the old commitments to empire, freedom, and permanent peace, but in ways that fundamentally altered if not discarded settlerism. Promoting economic independence and republican freedom no longer provided the rationales for expansion or international power.

   • 2016, Richard M. Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, Robert C. Lieberman, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, →ISBN, page 80:

     The positive side of settlerism was embrication of individual social and economic autonomy, creative self-realization through work, and egalitarian political membership in the American conception of freedom. However, settlerism also had a dark side that excluded those who were not deemed eligible to participate in this egalitarian democracy and used state authority to remove them from the frontier.