Settlerism

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.