Carl J. Guarneri, ‘Mapping the Anglo-American Settler Empire’, Diplomatic History 35, 1 (2011).

In the nineteenth century, British imperial spokesmen routinely referred to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as “settler colonies,” where Britons migrated in large numbers, dominated indigenous peoples, and successfully transplanted European ways. The term distinguished these “white dominions” from colonial possessions like India, where a small cadre of British officials governed a vast non-European majority, and local cultures remained relatively intact. In recent decades, scholars from several disciplines have revisited the settler-society paradigm. Political scientists compare the dynamics of federal polities and legal regimes among British-origin settler societies. Anthropologists and postcolonial scholars take a critical approach to “settler colonialism” by examining the rhetoric and actions of European newcomers who pushed aside native peoples. Environmental historians trace the wholesale biological transfers that remade the New World temperate-zone ecologies into “Neo-Europes,” a term that was coined by Alfred Crosby in 1986