« Asian settler colonisers: Hana Maruyama, ‘Asian Diasporas and US Settler Colonialism’, in Maddalena Marinari (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Migration Studies, OUP, 2026

Settler colonial studies revisited: Jay Lalonde, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Colonialism’, in Maddalena Marinari (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Migration Studies, OUP, 2026

15Apr26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a theory, policy, and practice in which settlers create new political orders on lands dispossessed from Indigenous peoples. Typically, an empire seeks to remove Indigenous inhabitants and replace them with settlers from the metropole in order to generate revenues from land sales, bolster sovereignty claims through occupation of territory, and, eventually, provide staples to help feed the metropole. In order to gain the land necessary for settler colonial projects, settlers need to remove Indigenous peoples: either through genocide, by restricting or removing Indigenous sovereignty and land base, or by conceptual erasure and forcible assimilation into the settler citizenry. While colonial settlement has existed since at least the beginnings of European colonization in the 15th century—and potentially much earlier—it has defined especially the 19th and early 20th centuries. British settler colonies (especially Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) have all enforced similar policies of settler colonial dispossession. After providing a summary of the emergence of settler colonial studies as a discipline and definitions of settler colonialism, this article focuses mainly on settler colonial policy in Canada and British settler colonies generally. It shows that colonial settlement created a settler society based on the redistribution of land dispossessed from Indigenous nations to settlers perceived as desirable, and shaped immigration policy to recruit large numbers of settlers from Europe, ideally able-bodied farmers. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between colonial settlement and migration. Topics include dispossession and displacement; doctrines of discovery and occupation; imperial competition over colonies; the Homestead Act and the Dominion Lands Act; terra nullius; whiteness and desirability; and the emergence of “white settler colonies,” “neo-Europes,” and the “Angloworld” in the 19th century.


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