Invasion is a structure not an event. ~ Patrick Wolfe

Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that seeks to replace indigenous sovereignty with a new sovereign society of settlers. This form of colonialism was practiced by the Spanish Empire, the French Colonial Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Portuguese Empire, and the British Empire during the European colonization of the Americas and to a more limited extent during the colonisation of Africa. The United States, Canada, most Latin American countries, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were founded from former settler colonies.

Quotes

• To illustrate how dramatically populations can displace each other over time, the historian E.M. Kulischer once reminded his readers that in A.D. 900 Berlin had no Germans, Moscow had no Russians, Budapest had no Hungarians, Madrid was a Moorish settlement, and Constantinople had hardly any Turks. He added that the Normans had not yet settled in Great Britain and before the sixteenth century there were no Europeans living in North or South America, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa.
  • Neil Howe, Richard Jackson (2008) The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. p. 15

• This relative lack of external pressure, together with the rise of laissez-faire liberalism at home, caused many a commentator to argue that colonial acquisitions were unnecessary, being merely a set of “millstones” around the neck of the overburdened British taxpayer. Yet whatever the rhetoric of anti-imperialism within Britain, the fact was that the empire continued to grow, expanding (according to one calculation) at an average annual pace of about 100,000 square miles between 1815 and 1865. Some were strategical/commercial acquisitions, like Singapore, Aden, the Falkland Islands, Hong Kong, Lagos; others were the consequence of land-hungry white settlers, moving across the South African veldt, the Canadian prairies, and the Australian outback—whose expansion usually provoked a native resistance that often had to be suppressed by troops from Britain or British India. And even when formal annexations were resisted by a home government perturbed at this growing list of new responsibilities, the “informal influence” of an expanding British society was felt from Uruguay to the Levant and from the Congo to the Yangtze. Compared with the sporadic colonizing efforts of the French and the more localized internal colonization by the Americans and the Russians, the British as imperialists were in a class of their own for most of the nineteenth century.
  • Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (1987)

• Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia.
  • David B. MacDonald, “Canada's history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the United States, Australia and Canada”, Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 17, 2015, "Issue 4: Special issue on Canada and Colonial Genocide", (pub. online (11 Dec 2015).

• Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.
  • Patrick Wolfe, "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native," Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, December 2006, p. 388

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