Settler colony
Also called: Settler colonialism · Topic: Settler Colonialism: Native Peoples of America and Australia · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 6 "Displacing Indigenous Peoples"
Meaning
A settler colony is a colony where large numbers of Europeans came to live permanently. They took the land and pushed out the native peoples who already lived there. Examples are America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland. When these colonies became independent, they turned into 'states' run by the settlers' descendants, not by the native peoples. Profit drove this kind of colonisation, like all others. The difference is that here the settlers made the land their own home.
Example
The British set up a penal colony (a colony for convicts) at Sydney in Australia in 1788. Freed convicts were not allowed to return to Britain, so they took land for farming and drove the natives off it. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 90% of the native people died.
Don't confuse with
- Direct imperial rule: in British India, a trading company (the East India Company) became the ruler and collected taxes. Few Europeans settled there permanently.
- Semi-colony: in China, several foreign powers used its resources and weakened its independence, but none of them took over the government.