Asettler is a person who has immigrated to an area and established a permanent residence there.
A settler who migrates to an area previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited may be described as a pioneer.
Settlers are generally thought of as people who travel to discover new land. Many times in history, it has not been like that. Most of the time in history, settlers are people who travel to a land that already belongs to someone else, forcing them out, and claiming the land as their own.
Settlers are generally from a sedentary culture, as opposed to nomadic peoples who may move settlements seasonally, within traditional territories. Settlement sometimes relies on dispossession of already established populations within the contested area, and can be a very violent process.[1] Sometimes settlers are backed by governments or large countries. Settlements can prevent native people from continuing their work.[2]
One can witness how settlers very often occupied land previously residents to long-established peoples, designated as Indigenous (also called "natives", "Aborigines" or, in the Americas, "Indians").
The process by which Indigenous territories are settled by foreign peoples is usually called settler colonialism.[3] It relies upon a process of often violent dispossession.[1]
In the figurative usage, a "person who goes first or does something first" also applies to the American English use of "pioneer" to refer to a settler – a person who has migrated to a less occupied area and established permanent residence there, often to colonize the area; as first recorded in English in 1605.[4] In United States history it refers to Europeans who were part of settling new lands on Indigenous territories.
In this usage, pioneers are usually among the first to an area, whereas settlers can arrive after first settlement and join others in the process of human settlement.[citation needed] This correlates with the work of military pioneers who were tasked with construction of camps before the main body of troops would arrive at the designated campsite.
InImperial Russia, the government invited Russians or foreign nationals to settle in sparsely populated lands.[5] These settlers were called "colonists".[citation needed] See, e.g., articles Slavo-Serbia, Volga German, Volhynia, Russians in Kazakhstan.
Although settlers in the early modern era frequently made use of sea routes—significant waves of settlement could also use long overland routes, such as the Great Trek by the Boer-Afrikaners in South Africa, or the Oregon Trail in the United States.[citation needed]
Anthropologists record tribal displacement of native settlers who drive another tribe from the lands it held, such as the settlement of lands in the area now called Carmel-by-the-Sea, California where Ohlone peoples settled in areas previously inhabited by the Esselen tribe (Bainbridge, 1977).[6]
In Canada, the term settler is currently used to describe "the non-Indigenous peoples living in Canada who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority," asserting that settler colonialism is an ongoing phenomenon. The usage is controversial to some.[7][8][9]
In the Middle East, there are a number of references to various squatter and specific policies referred as "settler". Among those:[citation needed]
The reasons for the emigration of settlers vary, but often they include the following factors and incentives: the desire to start a new and better life in a foreign land, personal financial hardship, social, cultural, ethnic, or religious persecution (e.g., the Pilgrims and Mormons), penal deportation (e.g. of convicted criminals from England to Australia), political oppression, and government incentive policies aimed at encouraging foreign settlement.[13][14][15]