Settler

A settler is a person who has migrated to an area and established a permanent residence there, often to colonize the area. Settlers are generally from a sedentary culture, as opposed to nomads who share and rotate their settlements with little or no concept of individual land ownership. Settlements are often built on land already claimed or owned by another group. Many times settlers are backed by governments or large countries.

Historical usage

One can witness how settlers very often occupied land previously home to long-established peoples, designated as indigenous (also called "natives", "Aborigines" or, in the Americas, "Indians"). In some cases (such as Australia), as colonialist mentalities and laws change, the legal ownership of some lands is contested by indigenous people, who either claim or seek restoration of traditional usage, land rights, native title and related forms of legal ownership or partial control.

The word "settler" was not originally usually used in relation to unfree labour immigrants, such as slaves (e.g. in the United States), indentured labourers (such as in Colonial America), or convicts (such as in British America, c. 1615–1775; Australia 1788-1868).

Settler (Asimov)

Settlers are fictional human colonists that replaced the earlier Spacer emigrants who were in dominance in the vague period between Isaac Asimov's Robot series near-future short stories (of the type collected in I, Robot) and novels.

Description

Emigrants from Earth establish colonies on fifty worlds, the first being Aurora, the last Solaria, and the Hall of the Worlds located on Melpomenia, the nineteenth. However, sociological forces possibly related to their sparse populations and dependence on robot labor lead to the collapse of most of these worlds; their dominance is replaced by new, upstart colonies known as Settler worlds in the Milky Way galaxy. Comporellon was the first colonized world of the Settlers. Unlike their Spacer predecessors, the Settlers detested robots, and so by the time of the Empire series, robotics is almost an unknown science.

In the novel The Robots of Dawn, Asimov reveals why the majority of Settlers came from the short-live Earth population, as opposed to Spacer worlds, which would have used humaniform robots in the process.

Settler (disambiguation)

A settler is a person who has migrated from the land of his or her birth, or who takes up residence on land and cultivates it, as opposed to a nomad.

Settler or settlers may also refer to:

See also