Protecting the Empire's Humanity Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870 Critical Perspectives on Empire Series

Rooted in the extraordinary archive of Quaker physician and humanitarian activist, Dr Thomas Hodgkin, this book explores the efforts of the Aborigines' Protection Society to expose Britain's hypocrisy and imperial crimes in the mid-nineteenth century. Hodgkin's correspondents stretched from Liberia to Lesotho, New Zealand to Texas, Jamaica to Ontario, and Bombay to South Australia; they included scientists, philanthropists, missionaries, systematic colonizers, politicians and indigenous peoples themselves. Debating the best way to protect and advance indigenous rights in an era of burgeoning settler colonialism, they looked back to the lessons and limitations of anti-slavery, lamented the imperial government's disavowal of responsibility for settler colonies, and laid out elaborate (and patronizing) plans for indigenous 'civilization'. Protecting the Empire's Humanity reminds us of the complexity, contradictions and capacious nature of British colonialism and metropolitan 'humanitarianism', illuminating the broad canvas of empire through a distinctive set of British and Indigenous campaigners.

1. Introduction; Part I. Mapping Humanitarianism: 2. Indigenous protection at the humanitarian apogee; 3. Metropolitan contexts: Thomas Hodgkin, science and medicine; 4. Anti-Slavery, colonization and emigration: 'civilizing' West Africa; 5. Free trade versus free labour: British India and the West Indies; Part II. Humanitarianism and Settler Colonialism: 6. Making colonization civilizing: the Aborigines' Protection Society; 7. Dealing with the devil: systematic colonization in Australasia; 8. Conscripts of civilization: North American networks; 9. Betrayal in the borderlands: Lesotho and New Zealand; 10. Conclusion.

Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Colonial Connections 1815-45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (2005) and co-editor, with Alan Lester, of Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (2015).