Zoë Laidlaw – författare

This groundbreaking book challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, the British government ruled a more diverse empire than ever before, and the Colonial Office responded by cultivating strong personal links with governors and colonial officials through which influence, patronage and information could flow. By the 1830s the conviction that personal connections were the best way of exerting influence within the imperial sphere went well beyond the metropolitan government.This book challenges traditional notions of a radical revolution in government, identifying a more profound and general transition from a metropolitan reliance on gossip and personal information to the embrace of new statistical forms of knowledge. The analysis moves between London, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, encompassing both government insiders and those who struggled against colonial and imperial governments.

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.

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.