Protecting the Empire's Humanity

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).

• 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.

'Through the entwined histories of Thomas Hodgkin and the Aborigines' Protection Society, Zoë Laidlaw builds a set of new narratives about the tense and tender interdependence of imperial humanitarianism and indigenous sovereignty. Mapping a far-flung ecosystem of liberal reformers and their dynamic, often contradictory, social/political formations, this study materializes the network of transimperial mobilities that animated white settler ambition.' Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign