This chapter asks what the Aborigines’ Protection Society and Thomas Hodgkin reveal to us about British humanitarianism and settler colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century. It also considers how, in the twenty-first century, we should read the chauvinism and paternalism of metropolitan advocates of indigenous rights, and how we can understand the importance, but limitations, of their interventions.

This chapter investigates two episodes in which humanitarian objectives clashed with liberal economic orthodoxy. The British India Society broke away from the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1839. It linked ‘Justice to India’ with ‘Prosperity to England’ and ‘Freedom’ to American slaves, but its supporters were divided over the first Opium War and its campaign was derailed by the decision to prioritize Corn Law repeal over Indian reform. The relationship between ‘free trade’ and ‘free labour’ was also a focus of the campaign waged by the West India Association, in which Dr Thomas Hodgkin was prominent, to maintain tariff protection for British West Indian sugar against that produced by slaves in Brazil and Cuba. The Association prioritized free colonial labour over free trade, even though a more ethical British stance would come at the expense of British workers. The chapter reveals tensions between London and the British provinces, and within liberal imperial policy, as well as contradictions within humanitarian circles.

Dr Thomas Hodgkin was a physician and medical researcher as well as a humanitarian campaigner. Hodgkin’s science was informed by his social conscience and his affiliation to the Society of Friends, while his philanthropy rested on the presentation of systematically organized and scientifically derived evidence. This chapter discusses Hodgkin’s medical research and career, and then his significant contribution to the emerging disciplines of ethnology and geography. Hodgkin and his peers within newly emerging scientific disciplines established and used scientific societies to not only stake disciplinary claims, but also promote political and humanitarian objects. Exploring the myriad overlaps in personnel, ideas and approach between the different areas and organizations with which Hodgkin was involved, this chapter addresses the underappreciated connection between science and humanitarian activity in mid-century London, and the impact of that relationship on our reading of indigenous protection.

The parlous situation of indigenous peoples in Southern Africa and New Zealand deteriorated even further in the 1850s and 1860s. The Aborigines’ Protection Society tried to promote indigenous rights in these regions to increasingly hostile and independent settler polities and to persuade the imperial government and metropolitan Britons of their continuing responsibilities to indigenous subjects. Ever more conscious of the gap between its programme of securing indigenous land and autonomy and colonial policies of (coercive) ‘amalgamation’, the society made little headway. Dr Thomas Hodgkin tried to mediate between indigenous leaders, missionaries and activists, settlers, and colonial and imperial governments during conflicts in Lesotho and New Zealand, focusing his efforts particularly on the powerful architect of ‘humane governance’, Governor Sir George Grey. These years, however, revealed the society as at odds with both metropolitan and colonial power brokers, patronizing towards its indigenous and missionary allies and impractical in its plans.