Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance
Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

This book reveals the ways in which those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century empire sought to make colonization compatible with humanitarianism.

Alan Lester (Author), Fae Dussart (Author)

9781316635285, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2016

294 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.43 kg

'Then as now, humanitarianism often served the needs of its benefactors better than its receivers. Lester and Dussart's complex, nuanced, and sympathetic account does much to illuminate the process by which that happened.' Aidan Forth, Victorian Studies

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

1. Colonization and humanitarianism: histories, geographies and biographies
2. The genesis of humanitarian governance: George Arthur and the transition from amelioration to protection
3. Colonization and protection: an experiment orchestrated in London
4. Humane colonization in practice: the Port Phillip District Protectorate of Aborigines
5. The New Zealand Protectorate of Aborigines
6. Humanitarian governance in a settler empire.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1], General & world history [HBG]