Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism, 1830–1870, by Zoë Laidlaw

Abstract

Zoë Laidlaw’s first book, Colonial Connections: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (2006; rev. ante, cxxiii [2008], pp. 1,576–7) examined the processes of British imperial administration from the inside, in a globe-spanning, intensely archival, and pioneering fashion. This second monograph, while sharing the same concern with archives, networks, information, and the misunderstandings which shaped colonial government, turns to those who sought to influence the running of the empire from without. The book is really a methodological experiment. It is a study centred on a single, massive personal archive: that of Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker doctor and philanthropist. In 1837, Hodgkin co-founded the Aborigines’ Protection Society—for generations thereafter the most prominent metropolitan organisation which claimed to want to protect the indigenous peoples of the British empire against the depredations of governors and settlers—and remained until his death in 1866 one of its leading lights, as well as promoting a range of other imperial and para-imperial ‘humanitarian’ causes. Laidlaw’s approach is to follow the spokes of his archive (currently housed at the Wellcome Library in London) outwards, interrogating virtually all the imperial concerns, contacts and networks for which it supplies evidence. This is a novel strategy, at least for nineteenth-century imperial history. Hodgkin’s archive could hardly be better chosen as a starting point for the scheme, given the extraordinary reach and scope of his preoccupations. Not the least significant result of Laidlaw’s endeavours is to provide comfortably the most sophisticated and reflective history of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, in its early decades, which is now available. But the broader purpose of the book is to probe the wider tensions, ties, and contradictions within British imperial humanitarianism between the 1830s and the 1860s.