Zoë Laidlaw re-assesses British colonial activism and ‘the illuminating failure’ of the Aborigines Protection Society

Historian Zo€e Laidlaw’s impressive new monograph addresses imperial humanitarianism’s expansive reach from the very centre of the British empire using the archives of the prominent Quaker Dr Thomas Hodgkin, co-founder of the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) in 1837. Hodgkin rarely travelled; he was largely resident in London. Yet, as Laidlaw demonstrates, he was no mere armchair humanitarian, no Dickensian ‘telescopic philanthropist’.
Protecting the Empire’s Humanity aims to improve understandings of British activism through an analysis of metropolitan ‘imperial humanitarianism’ and its networks. In line with a wave of scholarship over the last decade, which has sought to historicise and add much-needed specificity to the term ‘humanitarianism’, Laidlaw seeks to ‘disentangle the sometimes contradictory ideas and practices’ that are too often held under the umbrella
term of humanitarianism (2). Laidlaw deftly examines the ‘limited, but illuminating’ influence on policies attributed to ‘imperial humanitarianism’ between 1820 and 1860 (2), a period of Britain’s peak imperial humanitarian ferment occurring amid the vast expansion of its empire and the violent colonisation of Indigenous lands in Africa, North America, the Pacific and Australasia.