1 Protection and The Ends of Colonial Governance

1 Protection and the Ends of
Colonial Governance
Introduction
This book explores how the process of protecting indigenous people’s
rights around the British Empire was dependent upon their reform as
governable colonial subjects, including through punishment under the
law. The endpoints of this process remain visible today in indigenous
people’s over-representation in contemporary criminal justice systems
and the related afterlives of colonial subordination, but its origins lie in
unresolved debates within the nineteenth-century British settler world
about the perceived nature of indigenous people’s rights and responsi-
bilities as nominal members of an expanding empire. From the 1830s
onwards, imperial administrators, colonial officials, settler entrepre-
neurs, and the mixed assortment of humanitarians who closely observed
the progress of British colonisation all grappled with these questions:
what was the nature of indigenous people’s recognisable rights – rights to
legal equality, rights to land, rights to compensation for dispossession –
and what obligations did those rights incur upon them?
There has been considerable recent interest in the politics of humani-
tarianism that swayed the directions of British imperial policy during the
early to mid-nineteenth century, and in tracking how a post-abolitionist
commitment to indigenous justice rose and then fell with the mid-
century transition to settler self-government. One of the most influential
of recent works, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart’s Colonization and the
Origins of Humanitarian Governance, traces how the goal to produce a
humane British Empire was imagined and implemented between the
1820s and the 1860s as the key decades of almost unbridled colonial
growth.1 Their work sits within a wider body of scholarship that explores
the scope and the limits of humanitarian responses to the expansion of
empire, and the many ways in which those responses became translated
across the administrative and philanthropic circuits which connected the
1
Lester and Dussart, Colonization.
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2 Protection and the Ends of Colonial Governance
imperial metropole and colonial peripheries to each other.2 Concerns

about the possibilities of humane rule were voiced from within the
Colonial Office as well as from within Britain’s colonies in ways that
reflected a shared investment in the larger imperial polity and the future
of colonial security.3 But as other important recent scholarship explores,
such humanitarian aspirations were followed by a later-nineteenth-
century concept of colonial democracy in the self-governing settler colo-
nies from which indigenous people were increasingly excluded.4 These
historical enquiries into the unstable trajectories of nineteenth-century
indigenous policy around the British Empire have produced vital insights
into a mutable political world in which high principles of humane gov-
ernance became subsumed to the economic goals and administrative
limits of an ever-growing, racially hierarchised empire.5
However, there remains much scope for exploring how nineteenth-
century concerns to deliver indigenous rights accorded with the practical
processes of colonial state-building, particularly in tying humanitarian
obligations to the regulatory power of the law. This book traces how
the relationship between humanitarian obligation and legal regulation
evolved over the nineteenth century in governmental attempts to remake
indigenous people as meaningful subjects of the British Empire. Its
broader focus is on ‘protection’ as a wide-ranging program of legal
reform and on the interlaced purposes it held in its applications to
indigenous people: to extend to them equal rights as subjects under the
Crown’s dominion, to build the terms of their colonial citizenship, and to
manage their place within the settler state. In these purposes, the insti-
tutional framework of ‘Aboriginal protection’ accrued both specific and
general features, adapting an earlier program for the amelioration of
slavery and overlapping with other applications of protection policy in
the nineteenth-century British world.6 By the early twentieth century,
when Britain’s global power was starting to decline, protection poli-
cies had been through numerous iterations around the colonial world
and had come to represent something quite different from the defence
of rights.
2
For instance, Skinner and Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire’; Edmonds and
Johnston, eds., ‘Empire, Humanitarianism and Non-Violence’. On trans-imperial
patterns, see Kamissek and Kreienbaum, ‘An Imperial Cloud?’, 164–82.
3
See for instance Laidlaw, Colonial Connections; Lambert and Lester, eds., Colonial Lives.
4
Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights; Woollacott, Settler Society, Curthoys and
Mitchell, Taking Liberty.
5
On the relationship between humanitarianism and imperial growth see Skinner and
Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire’, 279–347.
6
Spence, ‘Ameliorating Empire’; Twomey, ‘Protecting Slaves and Aborigines’.
Introduction 3
The nineteenth-century history of Aboriginal protection has most

often been explored within the analytical frame of imperial humanitarian-
ism, as a Colonial Office initiative to check the impacts of violence and
dispossession in the settler colonies. It is orthodox to locate its humani-
tarian starting points in the anti-slavery campaigns which achieved aboli-
tion across the British Empire in 1833, and more specifically in the
objectives of the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines
(British Settlements) which released its final report in 1837. Scholars
have often noted that the imperial design of Aboriginal protection was
both short-lived and ambivalent, vacillating between indigenous advo-
cacy and coercion.7 But regarded through the filter of its humanitarian
intention, Britain’s scheme to ‘protect’ indigenous people has still
remained widely understood as a vehicle for extending ‘soft’ forms of
colonial power in the guise of moral suasion; much less often has it been
regarded as a vehicle for exerting the law’s surveillance over subjects-in-
the-making.8 Instead, the legal implications of protection policy as it was
applied to indigenous people have most often been associated with the
later statutory acts and government departments that oversaw the cen-
tralised management of indigenous lives in the British Commonwealth
during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
However, protection policies have a long and intriguing history as a
means of regulating colonial worlds and consolidating governmental
authority through the mechanism of law, as a growing body of scholar-
ship is now exploring.9 Through this wider lens, concerns to protect
indigenous rights during the 1830s reflected more than a humanitarian
preoccupation with moral reform of the Empire; just as importantly, they
reflected an imperial desire to improve governmental coherence within
an increasingly mobile Empire that had developed until this point in
uneven ways.10 The purpose of a dedicated policy of protection for
indigenous people – as for slaves before them and for indentured workers
7
Much of the scholarship on nineteenth-century Aboriginal protection has focused on the
Port Phillip protectorate and its aftermaths. Examples include Christie, Aborigines in
Colonial Victoria; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians; Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District;
Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson; Reed, ‘Rethinking William Thomas’; Clark and Heydon,
A Bend in the Yarra; Mitchell, ‘“Country Belonging to Me”’; McLisky, ‘“Due
Observance of Justice”’; Fels, ‘I Succeeded Once’; Standfield, ‘Settler Politics and
Indigenous Politics’ and ‘The Vacillating Manners and Sentiments’; Boucher and
Russell, eds., Settler Colonial Governance; Attwood, The Good Country.
8
Exceptions include Nettelbeck, ‘“A Halo of Protection”’; Dorsett, ‘Travelling Laws’;
Ford, ‘Protecting the Peace’.
9
Spence, ‘Ameliorating Empire’; Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 4; Benton,
Clulow and Attwood, eds., Protection and Empire; Twomey and Ellinghaus, ‘Protection’.
10
Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, particularly chapter 2.
who became the backbone of the Empire’s labour force after the abolition
of slavery – was not just to safeguard their rights as newly clarified British
subjects but also to bring the corrective influences of law and good
government to the furthest peripheries of the British Empire.
This corrective purpose of protection policy was embedded in its
correlative of ‘amelioration’, a philosophy of improvement directed
towards reforming both the condition of subject peoples and the insti-
tutional character of colonialism itself.11 The agendas of amelioration did
not originate with the British Empire, although they have been particu-
larly associated with Britain’s anti-slavery era.12 Lisa Ford notes that
amelioration efforts took on a stronger legal aspect in Britain’s anti-
slavery campaigns, directing the energy of law towards turning slaves
from ‘latent’ subjects into realised subjects who would be capable of ‘the
burdens of full British subjecthood’. But in this objective, she stresses,
amelioration was not just contained to bettering the condition of slaves;
as a legal project, it became integral to a larger process of imperial
‘reordering’ around the British Empire, working ‘to transform the legal
relationship among subjects, colonial states and the imperial centre’.13
It was with the entwined purposes of improving the indigenous
‘condition’ and improving colonial legal order that the key government
representatives of Aboriginal protection policy, Protectors of Aborigines,
were empowered as magistrates. Magisterial powers aligned Aboriginal
Protectors with earlier magisterial offices established for the protection of
other ‘vulnerable subjects’ in Britain’s colonies, and well before that in
older imperial settings.14 Protectors held a duty to secure for indigenous
people the protections of British law, but an equally important part of
their duty was to bring these would-be subjects more effectively within
the pale of law. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the process of
creating indigenous people’s amenability to the law involved a complex
mix of strategies, ranging from efforts of conciliation and assimilation to
measures of policing and incarceration. Indeed, the reformist impulse
of protective governance itself was often driven by a conviction that if
indigenous people could be made amenable to British law – whether
through persuasion or punishment – their protection as British subjects
would follow.
11
Innes and Burns, ‘Introduction’, 11.
12
On the longer imperial relationship between protection and amelioration, see Spence,
‘Ameliorating Empire’ and Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, Part II. On amelioration and
anti-slavery in the British Empire, see for instance Titus, Amelioration and Abolition of
Slavery.
13
Ford, ‘Anti-Slavery and the Reconstitution of Empire’, 71–82.
14
Benton and Ford, ‘Magistrates in Empire’, 10–18; Benton and Clulow, ‘Introduction’.
Introduction 5
It is important here to comment on this book’s scope. It does not claim

to be a history of indigenous rights as such, a project better explored by
others.15 Rather, it is a history of how a discourse of indigenous rights
safeguarded in law, the initial basis of Aboriginal protection policy,
became reconciled with coercive practices which worked over time to
build indigenous colonial subjecthood. In tracking this process, the book
examines how Aboriginal protection policy articulated with wider appli-
cations of protection policy in the British Empire, originally to organise
the treatment of slaves and then to monitor the conditions and mobility
of indentured labour forces and others. Within this broader domain, it
aims to draw out how the humanitarian objective of protection policy to
mitigate the misuse of colonial power carried with it a larger concern to
manage colonised peoples in an Empire where the demands of humane
governance and the rule of law jostled with colonial growth and mobility.
Like the connected imperial project of amelioration, protection policy
did not originate with the British Empire. But its patterns across Britain’s
colonies, with their points of commonality and difference, help to illu-
minate how and why later expressions of Aboriginal protection became
recast as a set of legally empowered institutions for indigenous manage-
ment, in which the rhetoric of civil rights had all but disappeared.16
These wider patterns in Britain’s nineteenth-century history of protec-
tion also help to highlight how the ‘pioneering violence’ of settler coloni-
alism shared structural equivalencies with the forms of violence that
underpinned the colonial labour market, as Tracey Banivanua Mar has
argued elsewhere.17 This book does not attempt a comprehensive survey
of the other protection offices established around the British Empire to
oversee colonial labour systems, which have received their own attention.
Rather, it considers them alongside Aboriginal protection as related
programs of colonial governance in order to trace protection’s scope
and limits as a widely applied project of reform, and to better understand
the relationship between the global and the local designs of Aboriginal
protection as its own varied project.
Protection in an imperial context implied the Crown’s authority to
impose checks on abusive or capricious colonial practices.18 In this
15
For recent transnational examples, see, for instance, Pulatano, ed., Indigenous Rights in
the Age of the UN Declaration; Richardson et al., eds., Indigenous Peoples and the Law;
Langton et al., eds., Settling with Indigenous People.
16
Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights.
17
Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue.
18
Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 4.
sense, Crown-appointed Protectors of Aborigines personified imperial

values of legal transparency and amelioration. But while the name of
their position was new, they did not forge an untrodden or solitary path.
Locally, they came in the wake of a mixed milieu of personnel, from
interpreters and government intermediaries to missionaries, magistrates
and police, who undertook similar work in the settler colonies. Around
the Empire, they were preceded by Protectors of Slaves and ‘Indians’,
and they were contemporaneous with Protectors of Immigrants (or
Immigration Agents) appointed in the post-abolition years to supervise
the burgeoning indentured labour system. From the 1870s onwards,
Protectors of Chinese were also appointed to administer Chinese labour-
ers and diasporic communities in the Straits Settlements, and the same
name applied to officials appointed in the 1850s in colonial Victoria to
manage the considerable Chinese presence on the goldfields. In late
colonial Queensland, these officials had an equivalent in the Inspectors
of Pacific Islanders who oversaw the contracts and working conditions of
people imported from the South Pacific to be the principal labour force
of the sugarcane industry.19 In effect, a policy of Aboriginal protection
was never simply introduced into the settler colonies as a humanitarian
intervention of the Colonial Office. Rather, it formed part of a wider
schema of governance that was forged and revised in the space between
metropolitan and local strategies for managing fluid colonial conditions.
The book’s focus on Aboriginal protection as a project of reform that
had its origins in both local and global practices centres most fully on the
Australian colonies because, from everywhere across the British settler
world, it was designed as having greatest relevance there. By extension,
it was also in the Australian setting that protection policies would have
the longest life, sustained in some institutional form or another from the
late 1830s to the late 1960s. In its well-known report of 1837, the Select
Committee on Aborigines argued that indigenous peoples in all British
settlements deserved the safeguards of law and civil rights, but it saw
especial urgency for establishing dedicated offices of Aboriginal protec-
tion in the Australian colonies. Relative to indigenous peoples elsewhere,
Australian Aboriginal peoples were distinctly subject to an imperial
assumption that their apparently ‘undeveloped’ civil life made them
particularly vulnerable to dispossession and destruction. And because
their land management practices did not activate a legal definition
of possession, according to international law in an imperial context,
British sovereignty was asserted without recourse to treaties, bringing
19
Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, chapter 5.
Introduction 7
them by default within the Crown’s presumed ‘allegiance’ as people

‘entitled’ to its protection.20
Although the imperial policy of Aboriginal protection had special
meaning for the Australian colonies, it was locally tempered in quite
different ways, and here it must be remembered that the Australian
colonies do not represent one colonial case but a rich trans-colonial
history of their own. While geographically and culturally connected, they
were founded at different moments under different philosophies and
conditions of colonisation. In 1835, when the Select Committee on
Aborigines sat for the first time, the vast continent of ‘New Holland’
comprised three colonies, with a fourth in development. The original
colony of New South Wales had been in existence for almost fifty years,
and the principles of its establishment on penal labour were quite
removed from the principles of free settlement on which Australia’s later
colonies were independently founded. New South Wales’s dependent
territories included the penal settlement of Moreton Bay to the north
(which became part of the colony of Queensland in 1859) and the
emergent pastoral settlement of Port Phillip to the south (which became
the colony of Victoria in 1851). New South Wales’s sitting governor in
1835, Richard Bourke, was a seasoned colonial administrator who had
brought from the Cape Colony a range of plans for indigenous people’s
‘civilisation’ and assimilation.21 Yet even when he arrived in 1831 as the
colony’s eighth governor, his predecessors had already tested a range of
protective measures, from colonial diplomacy to martial law, in efforts to
pacify unsettled race relations.
Across the ocean strip of the Bass Strait, the island colony of Van
Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) was still reliant in 1835 on the trans-
portation of convict labour, as it had been for over a generation. It
achieved independence from New South Wales a decade earlier and
was now just emerging from the impact of the most formidable frontier
wars in Australia’s colonial history. In contrast, the young colony of
Western Australia (initially the Swan River Colony) was only six years
old. The administration of the inaugural governor James Stirling was still
very limited in its scope and powers, and European settlement was still
clustered around a contained southern region. When the Select Com-
mittee on Aborigines first met, plans were still in formation to establish
the new colony of South Australia which would absorb the vast interior of
20
Select Committee on Aborigines report (1837), 83. On Britain’s justification of sovereignty
claims, see, for instance, Miller et al., Discovering Indigenous Lands. On Aboriginal land
management technologies, see Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth.
21
Laidlaw, ‘Richard Bourke’.
the continent. The South Australia Act (1834) was in place, but the arrival
of settlers was still more than a year away. The northern pastoral,
pearling and mining frontiers of Queensland, Western Australia and
South Australia had not yet entered the settler imagination; fortune
seekers would not begin to push their way into Aboriginal country in
these more inaccessible reaches of the continent until later in the nine-
teenth century. By the time Australia became a federated nation in 1901,
each of its colonies had been pursuing sometimes overlapping but often
divergent strategies of Aboriginal governance for many decades, in ways
that spoke to their own economic and demographic realities.
Beyond these differences, however, the premise that treaties offered an
appropriate approach to colonisation elsewhere but not in the Australian
colonies created a different model of protective governance there than in
other British settler sites. In New Zealand, the signing of the Treaty of
Waitangi in 1840 preceded the establishment of an Aboriginal protector-
ate which operated according to an official policy that Māori held propri-
etary rights in land and would (at least temporarily) continue to exercise
their own laws amongst themselves. The relative peace that followed the
treaty did not last, however, and questions of conflicted sovereignty
triggered a series of frontier wars in the mid-1840s that endured for
almost three decades.22 Treaties were also seen as a pathway to British
rule in the Cape Colony alongside other forms of government and
missionary diplomacy, although as in New Zealand, periods of peace
were interrupted by cycles of bitter warfare that erupted over decades.23
In Canada, a long history of diplomatic and military allegiance between
First Nations and European sovereigns again made treaties the preferred
avenue through which the Crown gained access to indigenous lands.
From this formal understanding of friendship and allegiance, a more
institutionalised model of protective governance later emerged that pre-
pared the ground for indigenous people’s containment to government
reserves and residential schools.24
Clearly, the Crown’s negotiation of treaties elsewhere did not clarify
shared understandings of sovereignty, resolve the future risk of warfare
or provide indigenous people with secure interests in land protected
from settlers’ future encroachments. But while treaty making was not
particularly successful in producing lasting peace or mutual diplomatic
22
Belich, The New Zealand Wars.
23
For instance, Mostert, Frontiers; Lester, Imperial Networks; Elbourne, Blood Ground;
Price, Making Empire.
24
For instance, Tobias, ‘Protection, Civilization, Assimilation; Haig-Brown and Nock,
eds., With Good Intentions; Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment.
Introduction 9
understanding, its notable absence as an approach to British sovereignty

claims in the Australian colonies had far-reaching effects. This absence
exacerbated interracial conflicts over land, and it bound the future of
Aboriginal protection to the concept that British guardianship comprised
its own compensation for dispossession. Although the imperial govern-
ment saw a better model of humane governance as necessary to the
future of colonisation across the Empire’s varied territories, it was in
Australia’s colonies that this idea was most strongly grounded in the
premise that the best means to protect indigenous people was to more
fully exercise the Crown’s assumed jurisdiction over them.
The history of Aboriginal protection opens onto the many ways in
which government objectives to administer a humane British Empire
became translated across time and space, as Lester and Dussart have
argued.25 At a local level, too, it tells a complex human story of colonial
relations because it brought together such a diverse range of actors:
governors and mid-level civil servants, magistrates and police, interpret-
ers and would-be missionaries, together with indigenous people them-
selves. Policies of protection, then, not only encompassed a range of
understandings about the making of colonial order but also prompted
encounters between different groups of people who often held quite
different agendas. The varied relationships and outcomes generated by
protection reflect its capacity the capacities of protection for localised
interpretation. But they also point to an unresolved set of questions
within the British Empire about how to account for the continuing place
of indigenous people within the settler colonial state following the pro-
cesses of their dispossession, and about how to reconcile humanitarian
idealism with more coercive strategies for securing colonial authority.
The second part of Chapter 1 takes up this story in the mid-1830s
when the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines recom-
mended protecting indigenous rights by improving the reach and influ-
ence of British law in unsettled colonial territories. This concern to
protect indigenous people through legal reach was aligned with older
understandings of protection as a mechanism for asserting imperial
jurisdiction in distant colonial settings. It also expanded upon an exist-
ing template of protection in the British Empire that already regulated
relations with other colonised peoples and that would continue to over-
see colonial labour and mobility for the remainder of the nineteenth
century. Whether ‘vulnerable subjects’ were slaves, indigenous people,
25
Lester and Dussart, ‘Trajectories of Protection’; Lester and Dussart, Colonization.
indentured labourers or ethnic diasporas, programs of protection over-

saw their obligations to colonial subjecthood as much as their rights as
British subjects.
The questions that loomed large for colonial reformers in the 1830s
about indigenous people’s rights and obligations as British subjects
opened onto other, trickier questions about how they might best be
introduced to British law and made genuinely amenable to it. Chapter 2
considers these debates in the context of different colonial proposals on
how to remake indigenous people as subjects of the Crown in more than
name. Not surprisingly, these proposals varied according to imperial
perceptions about the nature of existing indigenous law and sovereignty.
Some colonial commentators argued for a transitional model of protect-
ive governance that would include indigenous people as active political
agents and operate according to a hybrid code of laws. Others saw
protective governance as a process of subjecting indigenous people to
British law as early and fully as possible. Such arguments mirrored a
tension felt around the Empire between the practical toleration of indi-
genous laws and the desirability of bringing indigenous people to a more
uniform acceptance of British law.
By 1840, Crown-sanctioned departments of Aboriginal protection
were in place in the Antipodean jurisdictions where young British admin-
istrations were still being established: the Port Phillip District of New
South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and New Zealand.
The exception was Van Diemen’s Land, where the famed ‘conciliator’
George Augustus Robinson had already removed Aboriginal survivors of
the colony’s frontier wars to Flinders Island.26 While these departments
represented the idea of metropolitan supervision, their working character
was in many ways determined less by Colonial Office directives than by
local colonial practices. Well before this moment, colonial governments
were employing a range of strategies to conciliate indigenous people to
colonial order or otherwise to assert the presence of law and government
on unsettled frontiers. Chapter 3 explores how these local antecedents
of imperial protection were trialled in practical schemes of colonial
diplomacy and legal intervention; and how, even after the arrival of
Crown-appointed Protectors, protection policy unfolded in ways that
spoke to the different conditions of the settler colonies.
Through the 1840s and well into the 1850s, this first wave of Abori-
ginal Protectors worked to mediate indigenous people’s encounters with
British law, whether they were the victims or the perpetrators of crimes.
26
On the longer history of Aboriginal Tasmania, see Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines.
Introduction 11
Like many of their counterparts in parallel offices of protection around

the Empire, Aboriginal Protectors were (usually) empowered as magis-
trates so that they could carry the law’s securities forward to indigenous
people as well as educate them in their responsibilities to the law. In the
Australian colonies, at least, Protectors were also asked to manage the
entry of Aboriginal people into colonial schemes of labour and training,
aligning the Aboriginal protection departments with other departments
around the British Empire for the protection of indentured labourers.
Chapter 4 explores the mixed capacities of Protectors of Aborigines as
magistrates, both in managing labour schemes and in representing the
rule of law. The question of how much they should advocate for indigen-
ous people and how much they should embody the principle of impartial
justice was differently interpreted in the colonies in ways that speak to the
adaptable place of protection within wider systems of policing and colo-
nial state-building.
Protector magistrates held an ambivalent place within a larger system
of colonial governance, but they were not sufficiently empowered to
control its directions. Chapter 5 considers how protection offices around
the British Empire might have held utility for the people to whom they
applied, no matter how compromised that utility might have been. Slaves
and indentured labourers leveraged protection offices in so far as
they were able, even as those offices worked to govern them as colonial
subjects. Similarly, the Aboriginal protection offices opened avenues for
indigenous diplomacy and political action, even as they carried colonial
intrusion into indigenous country. Over the years, indigenous people
worked with or for Protectors in various capacities: as frontier intermedi-
aries and interpreters, police aides and household servants, for instance.
On some occasions, they enlisted Protectors to represent their griev-
ances, and on others they rejected Protectors’ efforts to interfere in their
lives and laws. While Protectors often presumed to hold the greater
influence and authority, they also lamented their inability to reform
indigenous laws and cultural practices in any enduring way. The culture
of protection that emerged from this complex set of relationships was not
monolithic or stable but was constantly subject to vacillations between
collaboration and conflict.
By the late 1850s, the early Aboriginal protection offices had all closed.
Chapter 6 considers how policies of Aboriginal protection became locally
recast over the second half of the nineteenth century around shifting
programs of welfare and legal supervision. This focus on legal supervi-
sion was paralleled in protection offices for indentured labour elsewhere
in the British Empire, highlighting a shared focus on the regulation of
colonised subjects over the delivery of rights. By the twentieth century,
protection policies had more uniformly come to symbolise the absence

rather than the promise of citizenship underpinned by equal rights, a
transition contested in indigenous petitioning and civil rights campaigns.
The striking shift from the origins to the ends of protection was not neces-
sarily inevitable, but these two points were always connected by their
shared roots in the priorities of colonial governance. The book concludes
by reconsidering the flexible role of protection policy in nineteenth-
century goals to rehabilitate the British Empire, and the distinctive place
of ‘Aboriginal protection’ within this broader plan. Aboriginal protection
shared with protection policy’s other applications a capacity to manage
people’s labour and mobility through means of the law, but its assimila-
tive agendas also introduced a more comprehensive suite of institutional
measures for indigenous reform. This is a history that has never ended
but that continues in settler colonialism’s ongoing legacies.
Indigenous Justice in the Age of Reform

In the nineteenth-century history of British colonisation, the House of
Commons’ 1837 Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British
Settlements) stands out as the most famous statement on the interests
of indigenous peoples whose lands came within the Empire’s vast terri-
torial claims. It offered neither the first nor the last proposal on how the
Empire could best deliver humane rule, but the compelling nature of its
evidence and the reach of its circulation has since made it metonymic of
nineteenth-century campaigns for indigenous rights. The committee’s
establishment in 1835 was urged by the evangelical parliamentarian
Thomas Fowell Buxton, already well known as a central figure of the
anti-slavery movement. Following the success of abolitionism, the com-
mittee’s purpose was to consider scope for ‘a different kind of policy’
towards indigenous peoples.27
However, the demands for imperial intervention that were channelled
into a course towards indigenous ‘justice’ in this moment reflected a
much wider political climate geared towards social and legal reform. In
addition to slaves and Aborigines, the appetite for reform stretched to
encompass convicts, refugees, child workers, apprenticed or indentured
labourers, and the British working classes.28 At the same time as energy
27
House of Commons Debates, 3rd series, vol. 29, 14 July 1835, 549–53. Select Committee on
Aborigines report (1837), 3.
28
BPP, Report on the Bill to Regulate the Labour of Children, no. 706 (1831–2); An Act for the
Amendment and Better Administration of the Laws Relating to the Poor in England and Wales
(4&5 Will. IV, No. 76) 1834; Sir William Molesworth, Report on Transportation (1838).
See also Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace.
Indigenous Justice in the Age of Reform 13
flowed in Britain for social improvement, the pace of migration to its

colonies was booming at a rapacious rate, producing what James Belich
has called a ‘settler explosion’ supported by new industries, technologies
of travel and communication, and the seductions of untapped colonial
wealth.29 This volatile age created multiple motivations for reform,
Joanna Innes and Arthur Burns note: more than purely liberal aspir-
ations, the zeal for corrective change during the early to mid-nineteenth
century reflected a pragmatic need to resolve potential unrest through a
‘middle way between reaction and revolution’.30 Both at home and
abroad, the time was ripe for revising the terms on which the British
polity operated.
News of fresh outbreaks of atrocity on the Cape Colony’s cyclically
violent eastern frontier initiated the establishment of the Select Commit-
tee on Aborigines in 1835, but reports of abuses suffered by indigenous
peoples around other British settlements, including the recent ‘Black
Wars’ in Van Diemen’s Land, globalised the Select Committee’s pur-
view.31 From July 1835 to May 1837, it met to assess the extent of
colonial injustice against indigenous peoples around the Empire and
the means to overcome it. It heard testimony relating to the Cape
Colony, the Australian colonies, the British Americas, and Pacific sites
that were not yet under British possession but where British settlers were
establishing themselves in increasing numbers. Within months of the
release of its final report in mid-1837, its recommendations were being
disseminated across the British world.
Initially, the Colonial Office only forwarded the report for the notice of
colonial governments, but it was carried much further afield by an active
network of evangelical humanitarians, quickly becoming part of a wider
print culture that circulated in the cause of reform.32 A significant con-
tributor to this process of information exchange was the new Aborigines’
Protection Society, which had recently been founded on the back of
the Select Committee on Aborigines and which now reprinted its report
for broader circulation. The APS’s publication included a new preface
drawing public attention to the report’s significance as ‘one of the most
important documents which has ever come before the legislature’.33 Yet
despite its wide circulation, Zoë Laidlaw suggests that the report
had limited impact beyond the authorisation of a formal Aboriginal
29
Belich, Replenishing the Earth. 30
Innes and Burns, ‘Introduction’, 11–14.
31
On the scope and import of the Select Committee’s inquiries see Laidlaw, ‘Integrating
Metropolitan, Colonial and Imperial Histories’.
32
Edmonds, ‘Honourable Colonisation?’, 56.
33
Preface to Report on Aboriginal Tribes, v.
protection program in the Antipodean colonies. Indeed, she shows that

the report’s set of recommendations reflected less the coordinated
response of influential policymakers at the seat of empire than the
views of a group of evangelicals working within a relatively tight social
and domestic sphere. But as she writes, although it may not have had
the far-reaching consequences for colonial policy to which its authors
might have aspired, it set a benchmark for colonial officials and has
enduringly represented ‘a high point of humanitarian influence’ in the
nineteenth century.34
The practical limitations of the 1837 report reflect the fact that it was
less a comprehensive policy document than an essay in the moral and
legal obligations of imperialism. Condensing a massive amount of testi-
mony from a diversity of colonial sites, the report cast a line between an
ethical appeal to ideas of indigenous justice and a political appeal to the
expediencies of colonial growth. It did not question the value of British
colonisation as a continuing reality but explored the best way forward for
the future of colonial governance. Either the existing conditions of indi-
genous exploitation and extermination would continue until colonists
had ‘shot the last man’, it stated, or the imperial government must clarify
a line of colonial policy that would enable colonised peoples to share in
the rewards of British civilisation, Christian well-being, good govern-
ment and fair trade.35
In urging this second path, the report aspired to two not quite recon-
cilable goals. Firstly, it called for commitment to the legal principle that
indigenous people held equal defensible rights as British subjects, rights
that must be upheld and protected. Secondly, it called for commitment
to a principle of indigenous reform that was grounded in the hierarchy
of stadial theory through which Britain could position itself as guardian
to ‘lower races’.36 Together, these two goals formed the backbone of
humanitarian campaigns for indigenous rights over the coming years,
bringing into fractious tension the ideal of indigenous people’s equality
under the law and an assumption of trusteeship for their amelioration.
This was not a new tension to face imperial humanitarians but was one
that also infused earlier anti-slavery debates.37 According to the Select
Committee on Aborigines report, the resolution of this tension between
equal legal rights and long-term indigenous reform lay in the promise of
34
Laidlaw, ‘Aunt Anna’s Report’, 1–3. On how the Select Committee testimony became
marshalled for a ‘common humanitarian narrative’, see also Lester, ‘Humanitarians and
White Settlers’.
35
Select Committee on Aborigines report (1837), 75.
36
Buchan, Empire of Political Thought, 113.
37
Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism’, 199.
Indigenous Justice in the Age of Reform 15
consistent good governance. The report’s recommendations filled more

than 10 pages of suggested improvements in colonial governance, which
it predicted would secure for indigenous peoples ‘the due observance of
Justice and the protection of their Rights’.38 Over the remainder of the
nineteenth century, this concept of protection as a key plank of indigen-
ous colonial policy continued to hold a central place, but it would take on
a number of different shapes.
In the nearly two centuries since it was scripted, the 1837 report of the
Select Committee on Aborigines has become one of the most oft-cited
documents in historical accounts of a British imperial determination to
guarantee indigenous rights and of how that determination waned after
the administration of indigenous affairs shifted from London’s Colonial
Office into the hands of local colonial governments. This ‘humanitarian
moment’ of imperial intervention has usually been understood within
the context of a specific timeline: a relatively compressed generation of
political energy that gained momentum during the heightened aboli-
tionist years of the 1820s, refocused on indigenous rights during the
1830s and 1840s, and was in decline by the 1850s. It is also traditionally
regarded as emerging from the Empire’s metropolitan centre, carried
forward by evangelic politicians and reformers who, however fleetingly,
held critical influence at the heart of imperial government. Having suc-
cessfully achieved the emancipation of slaves when appetite for reform
was at its peak, historians have argued, humanitarian politics foundered
on the difficulties of delivering indigenous justice in face of the settler
colonies’ growing power and in a climate of waning political faith in legal
rights and ‘civilising’ schemes as the pathway to indigenous colonial
citizenship.39
However, the triggers of colonial reform in the early- to mid-nineteenth-
century British Empire were also more complex than this, as recent
scholarship has explored. Historians are now turning a magnified lens
on how ideas of humane governance – once predominantly associated
with London-based colonial administrators and evangelical parliamen-
tarians – were produced, debated and reinterpreted around the colonies.
The lines of connection and communication that loosely held together
the Empire’s global territories are now being teased out in ways that
reveal in better detail, as Laidlaw puts it, ‘both the dynamic nature of
interactions across the colonial world and their spatial messiness’.40 This
new line of attention to how ideas of humane colonial policy unfolded as
38
Select Committee on Aborigines report (1837), 3; 76–87.
39
On this trajectory see, for instance, Ward, ‘Imperial Policy’, 240.
40
Laidlaw, ‘Breaking Britannia’s Bounds?’, 816.
a complex set of everyday practices, both in localised settings and as a set

of trans-colonial movements, has produced some fascinating insights
into the divergent forms those practices took, the different agendas they
pursued, and the kinds of indigenous agency they enabled.41
This turn to considering the ‘messiness’ of Empire has also challenged
any notion that nineteenth-century colonial policy was orchestrated in
any predetermined or coherent way from London. There can be little
doubt that metropolitan officials struggled to manage an empire that
Laidlaw describes as ‘diverse, distant and increasingly dissatisfied’.42
Writing in 1836, the Colonial Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary
James Stephen suggested that the principles of colonial governance were
less determined by any well-crafted ‘political philosophy’ than by the
fortuitous overlap between what Parliament would sanction and colon-
ists would accept.43 With the aim of introducing a body of centralised
principles by which the Empire should be governed, Stephen prepared
a handbook of Rules and Regulations for Her Majesty’s Colonial Service,
which entered the civil service from 1837.44 Even so, navigating the
shifting political scene of an expanding empire and responding to its
demands and dilemmas was an uneven process.
It could hardly be otherwise, Kate Boehme, Peter Mitchell and Alan
Lester argue. They point out that, for a start, colonial administration
emerged not from one but from several government bodies that included
the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, the East India Company Office
and the British Parliament. Administered across these combined political
seats, the British Empire functioned less as an entity than as a moving
feast of priorities, events and trends. The evolving forces of ‘intercon-
nectivity and simultaneity’ moulded the directions of the nineteenth-
century Empire, they suggest, more than the advanced calculations of
policymakers.45 In a similar spirit, Elizabeth Elbourne makes the point
that the famed Select Committee report on indigenous rights cannot be
read as being representative of ‘metropolitan’ policy as distinct from
‘colonial’ interests but, rather, as a kind of lightning rod for a wider set
of debates that were active around the British settler world about the
future of colonial progress and the nature of ‘civilised’ identity.46
It is increasingly clear, then, that nineteenth-century ideas on humane
colonial policy had no straightforward direction. Indeed, ‘humanitarians’
41
For instance, Lester and Dussart, Colonization; Laidlaw and Lester, eds., Indigenous
Communities and Settler Colonialism; Edmonds and Johnston, eds., ‘Empire, Humanitar-
ianism and Violence’.
42 43 44
Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 169. Ibid. Jeffries, The Colonial Empire, 3–6.
45
Boehme, Mitchell and Lester, ‘Reforming Everywhere and All at Once’.
46
Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler’.
Protection Policy and Problems of Jurisdiction 17
themselves, as they are now considered, comprised a diverse bunch who

attached themselves to varied, sometimes competing movements.47 Even
the Aborigines’ Protection Society – the principal body of trans-colonial
humanitarianism – was buffeted by internal arguments about its agendas,
by personality rifts within its ranks, and by the repercussions of chang-
ing political regimes.48 This recent attention to the variable nature of
nineteenth-century humanitarian policies and practices also calls for
closer scrutiny of the ways in which the policy of Aboriginal protection,
which became one of the most enduring legacies of the reformist 1830s,
was intricately interwoven with the demands of colonial governance
and the wider need to improve mechanisms of legal order within an
unruly Empire.
Protection Policy and Problems of Jurisdiction

Alongside the notion of delivering indigenous people with ‘rights’ and
‘justice’, an equally pressing theme running through the report of the
Select Committee on Aborigines was Britain’s need to clarify jurisdic-
tion over matters relating to indigenous people in order to ensure that
systems of law and government would apply to them. Perhaps more than
anything else, the committee’s two-year investigations highlighted the
absence of any dedicated line of colonial policy relating to indigenous
people, and its report emphasised the need to develop one in an age of
territorial expansion. But this perceived need to develop a clearer line of
colonial policy was not isolated to indigenous issues alone. It dovetailed
with a broader desire among metropolitan officials to introduce more
robust systems of communication and reportage, a more coordinated
culture of government, and a more administratively unified British
globe.49 In calling upon the imperial government to clarify the nature
of indigenous people’s ‘civil rights’ and to defend those rights in law,
the Select Committee’s concerns sat at a nexus between humanitarian
debates and wider administrative debates about the scope of Crown
authority.50
What the report did not attempt to define, however, was the precise
nature of indigenous ‘civil rights’ or the degree to which people might
practically be able to exercise them. Upholding indigenous people’s
rights as recompense for the evils of colonisation held an indisputable
47
Green, ‘Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context’.
48
Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire’.
49
Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 170–4; Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 3.
50
moral force, but their actual legal status in relation to the Crown varied
widely around the Empire and was often subject to profound ambiguity.
This was a critical question that the Select Committee report addressed
only obliquely. Its commentary remained vaguely framed by a presump-
tion of Britain’s responsibility for indigenous people’s welfare without
any clear determination on how much the Crown’s jurisdiction extended
to include them in reality. The Select Committee report entered into
circulation just as Queen Victoria came to the throne. Over the long
course of her reign, an elaborate public discourse on Her Majesty’s
solicitous care of indigenous peoples would take root, turning the idea
of a humane British Empire into a self-conscious hallmark of the nine-
teenth century.51 Yet even as this idea of the Queen’s protection of her
indigenous subjects became a cherished motif of the Victorian age, in
practice, their status remained far from clarified.
One of the clearest problems exposed by the wealth of testimony to the
Select Committee, in fact, was that indigenous people did not securely
come within the jurisdiction of the Crown, although the reasons for this
varied. After Britain’s annexation of New Zealand via treaty in 1840,
British jurisdiction did not initially extend to Māori in matters relating to
themselves; instead Māori remained subject to their own laws in line with
an official principle that British law would be gradually introduced rather
than imposed.52 On South Africa’s war-torn eastern frontier, protracted
conflicts with the Xhosa continued to render the boundaries of British
sovereignty and jurisdiction uncertain through the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. However, even in territories where Britain had already laid full
claim to sovereignty, as was the case in Australia’s colonies, its effective
jurisdiction remained uncertain because the rule of law was constantly
undermined by the realities of frontier conflict. The ongoing problems of
unofficial warfare between indigenous people and settlers ‘beyond the
borders’ of established settlements infused the entire Select Committee
report and spelled out the practical limits of British jurisdiction. The very
insistence that indigenous people must be protected with the same legal
rights as settler subjects revealed deep fractures in the Crown’s jurisdic-
tion precisely because it highlighted the degree to which indigenous
people remained beyond the defence – and, by implication, beyond the
influence – of British law.53
In this vital sense, the imperative to provide indigenous people with
justice and rights through the law’s protection was motivated not only
51
Carter and Nugent, eds., Mistress of Everything.
52
On how the introduction of settler law proceeded in the courts, see Dorsett, Juridical
Encounters.
53
Douglas and Finnane, Indigenous Crime and Settler Law; Dorsett and McVeigh,
Jurisdiction.
Connected Colonial Offices of Protection 19
by a moral duty to mitigate the consequences of their dispossession but

also by a need to clarify their status as British subjects. This, the Select
Committee report argued, would bring order to lawless frontiers, and it
would equally enhance the profitability of the Empire by bringing into its
fold a new generation of colonial subjects and workers. According to this
reasoning, colonisation was not the problem; the problem was Britain’s
failure to manage its territories through a framework of colonial govern-
ance that was at once humane, consistent and economical. In highlight-
ing this point, the report appealed to the spectre of squandered wealth
caused by the current failures of good governance. The recently abol-
ished slave trade constituted an evil ‘of great magnitude’, it stated. But
however wrong slavery had been to human feeling, it had at least been
sustained during its lifetime by legislative sanction and economic inter-
ests. By comparison, indigenous oppression in Britain’s settlements
could not even be justified on these grounds. Instead, it had taken root
through long practices of political neglect and inertia, coming to fruition
both as a moral wrong and as a shameful waste of potential resources. It
disrupted the potential of ‘successful colonisation’; it ‘engendered wars,
in which great expenses were necessarily incurred’; and it ‘exterminated
the natives, who might have been profitable workmen, good customers,
and good neighbours’.54
The Select Committee’s recommendations on Aboriginal protection
were intended to secure indigenous people’s place as subjects of the
Crown and give moral sanction to the Empire’s goals of ‘successful
colonisation’. This represented less a refinement of colonial policy
towards indigenous people than an aspirational project to transform
them into the kind of British subject who would warrant their rights
and fulfil their obligations as future citizens of the Empire. The new
departments of Aboriginal protection created in the wake of the Select
Committee report reflected this aspiration, but they were not a novel
invention. Rather, they entered a field of protection offices that had long
held a place in the toolbox of empire as a means of extending both the
advantages and the obligations of legal subjecthood.
Connected Colonial Offices of Protection

In their study of the British Empire and the origins of international
law, Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford argue that guarantees of protection
served as one of the ‘legal technologies’ through which imperial order
was established and maintained.55 Protection talk itself arose from a
54
55
Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, 83; 85–116.
deep-seated political tradition of treaty making, in which subordinate

polities relinquished rights of political autonomy in exchange for a
stronger power’s promise of security. And since the power to safeguard
the well-being of an empire’s subjects was predicated on the fact that its
sovereignty extended to include them, the promise of protection cast the
jurisdiction of empire forward into new territories. In this sense, they
suggest, the ‘rage for order’ that defined British colonial policy in the
early nineteenth century was motivated by a need to bind together the
empire in ways that would establish the prerogative of the Crown and
rein in the arbitrary politics of distant colonies. By bringing together the
defence of vulnerable peoples and the enhancement of colonial order,
they argue, the promise of protection had ambiguous implications. On
one hand, it offered to mitigate colonial injustices; on the other, it
measured the reach of the Crown’s authority.56
These mixed purposes to correct injustice and to assert authority were
apparent in the deeper imperial histories of protection. Annabel Brett has
traced, for example, how the language of protection was long embedded
in English legal and political thought. Coalescing around the respon-
sibility of the Crown to uphold the laws of the land and defend the
sovereign’s subjects from harm, protection brought the exercise of power
together with the promise of justice.57 Protection had an even older and
more pervasive history in the exercise of imperial power that stretched
back centuries and across the globe, write Lauren Benton and Adam
Clulow. The protection arrangements of European empires were connec-
ted to an older imperial framework of governance derived from Roman
legal codes for the protection of vulnerable subjects perceived unable to
defend their own interests. Likewise, the conquests of other early empires
‘across Central Asia and the Middle East depended on promises to pro-
tect the lives, property and religion of invaded communities’.58
At an immediate level, British reformists concerned with indigenous
rights and amelioration in the 1830s would have been familiar with the
Protector of Slaves offices, first introduced in Trinidad in 1824 and then
elsewhere in the British Empire. Again, these protection offices were not
new to the British Empire but carried a long, interlaced history through
modern European empires. The duties of Britain’s Protectors of Slaves
had their origins in a series of slave codes, cross-fertilised amongst Euro-
pean empires of the early modern world, that led to the ratification of
56
Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 4.
57
Brett, ‘Protection as a Political Concept’, 93–4.
58
Benton and Clulow, ‘Introduction’, 3–7.
masters’ obligations to slaves and the creation of slaves as subjects with

legal rights. By the end of the eighteenth century, these rights included
such conditions as minimum access to medical care and religious educa-
tion, maximum caps on corporal punishment, and terms on which
freedom could be purchased.59 In the Spanish and French empires, slave
protection offices evolved over time from an essentially religious role to
an essentially legal one. Initially, Catholic priests visited plantations to
inquire into slaves’ material and spiritual condition, and when required,
they interceded in disputes. Later, this responsibility to adjudicate dis-
putes became the principal function of Protectors as secular officers who
held magisterial powers.60 Under the provisions of the 1824 Order in
Council that began the slave amelioration program in Trinidad, Protect-
ors of Slaves re-emerged as civil servants of the British Empire, carrying
forward an earlier imperial slave regulation system into an age of British
legal reform.
Like their predecessors in earlier empires, Britain’s Protectors of
Slaves were supported by magisterial powers and, in this capacity, their
role was as much about clarifying imperial jurisdiction as it was about
clarifying slave rights. Since the British government intended the protec-
tion office to mediate not just between master and slave but also between
the metropole and the slave colonies, the Protector’s office represented
less a radical avenue of slave advocacy than a means of diminishing the
local power of the slave owner in favour of the imperial power of the
Crown.61 Slaves and former slaves put the protection office to use by
bringing their grievances forward to be adjudicated by Protectors, even
though Protectors could adjudicate as much, if not more, in favour of the
master as of the slave.62 Nonetheless, in its very capacity to provide legal
supervision of the slave labour regime, the Protector of Slaves office
presented British humanitarian reformists with an encouraging model
of transparent civil order and amelioration.
In the Spanish conquest of the New World, however, the imperial
story of protection began not with slaves but with indigenous peoples
59
On the origins of the Spanish Slave Codes, see, for instance, Watson, Slave Law in the
Americas; on the development of the French Code Noir, see, for instance, Palmer, ‘The
Origins and Authors of the Code Noir’; on the comparative evolution of slave laws across
colonial settings, see, for instance, Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures.
60
Spence, ‘Ameliorating Empire’, 4; 47–8.
61
Spence, ‘Ameliorating Empire’, iii; Ford, ‘Anti-Slavery’, 83; Dooling, Slavery, Emanci-
pation and Colonial Rule, 90.
62
For elaboration on the protection office in different sites see for instance Mason, Social
Death and Resurrection and Burnard, ‘A Voice for Slaves’.
Figure 1.1 Richard Bridgens, ‘Protector of Slaves Office (Trinidad)’,

1833, Yale Centre for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
and the management of their social, economic and legal relations with
colonists.63 From the sixteenth century onwards, the office of Protector
de Indios formed an essential aspect of Spain’s governance of the New
World as part of its global empire. Like slave protectors, Protectors of
Indians were originally Catholic priests charged with a responsibility to
watch over the spiritual welfare of indigenous people, hear their material
complaints, and communicate on their behalf with the Spanish Crown.
Again like slave protectors, this office became more secular over time and
more legalised in its application to colonised subjects, as well as in its
use by them.64
The role of government intermediaries in regulating relations between
colonists and new or other ‘unprotected’ subjects had similar currency
within the Dutch Empire. Legal regulation of the slave regime was
managed by the Office of the Fiscal, which mediated disputes between
masters and slaves.65 A policy of indigenous protection was also repre-
sented in the position of uitleggers, or ‘postholders’, whose role was less a
legal one than one of conciliation and economic development, geared
63
Spence, ‘Ameliorating Empire’, 50.
64
Cutter, The Protector de Indios; Owensby, Empire’s Law and Indian Justice.
65
Turner, ‘The British Caribbean’; Burnard, ‘A Voice for Slaves’.
towards developing terms with indigenous people for trade, allegiance

or labour.66 When Britain took control of the Dutch territories that
later became British Guiana, these institutions of Dutch administration
had a second life under British rule. With the introduction of slave
amelioration laws in the 1820s, Protectors of Slaves became attached
to the Office of the Fiscal.67 In mediating settler–indigenous relations,
the Dutch postholder office was also supplemented with Protectors of
Indians, officials who were appointed from within the merchant or
planter class to control cross-cultural economies and to pursue indigen-
ous grievances with the authorities. By 1837, when the Select Committee
on Aborigines produced its recommendations on protecting indigenous
rights in British settlements, these positions were no longer active or were
otherwise being wound down. Abolition eventually rendered the slave
protection offices redundant, and the Protector of Indians positions were
also exhausting their perceived value.68 The colonial civil servant Robert
Montgomery Martin believed the low salaries of Protectors of Indians
did not encourage conscientiousness, and the ‘want of vigilant superin-
tendence’ by higher government authorities undermined any utility the
system might earlier have had.69
This was a view only partly shared by Herman Merivale, professor
of political economy at Oxford University and later James Stephen’s
successor as the Colonial Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary. In his
lectures on ‘colonization and colonies’ delivered between 1839 and 1841,
just as Aboriginal Protectors were being appointed to the Australasian
colonies, Merivale pondered the comparative strengths and weaknesses
of earlier European imperial protection practices, the value of the Pro-
tector of Indians office, and the future utility of Aboriginal protection
policy for British settlements. Like Robert Montgomery Martin, Merivale
noted corruptions in the Protectors of Indians office, at least in relation
to subordinate officers who operated within it. But the system of protec-
tion itself, he thought, was useful in furthering the causes of amelioration
and colonial order. Problems with the Protector of Indians office, in his
view, arose ‘not from the conception, but the execution of the laws’. Any
system of protection was likely to fail if its personnel were unfit ‘to take
the initiative – to act, devise, and control’; but if Britain appointed more
‘officers of high station and character’ and rewarded them with good
salaries and the promise of ‘higher colonial preferment’, then protection
offices could play an important role in colonial governance.70
66
Menezes, British Policy. 67
Burnard, ‘A Voice for Slaves’.
68 69
Menezes, British Policy, 109. Martin, The British Colonial Library, 150–1.
70
Merivale, Lectures, 160–1; 275.
Reflecting more deeply on indigenous protection policy in the ‘old

Spanish colonies’, Merivale found it ‘singular that English colonies have
been long without the advantage of a similar institution’. He suggested
that these older institutions of protection held important lessons for
improving the condition of colonised peoples in ways that also bolstered
colonial security. Here, Merivale pinpointed the purpose of protection
policy in navigating between the prospect of justice and the assertion
of authority: if ‘Indians’ were considered a ‘subject class’ under Spanish
rule, he mused, then Spain’s system of protection was ‘highly advanta-
geous, a little below freedom indeed, but far above slavery’. Equally, if it
were ‘necessary to maintain the domination of the whites, to preserve the
existing gradation of ranks’ and so on, then Spain’s system of protection
was effective in removing ‘the Indians … from the reach of oppression,
while it provided at the same time a security against revolution’.71
If protection carried potential advantages for a model of governance
that could be both humane and secure, it also had utility in bringing
peoples who remained outside Crown jurisdiction into dialogue with
colonial administrations. This was a purpose that had fresh application
in the British Empire with the appointment of Protectors of Aborigines.
The Select Committee on Aborigines imagined that these new Abori-
ginal Protectors would depart from the role of British Guiana’s Protect-
ors of Indians by having greater capacity to deliver a more transformative
level of moral and legal reform. Protectors of Indians, the report stated,
had encouraged trade and exchange with indigenous tribes but paid no
attention to their ‘moral or civil advancement’.72 The committee’s own
recommendations for the duties of Aboriginal Protectors reflected a
more ambitious remit beyond brokering cross-cultural exchange, adjudi-
cating disputes or regulating labour relations. Instead, the committee
imagined an extensive program of amelioration that would eventually
bind indigenous people to the wider civil machinery of colonial life
and enable them to take a true place as British subjects within an all-
embracing Empire.73
The Select Committee on Aborigines might have regarded new
Aboriginal Protectors as holding a distinctively sacred duty, but before
long, more protection offices were being planned for oversight of the
accelerating indentured labour market that followed the abolition of
slavery. Mauritius was the first colony to import large numbers of Indian
indentured labourers in the immediate post-abolition years. Accounts of
71
Merivale, Lectures, 157–8; 273–4.
72
Select Committee on Aborigines report (1837), 10; 77–83.
73
Select Committee on Aborigines report (1837), 83–4.
widespread abuse produced fears that it was ‘neither more nor less than a
renewal of the Slave Trade’, leading to an 1838 government inquiry and
a temporary prohibition.74 But the need for an ongoing source of cheap
labour besides former slave apprentices favoured its continuance. Legis-
lation introduced in 1842 by the British Indian government created new
provisions for monitoring the emigration and working conditions of
Indian labourers, first for Mauritius and then for the Caribbean colonies,
Natal and elsewhere.75 Under the new laws, Indian indentured labourers
were to be recruited according to written consent, for a fixed term, and
with a guaranteed return passage.
The legislation also provided for the appointment of protection officers
to oversee indenture conditions both at the departure port and in the
destination colony.76 Protectors of Emigrants at the home port were
responsible for registering recruited workers, confirming their consent to
the terms of their contract, and ensuring that vessels were licenced, venti-
lated and provisioned according to regulation. Protectors of Immigrants
or Immigration Agents at the destination point were responsible for
checking the wages, health, living and working conditions of indentured
labourers, investigating any complaints by them or their employers, and
instituting legal proceedings when required. At the end of indenture,
they would oversee the return of labourers to their home country or, if
workers accepted re-indenture, maintain watch over them. By the late
nineteenth century, Indian indentured labour represented an economic
and social system on a vast global scale. In addition to the British Carib-
bean and Indian Ocean world, workers were recruited into the French
colonies and later into the British Pacific. Australian colonists also put
forward proposals for the large-scale importation of Indian indentured
labourers, hoping to tap more deeply into avenues of economic growth
at a time of declining dependency upon convict labour, although these
proposals did not take root, and other labour sources – Aboriginal,
Chinese and from the Pacific – became available closer to home.77
Scholars have often cautioned against drawing any clear distinction
between slavery and the indenture system that came on its heels.78 Yet to
74
House of Commons Debates, 3rd series, vol. 41, 6 March 1838, 442; BPP, Report Respecting
the Exportation of Hills Coolies, vol. 19 (1841); Cassels, Social Legislation, 209–20.
75
India Act XV of 1842.
76
‘Duties of the Emigration Agents in India with sample forms for use by the Emigration
Agent and Protector of Emigrants’ (1844), CO 885/1, National Archives UK (NA).
77
Saunders, Workers in Bondage; Allbrook, ‘“A Triple Empire”’; Cullen, ‘Empire, Indian
Indentured Labour and the Colony’; Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue;
Mountford, Britain, China and Colonial Australia.
78
For instance, Allen, ‘Satisfying the “Want for Labouring People”’, 73; Kaarsholm,
‘Indian Ocean Networks’.
imperial observers, the departments created to supervise the indenture

system – like those of slave and Aboriginal protection – offered a com-
forting model of humanitarian intervention because they appeared to
assert the transparencies of justice over abuses of colonial power. In this
respect, protection offices served a similar purpose, in a more ongoing
way, to the periodic commissions of inquiry that upheld the Crown’s
authority to investigate and intervene in unsound colonial practices.
Scholars have discussed how colonial commissions of inquiry carried
the imprint of good government and the promise of justice, but they
could also set institutional limits on the Crown’s terms for interven-
tion.79 For instance, Radhika Mongia suggests that although the periodic
government inquiries held into the indenture system represented an
overarching purpose of liberal reform, their governing principles of
impartiality and unbiased inspection did little to correct – even helped
to prop up – its embedded exploitations.80
Merivale flagged the potential limits of administrative systems which
represented good government simply by virtue of their presence:
‘Throughout the vast regions where the British influence extends, the
mere existence of a British functionary in any post passes for a guarantee
that its strict duties will be performed’, he wrote. ‘In many cases this is all
which the interests of the country require’.81 In truth, the institutional
presence of Protectors of Immigrants did not squash coercive labour
practices, and nor were these agents of protection necessarily predis-
posed to be liberal champions of exploited labour.82 A need to keep up
numbers in the labour force also produced corruptions at the recruitment
point, inviting in unscrupulous practices and deceitful promises about
what awaited workers in the colonies.83 Nevertheless, by the mid-1840s,
the value of protection as an administrative response to colonial disorder
was well established around the British Empire, and it formalised a chain
of imperial concern from enslaved to indigenous to indentured peoples.
Each link in this chain was infused with the principles of social improve-
ment and humane rule, and each link appeared to reinforce the guarantee
of reform across the Empire.
79
Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire’, 751–2; Ford, ‘Anti-Slavery’, 78–9; Dooling, Slavery,
Emancipation and Colonial Rule, 92.
80
Mongia, ‘Impartial Regimes of Truth’. 81
Merivale, Lectures, 159–61.
82
Cumpston, Indians Overseas; Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 432; Kiely, The Politics of
Labour, 51; Allen, Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Labourers, 62–4; Cassels, Social
Legislation, 220; Batsha, ‘The Currents of Restless Toil’.
83
Coombs to the Colonial Secretary, 29 September 1896, CO 295/374, fol 511–25, NA.
Figure 1.2 ‘Indian Coolies at Depot, Trinidad and Tobago’, c. 1890,

National Archives UK.
From 1877, the protection office expanded again with the appoint-
ment of Protectors of Chinese to the Straits Settlements to manage
newly arrived Chinese labourers, both free and indentured, and other-
wise to mediate between the colonial administration and the Chinese
diaspora. The first Protector of Chinese posted to Singapore was the
colonial civil servant William Pickering, and over the coming years
the department extended to Penang and Malacca, growing to include
positions for Assistant Protectors, interpreters and clerks. Protectors of
Chinese oversaw labour contracts, arbitrated disputes between Chinese
workers and their employers or within the Chinese community itself
and provided a line of communication with the government. They also
attempted to check the operations of the Chinese secret societies and
networks of prostitution that interrupted the authority of British colo-
nial rule. Like other Protectors, their duties were framed in moral terms
of protecting the undefended, but their role was essentially to survey

the Chinese community.84
A more localised model of the Chinese protection departments was the
Protector of Chinese office established in the Australian colony of Vic-
toria in the mid-1850s to supervise the growing population of Chinese
who joined the international flood of prospectors to the goldfields. Vic-
toria’s perceived need for a special policy relating to Chinese immigrants
arose from a highly mobile colonial setting marked by sharp racial ten-
sions. The intent for the Chinese protectorate in some ways mirrored
the regulatory purpose of the Aboriginal protectorate that preceded it
in Port Phillip, and in other ways it mirrored the existing departments
that managed indentured labour elsewhere around the Empire. What
it shared with these other protection offices was a purpose to manage
people’s movements and the nature of their engagements within colonial
society: a key purpose of the Victorian Chinese protectorate was to limit
incoming numbers of Chinese miners and to segregate their place on
the goldfields.85
The scheme was authorised by the Chinese Immigration Act (1855),
which restricted numbers of incoming Chinese immigrants and allowed
the government to appoint Protectors of Chinese as special officers to
maintain ‘management and good government’ over them.86 Every regis-
tered Chinese immigrant was required to pay the Protector an annual £1
fee which funded the protection office and its staff, including police. If
someone failed to pay their licence fees or taxes, or otherwise infringed
the regulations of the Act, they were liable to a fine of up to £5 or two
months’ imprisonment. Assisted by police constables and interpreters,
Protectors supervised the Chinese camps, adjudicated disputes, main-
tained the boundaries between Chinese and European mining commu-
nities, and collected Chinese licence fees until the early 1860s, when the
gold rush ebbed and the system wound down. While slave, Aboriginal
and, to a lesser degree, immigrant protectors carried an outward role to
‘ameliorate’, Victoria’s short-lived Protectors of Chinese were more
explicitly tied to government priorities of ‘containment and regulation’.87
The Aboriginal protection offices introduced into the Australasian
colonies sat within the matrix of these earlier and coexistent departments
of protection around the British Empire, founded to manage affairs
84
Tang, ‘British Policy towards the Chinese’; Lee, The British as Rulers; Campbell, Chinese
Coolie Emigration.
85
Ngai, ‘Chinese Miners’, 11; see also Cronin, Colonial Casualties.
86
Chinese Immigration Act (18 Vict. No. 2), 1855 (Victoria).
87
Ngai, ‘Chinese Miners’, 23.
The Principles of Aboriginal Protection 29
relating to slaves, indentured labour forces or other ethnically specific

communities. These varied offices served to police the boundaries of
colonised people’s rights, including the terms of their own lawful con-
duct, the conditions of their employment and the scope of their move-
ment. Protection offices were connected by their institutional role, but
more personally they were also connected at times by the influence of the
civil servants who occupied them. Historians have examined how colonial
governance was often cross-hatched by individual administrators or
administrative families whose service took them to different parts of the
Empire.88 This kind of trans-colonial influence was also apparent in the
administration of protection across generations. A key player in plans for
the protection of Indian immigrant labour, for instance, was the Indian
Government Secretary Henry Thoby Prinsep; at the end of the century,
his nephew Henry Charles Prinsep became Western Australia’s inaugural
Chief Protector of Aborigines. In this way, the process of building pro-
tective governance as a field of colonial administration in the nineteenth-
century British Empire was both global and intimate.
The Principles of Aboriginal Protection

The moments of imperial intervention that overlapped in plans to take
the Crown’s protection to indigenous people and diasporic indentured
labourers shared the centralising logic that a more uniform model of
good governance would generate a more humane Empire. However, as
the Select Committee on Aborigines acknowledged, a particular diffi-
culty in devising a policy for protecting indigenous people’s rights around
the Empire was accounting for the diversity of their existing relationships
to the Crown and their degrees of independence from settler society.
This level of diversity required a more complex set of recommendations
on Aboriginal protection than those framed for the Empire’s inden-
tured labour network. Recognising that no simple ‘code of rules’ would
encompass the diversities of indigenous people’s status across Britain’s
settlements, the Select Committee offered some ‘general’ principles of
protection that would promote uniformity in colonial policy but also
some ‘special’ ones that would respond to local circumstances.
The first general principle was that protecting indigenous interests
must be the responsibility of local executive governments, personified
in the governor who reported directly to the Crown rather than of local
88
For instance, Lambert and Lester, eds., Colonial Lives; McDougall and Davidson, eds.,
The Roth Family; Allbrook, ‘Imperial Family’; Lester, ‘Personifying Colonial Govern-
ance’; Elbourne, ‘The Bannisters’.
legislatures that were more swayed by immediate political agendas. The

second was that indigenous people must be exempt from the vagrancy
laws that were then entering into local legislation around the colonies,
adapted from Britain’s Vagrancy Act (1824).89 The Select Committee’s
logic here was that continuing freedom of movement, at least in a
transitional phase, would enhance indigenous people’s capacity to gain
suitable employment and would also allow them to maintain traditional
means of subsistence while they adapted to a settled lifestyle.
Other general principles of protection related to plans for advancing
indigenous people’s moral and social ‘improvement’, but a particularly
important one related to land.90 Private citizens should be prohibited
from acquiring indigenous land directly through treaty or sale, and
colonial governments should only acquire it in the Crown’s name with
the imperial parliament’s sanction. Notably, this second restriction did
not apply to ‘the settlement of vacant lands’. As was well understood, the
concept of vacant land in British legal thought referred to the non-use
of land for settlement and agriculture.91 A legal understanding that
uncultivated land constituted vacant land continued to justify indigenous
dispossession into the future, and Paul McHugh has argued that by the
mid-nineteenth century, the notion of ‘tribal rights’ had also largely
waned in British legal thought, vesting property rights in the individual
and sovereignty in the Crown.92 Following this list of general princi-
ples were some ‘special’ recommendations for particular colonies. These
varied, but across them all was a common feature: greater vigilance
over frontier violence could only be achieved with the more consistent
application of British law and its guarantees of protection.93 With these
recommendations, the Select Committee sought to acknowledge the
pressures of local differences around British settlements at the same time
as it urged a pull to imperial legal uniformity.94
This long list of principles underpinned the Select Committee’s sug-
gested duties for Protectors of Aborigines. These were staggeringly
broad. As agents of social and moral instruction, Protectors would
facilitate personal contact with indigenous people, learn their languages,
supervise their training and employment, encourage their Christian
conversion, claim sufficient lands on their behalf to support their entry
into agriculture and promote any other ‘general scheme’ that would lead
89
Vagrancy Act 1824 (5 Geo. 4 c. 83) (UK).
90
91
Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past’, 56. 92
McHugh, Aboriginal Societies, 150.
93
Select Committee on Aborigines report (1837), 81–2; 85–6.
94
On the tensions between legal difference and uniformity in the British Empire, see, for
instance, Dorsett and McLaren, eds., Legal Histories of the British Empire.
The Principles of Aboriginal Protection 31
to their religious or civil ‘improvement’. As intermediaries of the law,

Protectors would be vested with magisterial powers. They would investi-
gate cases of interracial violence, pursue the prosecution of those who
injured indigenous people, perform the office of coroner when they were
slain, arrange the defence of indigenous defendants who came into
colonial courts, and generally work to bring indigenous people within
‘the pale of the law’. Not least, they would advise colonial governments
on what ‘provisional code’ of rules might be applied ‘for the regulation of
the Aborigines’ while they advanced in the ways of British civilisation.95
Even as the Select Committee’s description of Aboriginal Protectors’
duties reflected an apparently new avenue of humanitarian hope, it
reflected an old kind of imperial faith in the regulating power of govern-
ment and law. Over the rest of the nineteenth century, Britain would
deploy its protection offices in multiple ways that reflected the changing
needs of an Empire seeking improved governmental supervision. While
the need for a mechanism of slave protection shifted after abolition,
subsequent protection offices adapted themselves to the evolving circum-
stances of an ever-growing Empire. In its various applications, protection
was flexible enough to encompass the local needs of colonial gov-
ernments, whether that meant pursuing the assimilation or segregation
of colonised subjects, or controlling the flow and mobility of colonial
labour. The impacts of protection for the peoples who were subject to it
were mixed; for while its aims were intended to be liberal rather than
repressive, its liberalism was circumscribed by the degree to which it
could lay the ground for colonial order.96
95
96
Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, 148–9; 179.

1 Protection and The Ends of Colonial Governance

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1 Protection and the Ends of

imperial metropole and colonial peripheries to each other.2 Concerns

The nineteenth-century history of Aboriginal protection has most

It is important here to comment on this book’s scope. It does not claim

sense, Crown-appointed Protectors of Aborigines personiﬁed imperial

them by default within the Crown’s presumed ‘allegiance’ as people

understanding, its notable absence as an approach to British sovereignty

indentured labourers or ethnic diasporas, programs of protection over-

Like many of their counterparts in parallel ofﬁces of protection around

protection policies had more uniformly come to symbolise the absence

Indigenous Justice in the Age of Reform

ﬂowed in Britain for social improvement, the pace of migration to its

protection program in the Antipodean colonies. Indeed, she shows that

consistent good governance. The report’s recommendations ﬁlled more

a complex set of everyday practices, both in localised settings and as a set

themselves, as they are now considered, comprised a diverse bunch who

Protection Policy and Problems of Jurisdiction

by a moral duty to mitigate the consequences of their dispossession but

Connected Colonial Offices of Protection

deep-seated political tradition of treaty making, in which subordinate

masters’ obligations to slaves and the creation of slaves as subjects with

Figure 1.1 Richard Bridgens, ‘Protector of Slaves Ofﬁce (Trinidad)’,

towards developing terms with indigenous people for trade, allegiance

Reﬂecting more deeply on indigenous protection policy in the ‘old

imperial observers, the departments created to supervise the indenture

Figure 1.2 ‘Indian Coolies at Depot, Trinidad and Tobago’, c. 1890,

of protecting the undefended, but their role was essentially to survey

relating to slaves, indentured labour forces or other ethnically speciﬁc

The Principles of Aboriginal Protection

legislatures that were more swayed by immediate political agendas. The

to their religious or civil ‘improvement’. As intermediaries of the law,

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