Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

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Cambridge University Press, Mar 28, 2019 - History - 232 pages
Amanda Nettelbeck explores how policies designed to protect the civil rights of indigenous peoples across the British Empire were entwined with reforming them as governable colonial subjects. The nineteenth-century policy of 'Aboriginal protection' has usually been seen as a fleeting initiative of imperial humanitarianism, yet it sat within a larger set of legally empowered policies for regulating new or newly-mobile colonised peoples. Protection policies drew colonised peoples within the embrace of the law, managed colonial labour needs, and set conditions on mobility. Within this comparative frame, Nettelbeck traces how the imperative to protect indigenous rights represented more than an obligation to mitigate the impacts of colonialism and dispossession. It carried a far-reaching agenda of legal reform that arose from the need to manage colonised peoples in an Empire where the demands of humane governance jostled with colonial growth.
 

Contents

Creating Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown
32
Local Arenas of Protection
66
Mediating Labour and Law
100
Intimate Encounters with Protection
135
Recasting Protection from Rights to Surveillance
163
Bibliography
200
Index
224
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About the author (2019)

Amanda Nettelbeck is Professor of History at the University of Adelaide and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her many publications include Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony (2018), co-edited with Penelope Edmonds, and Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (2017), co-edited with Philip Dwyer.

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