The Humanitarian Impulse in Early 19th-Century Colonial Governance and Its Legacies
Early nineteenth-century British imperial policy towards Indigenous peoples imagined a world in which the imperial and settler presence would be reconciled with local cultures. Efforts were made to still violence at the frontier, to create systems of law that recognized cultural difference and to conciliate tensions between the races. This humanitarian impulse failed, compromised by the contradictions within its own ideology, the politics of emergent settler land claims, and the irresolvable violence that ripped through the period. Still, there were historical legacies that continued to whisper down the years.
This paper will do three things. First, it will explore the ideological tenets of the humanitarian impulse as lying within notions of human psychology that originated in the eighteenth-century enlightenment as well as in evangelical religious assumptions about universal man. Second, it will argue that the experience of imperial encounter provoked contradictions and tensions within those belief systems that frustrated even the best intentions of the most competent colonial governors of the period, such as Sir George Arthur of Van Diemen’s Land and Sir George Grey of South Australia. And, third, it will suggest that the historical legacies of the humanitarian impulse extended beyond the failure to realize its promise in the early nineteenth century. The afterlife of these policy efforts were found in imperial culture and in local histories. In imperial culture, a discourse was embedded that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century allowed empire to be viewed as liberal and liberating. And Indigenous rights movements at the end of the twentieth century in places like Australia and New Zealand framed their political objectives precisely around the issues--land, law and cultural difference--that this earlier period had endeavored to resolve.
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