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

Description

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. Cover Half-title Title page Copyright information Contents Figures Acknowledgements 1 Protection and the Ends of Colonial Governance Introduction Indigenous Justice in the Age of Reform Protection Policy and Problems of Jurisdiction Connected Colonial Offices of Protection The Principles of Aboriginal Protection 2 Creating Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown Indigenous Rights and the Application of British Law Treaty, Sovereignty and Legal Amenability in the Antipodean Colonies The Protections of Law and the Limits of Jurisdiction Imperial Intervention: Crown Responsibility and Protectors of Aborigines 3 Distinctive Designs: Local Arenas of Protection Proxies of Protection: Colonial Schemes of Conciliation and Amelioration Proxies of Protection: Colonial Schemes of Legal Regulation The Crown's Protection: Legal Transition and Land Policy Customised Instructions of Protection 4 Protector Magistrates: Mediating Labour and Law Protection and Colonial Labour Schemes 'A Provisional Code': Aboriginal Protectorates and the Duties of Legal Reform Impartial Justice or Indigenous Advocacy? The Port Phillip Protectorate Protectors as Legal Intermediaries: The South Australian Protectorate Protection as Policing: The Western Australian Protectorate The Legal Limits of Protector Magistrates 5 Intimate Encounters with Protection Utilities of Protection around the British Empire The 'Strategic Intimacies' of Aboriginal Protection Mediating the Law: Aboriginal Policing and Diplomacy on Australian Colonial Frontiers Settlement Schemes: Land Grants and Interracial Marriage 6 Recasting Protection from Rights to Surveillance Settler Governance and Colonial Citizenship in the Self-Governing Colonies Protection and Labour Management around the British Empire, Post-1860s The Statutory Age of Protection Conclusion: Protection and Reform in the British Empire Bibliography Archives and Unpublished Manuscripts British Library Colonial Office, National Archives UK Public Records Office Victoria State Library of South Australia State Library of Victoria State Records Office of Western Australia State Records of South Australia Wellcome Library, London Weston Library, Oxford Published Primary Sources British Parliamentary Papers Government Papers Other Nineteenth-Century Publications Government Gazettes and Newspapers Nineteenth-Century Legislation British and Imperial Australasian Colonies Canada Government of India Secondary Sources Index