Imagining protection in the antipodean colonies: Actors, agency and governance

[Extract] Recent years have seen a revival of historical interest in Aboriginal protection as a concept that gained critical momentum in British imperial politics after the abolition of slavery. A body of new work has explored the different ways that ideas of humane governance shaped indigenous policy around the British settler colonial world, and in how they became re-imagined over time. In particular, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart’s book Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (2014) has been influential in generating closer attention to the origins and translations of Aboriginal protection across different British colonial jurisdictions