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

Amanda Nettelbeck

ISBN 10: 1108458386 / ISBN 13: 9781108458382

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2021

About this Item

2021. Paperback. . . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9781108458382

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108458386
• ISBN 13: 9781108458382
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.