How altruism helped (re)create an aristocracy

 

The humanitarian impulse of the Aborigines' Protection Society helped embed privilege
across Britain's colonies, says the book's author, "whatever the colour of its skin"

"From 1836 to 1909 the Aborigines' Protection Society lobbied the British Colonial Office to defend the rights of aboriginal people. ... The background of the Aborigines' Protection Society's work was the growth of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. ... [Their generosity, though, fell short of respect, seeing native peoples as something like children, in need of protection rather than rights.]
    "The Aborigines' Protection Society was tied up in the New Zealand colony from the outset. ... Wakefield's early interesting in controlling emigration gave him common outlook with the Aborigines' Protection Society ... To get a clearer idea of what Wakefield was thinking, following his talks with [Aborigines' Protection Society head Thomas] Hodgkin, we can read his evidence to the [UK] parliamentary Select Committee around the same time (1840): 'if the inferior race of New Zealand can be preserved at all in contact with civilised men it can only be by creating ... a Native aristocracy, a Native gentry ...'
    "The Society's ... Reverend Montague Hawtrey ... persuaded the Colonial Undersecretary James Stephen that the Māori people ought to be 'looked after' in the new colony and 'saved from the impact of commerce.' ... Hawtrey, like Hodgkin, tried to get Wakefield to work the protection of the native Māori into his scheme of Systematic Colonisation. ... 
    "Hawtrey thought New Zealanders ought to pay homage to the native chiefs. 'Even if there were no chiefs in New Zealand it would be,' he wrote, 'judicious to select certain personages from among them and place them in a position of honour.' The reason was that there had to to be 'a class of persons in the island who, by common consent and prescriptive right hold a position onf eminence above the others.' That was true of the Europeans too ... Hawtrey thought ...
    "In the end, Hawtrey's loyalty was to privilege, whatever the colour of its skin. ...
    "As David Cannadine explains, 'It was these people--the chiefs, landowners, sultans or sheikhs--on whom the British felt they could rely, and with whom ... they were most comfortable'. ...
    "The Aborigines' Protection Society helped make the case for the Treaty, and for the colonisation that it licensed."

~ James Heartfield, from his book The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 [pp. vii, 67, 126-9]. As we've said before about the Treaty, it's the "chieftainship" that's the problem...

"Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the
British were motivated not only by race, but also by class. The British wanted to
domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they

ruled according to an idealised image of their own class hierarchies."