Between 1836 and 1909, the British Empire grew to take in New Zealand, much of Australia, Fiji, New Guinea, Southern Africa (beyond the Cape), and much more — from 2,824,040 square miles to 12,700,000. As we now know, imperial rule tore the lives of millions of native peoples apart, uprooting them from the land, pushing them aside into reservations and turning them into wage slaves, sucking resources and wealth to feed Britain’s industrial expansion. Today, of course, we have much more enlightened views. The United Nations declared an International Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, after dedicating first 1993 and then the decade 1994–2005 to their rights. The wrongs done to indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand have been addressed in apologies, declarations, commissions, land and political reform.

It might come as a surprise, then, to discover that the duty to protect Aboriginal peoples is not a recent idea at all. In those years between 1836 and 1909, the Aborigines’ Protection Society, a powerful lobby of British parliamentarians, colonial officials, churchmen and the Great and the Good worked on behalf of native peoples. The Aborigines’ Protection Society played a key role in the development of imperial policy, writing special laws into the new colonies that enshrined the protection of native custom, leadership and land. Even more surprising, as you read over the parliamentary debates and the colonial office records, you will discover that as each of the new colonies was brought under the British Crown most of that territory was taken with the stated aim of protecting the native peoples there. The Members of Parliament pushing for colonization were all leading lights or friends of the Aborigines’ Protection Society — Alderman M’Arthur, William Forster, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Chamberlain.

They did not call them “indigenous” in those days — they were “aborigines” a word not just for the original people of Australia, but for all First Peoples, who they called “Caffres” in South Africa, Chippeway in Canada. The United Nations brought Guatemala activist Rigoberta Menchu to London in 1993. More than a century earlier the Aborigines’ Protection Society brought the Zulu Cetshwayo and then the Maori Chiefs to the Lord Mayor of London’s Mansion House. (Bemused at the fashion for romanticizing the Iroquois, Karl Marx noted that “each century . . . produces its own primitives.”)