Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
8 - ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The Committee hoped to protect indigenous peoples from the worst excesses of British colonialism, stating that in general relations between an ‘uncivilized race’ and their ‘more cultivated neighbours’ ‘should be diminished rather than multiplied’. The exception to this was the ‘pastoral relations’ between missionaries and the indigenous populations with whom they worked, with the Committee simply recommending: ‘Missionaries to be encouraged’. The connections encouraged by the Committee were not simply religious, however, but aimed also for social change:
it is necessary that with plans of moral and religious improvement should be combined well-matured schemes for advancing the social and political improvement of the tribes, and for the prevention of any sudden changes which might be injurious to the health and physical constitution of the new converts.
The call for relations between British colonists and their indigenous neighbours to ‘be diminished’ was an attempt by metropolitan humanitarians to exert control over events and people on imperial frontiers. The Committee was faced with the recognition that in situations like those in Australia or at the Cape colony white settlement ran ahead of colonial control, and on the edge of empire in places like New Zealand, white traders operated beyond the gaze of metropolitan or colonial authorities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840 , pp. 163 - 178Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014