Prof. Zoe Laidlaw, "Settler Colonial Legacies of British Slavery: Rethinking Humanitarianism"

Keynote Address, Wānanga-Symposium, Waitangi, 17 November 2023
ABSTRACT
Britain’s decision to abolish slavery in 1833 led to the emancipation of 800,000 people in the British Caribbean, South Africa and Mauritius at a cost of twenty million pounds paid to slave-owners for the loss of their human property. Almost simultaneously, four new British settler colonies were established in the Antipodes: Swan River (1829), South Australia (1834), the Port Phillip District (1836) and New Zealand (1840). These colonial invasions resulted in the widespread and violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, even though their promoters had promised to recognise Indigenous claims - to land and humanity - as well as settler concerns. These histories - of Antipodean settler colonialism and Atlantic slavery - have long been treated separately. However,intimate and important connections can be traced through lives, careers, capital, ideas and practices that stretched between the British West Indies and Australasia. This lecture explores these links and interrogates the narratives that have served to distance nineteenth-century settler colonisers in Australia and New Zealand from the evils associated with ‘the First British Empire’ of the Atlantic. How close, it asks, was Antipodean settler colonialism to the slavery that had dominated Britain’s Atlantic empire? And how does our understanding of Antipodean settler colonialism change when we take a wider imperial view?
BIO
Zoë Laidlaw has been Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies since 2018, having previously worked at Royal Holloway University of London (2005-2018) and the University of Sheffield (2001-2005). Her expertise lies in the nineteenth-century history of the British Empire, and her work encompasses imperial networks and governance; humanitarianism; settler colonialism and Indigenous-settler relations; slavery, its abolition and legacies; the imperial state; commissions of inquiry; and the creation of imperial knowledge. Her most recent book is Protecting the Empire’s Humanity (Cambridge, 2021).