About the Project

This research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC), in the form of a Future Fellowship (project number FT110100572) titled ‘Reform in the Antipodes: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys and Early Histories of Human Rights’.

The Society of Friends (Quakers) was formative in the antislavery campaigns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and crucial to the flowering of both abolitionism and an evangelical humanitarianism critical of Britain’s moral conduct in the colonies. Some scholars have lauded the Quakers as the world’s first transnational human-rights movement. There is a burgeoning scholarly interest in the histories of humanitarianism and human rights, networks of empire and the long shadow of slavery in the British Empire. Yet the majority of this scholarship remains overwhelmingly transatlantic, missing the crucial chapters of second-wave British imperialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, post the American Revolution, in the Australasian and Pacific colonies.

In these Antipodean colonies of plantation and settlement in Australia, Mauritius, Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales, the Cape Colony and the Pacific, questions of slavery and unfreedom, liberty, colonialism and frontier violence were urgently contested by humanitarians. These Quaker journeys to witness and document the injustices and abuses of empire in the Antipodes were at once humanitarian witnessing exercises and unpredictable cross-cultural encounters. Yet the terms of inquiry could slip those bounds and moral certainties could begin to unravel. In order to understand of the reach of abolitionist sentiment and action in Britain’s empire, we cannot ignore the southern colonies, and the whole must be told in global context.

The project investigates five journeys to the Antipodes:

  1. James Backhouse and George Washington Walker’s tour to Mauritius, the Australian colonies and South Africa in the 1830s – an overview
  2. Backhouse and Walker in the Bass Strait islands, 1832
  3. Daniel and Charles Wheeler’s tour to the Pacific, including Hawaii and Tahiti in the 1830s
  4. Joseph Neave and Walter Robson’s tour to Australia, including Queensland, and the Pacific Islands in the 1860s
  5. The journey of the 1837 British Select Committee Report on Aboriginal Tribes to the Australian colonies -the journey of a text

Based on archival research drawn from unpublished reports, letters, diaries and published travel narratives, artworks and artefacts, much of which has never been studied before, this site brings these Antipodean histories of dispossession and humanitarian activism into conversation with global histories of empire and human rights.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to several archival repositories, museums and libraries for their generous assistance and access to rare archival manuscripts, images and artefacts. These include the Library of Friends House, London; the British Museum, London; Kew Gardens, London; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the University of Tasmania library; the State Library of Queensland; and the National Library of Australia.

All images and artworks have been used with permission, and we acknowledge that care is required around images of Aboriginal and Pacific peoples.

How to cite these pages

P. Edmonds, ‘Eyewitness to Empire: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys & Early Histories of Human Rights’ website, https://eyewitnesstoempire.com/ 2025, [date accessed].