Promethean Fire: Trusteeship and Free Labour

Abstract

The struggle against slavery and the protection of aboriginal rights apparently had its own reward. But in a society yet to come to a full realization of its own needs and the demands of its interests, such humanitarian assumptions as human rights were sometimes academic, and were often sorely tested and fraught with their own contradictions. The manifestation of these contradictions, specifically how they were played out among the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) and the Aborigines Protection Society (APS), on issues of trusteeship and the ideology of free labour, and their unforeseen but, nevertheless, critical implications for colonialism, is the central question discussed in this paper.


(The Journal of Cultural Studies: 2001 3(2): 549-565)