Aborigines' Protection Society

The Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) was an international human rights organisation, founded in 1837, to ensure the health and well-being and the sovereign, legal and religious rights of the indigenous peoples while also promoting the civilization of the indigenous people who were subjected under colonial powers.

The foundation of the Society was prompted by a group centred on Thomas Hodgkin, with experience from around the world: Saxe Bannister (Australasia), Richard King (North America), John Philip (South Africa). The founders were, on King's account, William Allen, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Henry Christy, Thomas Clarkson, Hodgkin, and Joseph Sturge. Buxton, after the 1832 British abolition of the slave trade, had taken an interest in particular in the Cape Colony.

The Quaker background and abolitionism were significant in the setting-up of the Society. The Quaker Meeting for Sufferings set up a committee on the issue in 1837, at Hodgkin's prompting, and in 1838 backed Buxton's Select Parliamentary Committee by publishing under its own name extracts from the evidence it had taken. It appeared as Information Respecting the Aborigines in the British Colonies; it was drafted by John Hodgkin but then rewritten by his brother Thomas, to sharpen the effect and reduce the references to missionary activity. The Report of the APS in 1838 put the case that colonisation did not inevitably have detrimental effects on indigenous peoples, as conventional wisdom had it, even to the point of their extinction: if the effects were negative, that was a criticism of the plan and regulation for the colony.

The principles of the APS combined "equal rights", i.e. legislation not based on race, with "racial amalgamation". There was no commitment therefore to preserving the indigenous peoples as encountered.

...
Wikipedia