Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin's Critique of Missions and Anti-slavery

The proofs are lamentably striking that . . . public interest is reduced almost to zero. If the slave trade had not been abolished by the generation which has passed away, it is pretty evident that it would be left untouched by the present.¹

So wrote Dr Thomas Hodgkin in 1861, more than forty years into his campaign for the rights of indigenous peoples across the British Empire. Undoubtedly, Hodgkin's disillusionment was justified. By his death in 1866 Britain had reached a new level of racial intolerance, manifested in both the colonial and metropolitan spheres. In that five-year period, Hodgkin himself would be profoundly concerned by the escalating dispossession of indigenous peoples in New Zealand and southern Africa; the savage repression of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica; and the acrimonious breakaway of the Anthropological Society from the Ethnological Society of London in order to pursue investigations predicated on the idea that different races were separate species. In each case, the racism that Hodgkin had challenged throughout his life triumphed. This article takes up the story of Thomas Hodgkin's campaigns for non-European peoples adversely affected by European colonialism, and examines his stance as a sympathetic critic of both the missionary and anti-slavery movements.

Born in 1798, Hodgkin's early life within the affluent and evangelical Quaker communities of first Pentonville and then Tottenham laid the foundations for his enduring commitment to the colonized. Although still 'peculiar' in dress and speech, and wary of frivolity, the evangelical Quakers of the early nineteenth century were outward looking. As such, his community provided Hodgkin with opportunities and connections, as well as the focused determination to use them.² Educated at home by private tutors, Hodgkin and his younger brother John conducted experiments, collected specimens, learned modern and classical languages, and absorbed the influence of family and friends. These included some of the nation's most prominent anti-slavery activists, including Thomas Clarkson, William Allen, the Gurneys, the Frys and the Buxtons. As a young man, Hodgkin had already dined with North American Indians, free blacks from America,

Fig. 1.

'Of One Blood'. Cover page from The Colonial Intelligencer; or, Aborigines' Friend, new series, 3: 27, July 1850.

and former Caribbean slaves bound for Sierra Leone. In 1818 he helped Thomas Clarkson draft a response to inquiries from the infant American Colonization Society. The family's connections to Quaker scientists were equally important to the young Thomas Hodgkin: apart from William Allen (both a leading research chemist and the owner of a thriving pharmaceuticals business), the Hodgkins were close friends with the 'father of meteorology', Luke Howard, and the brothers William and Richard Phillips, founders of the Geological Society.³

In 1816–17 Hodgkin left home to spend a period as William Allen's private secretary. Allen was a founding member of the African Institution and a strong supporter of Sierra Leone. As his secretary, Hodgkin enjoyed access to Allen's extensive library, he helped with correspondence – including to Henri Christophe, the King of Haiti – and benefited from Allen's excellent philanthropic and scientific connections both within and beyond the Society of Friends. Allen also, critically, bequeathed the conviction that scientific investigation served God's interests to the young Hodgkin.⁴

Hodgkin completed an apprenticeship as an apothecary in Brighton, but decided not to practise as a chemist, instead training as a medical doctor in London, Edinburgh and Paris. Remembered today for identifying the eponymous disease, Hodgkin's lymphoma, and establishing the Guy's Hospital Anatomy Museum, Hodgkin also advocated important reforms to medical education, and lectured and published on public health and sanitation. While studying in the 1820s he met and befriended luminaries of the European scientific establishment: James Prichard, Alexander Humboldt, Robert Knox, Baron Cuvier, John Herschel and David Livingstone were among his correspondents. In later years, Hodgkin would go on not only to found the Ethnological Society of London, but to be a Fellow of the Royal Geographical and Philological Societies as well.

After a European tour and two...