ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the humanitarian movement that commenced to affect broad sections of the British nation in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It focuses upon the campaign against slave trade and slavery, the spread of missionary enterprise, and the new attitude towards the aborigines’ problem. The idea of the white man’s burden had gained popularity ever since the trial of Warren Hastings and the spectacular probing into the records of the East India Company. Although the missionary movement was loosely connected with the European penetration of non-European continents, in England it was totally dissociated from the government. The indirect relationship between missionary movement and colonial expansion can best be studied in connection with the aborigines’ problem. The same age that felt disgust with the slave trade and was actuated by the urgent desire to confer the blessings of the Christian faith upon ignorant heathens, also broached the aborigines’ question.
