ABSTRACT
As Victoria ascended the throne in June 1837, the House of Commons ordered the printing of a report on the treatment of indigenous peoples in Britain’s proliferating colonial territories. The report heralded a period of intense discussion of the political rights both of emigrant Britons and of those whose lands they had invaded. I intend to show how concepts of these rights were interwoven in the settler colonies, how discussion of them connected colonial, British and American sites, and how political rights in Victorian Britain were discussed within this imperial frame of reference.
