Rate My Professor Zoe Laidlaw

Laidlaw specialises in nineteenth-century British imperialism and colonialism, with research interests encompassing imperial networks and governance, humanitarian activism, settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and the legacies of slavery in Australia. Her key publications include the monograph Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester University Press, 2005), which examines interpersonal communications in Colonial Office records; Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a study of Quaker activist Thomas Hodgkin and the Aborigines’ Protection Society; and co-edited volume Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Inter-connected World with Alan Lester (Routledge, 2015). Additional works feature Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne (University of Melbourne, 2023) and articles such as 'Peopling the Country by Unpeopling the Natives' (2023). As Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council Discovery Projects 'Inquiring into Empire' and 'Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery', she analyses imperial inquiries and the impact of slave-derived wealth on colonial Australia. Laidlaw’s scholarship highlights the roles of overlooked groups like women, Indigenous peoples, and slaves in shaping imperial histories.