[4] Other members brought experience from around the world: Saxe Bannister (Australia), Richard King (North America), John Philip (South Africa).
Hodgkin was interested in a forum for both scientific discussion (of early ethnology, a discipline that hardly yet existed separately from the study of language), and protective activities based on lobbying.
Buxton shortly became caught up in the activist drive that led quickly to the Niger expedition of 1841, the failure of which was a huge personal blow and also drove missionary considerations into the background for a time.
Hodgkin was unhappy with Buxton's published criticism of Elliott Cresson, and the general British disregard for Liberia as an abolitionist project.
King issued a prospectus for the new Ethnological Society of London in 1842, following Hodgkin's view that the humanitarian and scientific objectives should from then on be pursued separately.
[22] Other campaigns included the case of a black man in the Cape Colony accused of stealing from a white man and punished by torture (1850), the use of bonded labour of black children in the Transvaal Republic (1880), and, later continued protesting the exploitation of indigenous South Africans during the time preceding the Second Boer War (1899–1902), which, they said, was often perpetrated under a "guise of philanthropy and Christianity".
[8] Hodgkin's concerns over the indigenous peoples in the Hudson's Bay Company territory in western Canada were pursued both by correspondence with Sir George Simpson, and in the pages of the Intelligencer.