In 1814 he was appointed lieutenant governor of British Honduras, holding at the same time the rank of colonel on the staff, thus exercising the military command as well as the civil government.

However, Arthur had also stated in an 1816 article that, apart from those few cases he had reported, in no part of the world had he seen "the labouring class of people possess anything like the comforts and advantages of the Slave population of Honduras".

He selected Port Arthur as the ideal location for a prison settlement, on a peninsula connected by a narrow, easily guarded isthmus, surrounded by shark-infested seas.

Throughout the 1820s Arthur had instituted various measures to protect settlers from Aboriginal attacks, including the stationing of garrison troops in remote farmhouses and the dispatch of combined military and police teams into the wilderness to track Indigenous bands.

[7] In February 1830 Arthur sought public input on alternative measures to end the fighting; suggestions included a system of rewards for captured Aborigines, and the importation of packs of hunting dogs to "set [on] the natives as they would a quail."

[6] The centrepiece of Arthur's military efforts would be the Black Line fiasco, which was intended to drive the Aborigines from the colony's grazing land onto isolated peninsulas where they could be controlled.

At the beginning of the Black War in 1826 Arthur issued an official statement setting out those situations that would justify settlers using violence: 'If it should be apparent that there is a determination on the part of one or more of the native tribes to attack, rob, or murder the white inhabitants generally, any person may arm, and joining themselves to the military, drive them by force to a safe distance, treating them as open enemies.

[8] In 1833, Arthur wrote to his line superior, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Viscount Goderich, "I am willing to make almost any prudent sacrifice that may tend to compensate for the injuries that the government is unwillingly and unavoidably made the instrument of inflicting."

However, his concern appears to have been for the perception of his Abolitionist patrons and the home government regarding deaths of women and children in custody rather than for the tragedy of the Aboriginal Tasmanians' lives lost.

At the Aboriginal Establishment's subsequent locations, the litany of pernicious mortality-driving failings continued while Arthur, the Committee and the overseers ignore the everyday prophylactic protocols implemented on convict transports, in prisons and barracks.

Murray – an expert in military intelligence analysis who had served as a lieutenant-governor – wrote, "the adoption of any line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of the Native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government.

From the very start of his administration, he had to deal with the aftermath of the Upper Canada Rebellion and was instrumental in the execution of Peter Matthews (rebel) and Samuel Lount.

He failed to address the issues of fixing colonial administration from the influence of Family Compact, and was replaced by Lord Durham while the 13th Parliament of Upper Canada sat betimes.

He was appointed provisional governor-general, but did not assume office, as he was compelled by ill health to leave India before Lord Hardinge vacated the governor-generalship.

Sir George Arthur, during his administration of the affairs of the presidency, perfected the Deccan survey, the object of which was to equalise and decrease the pressure of the land assessment on the cultivators of the Deccan; and gave his hearty support to the project of a railway line from Bombay to Cailian, which may be regarded as the germ of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, while during his administration the reclamation of the foreshore of the island of Bombay was projected.