Hodgkin like many other Quakers was concerned both with the
abolition of slavery and the reduction of the impact of western colonization on indigenous peoples around the world. He stood aside from the
Anti-Slavery Society of the 1820s and 1830s, however; the society took a different line on emancipation and colonization in Africa. It refused in the early 1830s to publish his views. Hodgkin began to take multiple initiatives of his own.
Ethnology Hodgkin had an interest in both the
physical anthropology and the cultural aspects of what would now be
ethnology, before the academic disciplines existed. In his role as keeper of the Museum at Guy's, he collected specimens from peoples from around the world. In 1827, in a letter supporting the missionary
Hannah Kilham who was working with West African languages, he published for the first time long-held ideas on "
civilisation"; a Civilization Society in London had been a Hodgkin family initiative some years earlier. In helping to found the
Aborigines Protection Society, he argued that languages constituted philological evidence of man's origins, and should therefore be preserved where threatened; he had written a paper on the topic, and proposed a questionnaire, for the
Philological Society in 1835. For Hodgkin, language was a
racial trait. In Paris around the end of 1838, he prevailed upon W. F. Edwards to form a French society with the same aims as the Aborigines Protection Society; and in 1839 the
Société Ethnologique de Paris was set up in accordance with Edwards's own ideas. This development was reflected in 1843 when the
Ethnological Society of London was set up, diverging from the Aborigines Protection Society by its scientific and linguistic interests, and disconnecting from missionary work.
Colonization in Africa Hodgkin was a supporter of
Liberia in the early days of its foundation; and he compared it favourably to
Sierra Leone. In supporting
Elliott Cresson and the
American Colonization Society, he put himself outside the mainstream of Quaker and abolitionist thinking. When the American
abolitionist,
William Lloyd Garrison, toured in England in 1833, Hodgkin tried at first to mediate between Garrison and Cresson. The formation, however, of the
British African Colonization Society by Cresson had Hodgkin's support, and he found himself isolated from natural allies who were Quakers or physicians. There were personal attacks on Hodgkin from the Garrison camp.
Hudson's Bay Company Hodgkin became involved in campaigning concerning the
Boothia Peninsula and the
Hudson's Bay Company around 1836–37, through his friend
Richard King. King had been on the expedition of Captain
George Back in the north of Canada of 1833–35, and had written an 1836 book, his
Narrative, on it; he advocated a further expedition in the same area in 1836–37, a cause Hodgkin took up. Sensitive commercial interests were involved, as the Hudson's Bay Company's license was due for renewal in 1841. The
Narrative contained a piece Hodgkin had written on the indifference of the company to the indigenous peoples of western Canada. Hodgkin then took up the behaviour of the company with Benjamin Harrison, Treasurer of Guy's, disastrously mixing his professional life with his activism: Harrison was concerned in the management of the company as deputy chairman, and was related by marriage to
John Henry Pelly, the chairman, who had crossed swords with King at parliamentary hearings. Hodgkin's concerns over the indigenous peoples in the Hudson's Bay Company territory in western Canada continued. They were pursued both by correspondence with
Sir George Simpson, and in the pages of the
Intelligencer of the Aborigines Protection Society. ==Work in medicine==