The conclusion reconsiders the flexible role of protection policy in nineteenth-century plans to rehabilitate the British Empire. On the one hand, it served to imprint a vast Empire with the apparent guarantee of even-handed governance. On the other, it served to build new colonial foundations by reinforcing the Crown’s jurisdiction over subject peoples. The flexible applications of protection policy raise the degree to which Aboriginal protection was distinctive in the context of settler colonialism. It shared with other applications of protection a capacity to regulate people’s labour and mobility through law, but its goals of assimilation also introduced a more comprehensive suite of institutional measures for indigenous reform. This is a history that has never ended but whose legacies persist today.