Inquiring into Empire

A new history of British pan-imperial inquiry and counter-revolutionary reform in the nineteenth century.

The first pan-imperial history of commissions of inquiry sent across the British empire between 1819 and 1833. Drawing on the commissioners' extensive archive, this work develops a new understanding of early nineteenth-century reform as a part-genuine and part-defensive commitment to managing change on the global stage of counter revolution.This is the first history to grapple with the vast project of British imperial investigation in the years between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Great Reform Act. Beginning in 1819, commissions of inquiry were sent to examine law, governance, and economy from New South Wales and the Caribbean to Malta and West Africa. They left behind a matchless record of colonial life in the form of papers, reports and more than 200 volumes of testimonies and correspondence. Inquiring into Empire taps this under-used archive to develop a new understanding of imperial reform. The authors argue that, far from being a first step in the march towards liberalism, the commissions represented a deeply pragmatic, messy but concerted effort to chart a middle way between reaction and revolution which was constantly buffeted by the politics of colonial encounter.