Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 1819–1833

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.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; 2. The State of things; 3. Reordering New South Wales; 4. Remaking Caribbean courts; 5. Defending the crown; 6. Liberated Africans; 7. Bonded labour; 8. Slave traders; 9. Reforming Ceylon; 10. Reporting and reforming; A note on sources; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Lisa Ford is a Professor of Legal History at the University of New South Wales and the prize-winning author of three monographs, most recently The King's Peace (2021). Kirsten McKenzie is a Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Director of the Vere Gordon Childe Centre. Her most recent monograph is Imperial Underworld (2016). Naomi Parkinson is a historian of the nineteenth-century British Empire at the University of New South Wales, specialising in colonial law, governance and its reform from 1820-1860. David Andrew Roberts is a Professor of History at the University of New England (NSW) and editor (since 2003) of the Journal of Australian Colonial History.

Review :
'The British empire post–1815 was a vast human phenomenon, built largely on forced labour. This book tackles its complexity and diversity, its tyranny and hesitant idealism head on and the result is a ground-breaking synthesis – highly ambitious, seriously detailed, patient, painstaking and deeply humane.' Alan Atkinson, University of Sydney 'Brilliantly argued, evidentially rich and geographically sweeping, this work reveals how British inquiries into empire shaped both imperial and domestic realms in the 'Age of Reform'. It conjures a compelling human narrative from the archives of the state, one as attentive to the enslaved and dispossessed as to imperial overlords.' Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne