This project gathered data about most Commissions of Inquiry into British Colonies between 1819 and 1835: the Bigge Inquiry into New South Wales; the Commission of Legal Inquiry (Caribbean); the Liberated African (AKA Captured Negroes) Commission (Caribbean); and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry (Cape (South Africa), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Mauritius). We copied near-complete sets archival material created by each of these Commissions and reposed in The National Archives (UK). We have used these materials to explore the role of Commissions in post-Napoleonic imperial reform, the politics of information-gathering under the Liverpool government, and how new and old colonial subjects engaged with empire after 1815.
This project was generously funded by the Australian Research Council, DP180100537. Chief investigators include Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson, David Roberts, Stephen Doherty and Zoë Laidlaw. Partner investigators include Paul Halliday, Alan Lester and Phil Stern.
The collection uploaded here consists largely of volume indexes transcribed from archival volumes into MS Excel.
