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.

‘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