The Bigge Inquiry into New South Wales from 1819 demonstrates how inquiry in some respects mirrored Britain’s own counterrevolutionary project of restoring social and political hierarchies by sponsoring elites and limiting convict opportunity. But Bigge also modelled the power of commissions to bend their reports to suit local claims. In the course of his inquiries, Bigge was convinced by local elites to recommend the opening of frontiers to free capitalist farmers and pastoralists. He also proposed that elites should have a strong say in local government but was less convinced by calls to introduce an independent judiciary. The evidence he gathered prompted Earl Bathurst’s Colonial Office to compromise by limiting gubernatorial autocracy and expanding judicial authority. The resultant New South Wales Act set the parameters for conservative constitutional reform, which, by 1825, Bathurst planned to roll out in every crown colony in the empire.

The Commission of Legal Enquiry into the Caribbean (1822-1826) showcases the careful colonial politics of conservative inquiry into law and legal administration. The commissioners worked to keep planters onside in a successful effort to build consensus for sweeping law reforms. Their inquiries produced a bold (yet widely supported) endorsement of legal modernisation and professionalisation which garnered remarkable bipartisan support that swayed legal reform across the empire. Updating law and, most importantly, creating independent and professional Supreme Courts, formed key strategies of conservative reform here and elsewhere in the 1820s. In the Caribbean, law reforms promised not only to better manage trans-imperial business (by protecting creditors and heirs), they also formed the most important and consistent conservative strategy for ameliorating slavery. In the end these reforms failed because of a combination of penury, indecision and, ultimately, the fall of the conservative government.

In a brief discussion of our key primary sources, we outline the necessary limits of our own investigation into an enormous and understudied archive, suggest ways in which the structure of the archive shaped our analysis and offer reflections that we hope will inspire future scholars to launch inquiries of their own.

We explore the limits of conservative reform by unpacking the efforts of bonded labourers in the Cape between 1823 and 1826 to mobilise the Commission of Eastern Inquiry against the elaborate rules that governed the lives of people of colour. Hundreds of unfree people called on the commissioners to complain of systemic and personal abuse – more than any other colonial inquiry. And the commissioners opened their doors, recording unfree testimony and following up on most of the complaints that came before them. In the process, they performed a very important function of commissions everywhere – as emissaries of the king intimately supervising colonial governments and forging connections with new and old imperial subjects. Though they went to extraordinary efforts to follow up bonded complaint, Eastern Inquiry into the Cape failed, until extremely late in the day, to report their findings.

This introduction sets up our core findings about imperial inquiry and the British world in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It places imperial inquiry in the overlapping contexts of transforming modes of governmentality in Britain and changing ideas and practices of colonialism in the Age of Revolution. We outline the limitations of previous scholarly understandings both of this period and of the imperial commissions themselves. We also introduce the notion of ‘constructive conservatism’ as an entry point to understanding the vexed relationship between reform and reaction that characterised not only the Liverpool Administration (1812 – 1827) but also the wider context of Britain’s imperial meridian that would usher in a new phase of global history.

The commission of inquiry into Ceylon (1829–31) which reported after the 1830 general election in England is a significant outlier in the broader story of imperial commissions called during the period of Liverpool’s administration. Changing metropolitan politics had enormous ramifications for the relatively new colonial subjects of Ceylon who, even more so than bonded labourers in the Cape, inundated commissioner Colebrooke with complaints about personal injustice and the failures of British rule. Commissioners Colebrooke and Cameron turned these complaints into a report for the times – the most Benthamite, uncompromising and radical recommendations given anywhere. Tellingly, significant reforms were implemented in Ceylon despite the trenchant opposition of Robert Wilmot Horton, former undersecretary of state in the Colonial Office, who, after Liverpool’s stroke, took it upon himself to hold the conservative line as Governor in Ceylon.

It is by comprehending domestic parliamentary politics in Britain itself that the origins of the commissions of enquiry into empire in 1819 can be best explained. This chapter tracks these beginnings through the power struggles that lay at the heart of Prime Minister Lord Liverpool’s fraught period in office (1812 – 1827). As we explore the parliamentary machinations that led to the calling of each commission, we come to a new understanding of the tension between politics and reform that has so long absorbed historians. These inquiries were always more than diversions to control Parliament, even if this was a key goal in their establishment. They also exemplified the very peculiar cast of the Liverpool regime, which had its own part-genuine and part-defensive commitments to imperial reform.

In this chapter, we track the interplay between domestic British politics and empire through the 1823 and 1824 scandals surrounding the deportation of two free businessmen of colour, Louis Celeste Lecesne and John Escoffery, from Jamaica, and the grievances of Bishop Burnett who was deported from the Cape. These cases not only demonstrate the explosive potential of empire in 1820s parliamentary politics, they also bring to the fore a key function of inquiries ‘on the ground’, as the struggling Liverpool ministry tried (and largely failed) to use colonial commissions to keep Parliament (as much as possible) out of the serious business of governing and reforming empire.

Reaction, reform and compromise together constituted ‘constructive conservatism’ and the commissions of inquiry the Colonial Office sent out into empire from 1819 to 1825 were its perfect expression. Men on the ground, impartial enough to pass judgment, but knowledgeable enough about colonial affairs to cut through the noise of local and metropolitan politics, gathered firsthand knowledge of empire. To a ministry intent on holding tight to the reins of empire, this was essential because colonial scandals risked mobilizing Parliament to intervene. But commissions were also sent to gather real information to weave Britain’s newly disparate empire together. The very act of seeking independent intelligence demonstrated an effort to build imperial policy on information of a better calibre. Both political management and genuine reform were crucial to the origins, operation and consequences of the commissions, and together explain the entangled ideology and politics of the early nineteenth-century British world.

This chapter surveys the fate of the commissions in the Age of Reform from the 1830s and traces their key legacies. While the new Whig government took a hard line on some reforms (imposing a uniform slave code on all crown colonies in 1830, for example), an endless series of colonial secretaries, in dialogue with James Stephen Jr and Treasury, prevaricated about others. We show how systematic efforts to reform colonial constitutions and courts waxed and waned in the face of political turmoil, imperial penury, constitutional nerves, and/or waning Whig interest. We explore the complicated transition of the commissioners’ recommendations into partial and often abandoned reforms, ironically, as the ‘Age of Reform’ dawned.