Inquiring into Empire: Imperial Commissions and the Politics of Reform after 1815, launched earlier this month at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre at the University of Sydney, is the first comprehensive history of the British commissions of inquiry dispatched across the empire between 1819 and 1833.
“The British Empire emerged out of half a century of war with this vast, fragmented patchwork of territories, from the Caribbean to West Africa to India and Australia”, explains Professor Roberts, “It’s an Empire populated by diverse peoples, many of them unfree and newly conquered. The great challenge was how to unify these subjects under British law and command their loyalty to the Crown."
Professor Roberts, a leading expert on law and governance in Britain’s nineteenth-century colonies, brought to the book his deep familiarity with the influential Inquiry into New South Wales by Commissioner Bigge in 1819-1821. This, the earliest in the string of imperial commissions over the next fifteen years, set the tone and revealed the underlying purpose of what the book calls “the moment of inquiry”.
“The NSW inquiry became a model for conservative reform,” Professor Roberts explains. “It reasserted traditional social hierarchies in a dangerous colony by re-empowering elites and limiting opportunity for convicts and workers. But it also prompted significant constitutional innovation. It led to the creation of a Supreme Court and a Legislative Council, which became the blueprint for later reforms throughout the empire.”
But as the book explains, these were not necessarily great moments of liberal progress. “The reforms undertaken in NSW were essentially designed to reassert executive power and to thwart democratic impulses. This was a very querulous and combustible colony. The reforms enacted here are fundamentally driven by counter-revolutionary impulses and political pragmatism.”
Professor Roberts also emphasises the darker legacies of the NSW inquiry. “The NSW commissioner strongly encourages the opening of the frontier to free settlers, using unfree convict workers, which leads to the seizure of Aboriginal land and creates a class of powerful imperial capitalists who dominated colonial society for decades.”
The book, funded by the Australian Research Council, is a collaboration between Roberts and co-authors Professor Lisa Ford (UNSW), Professor Kirsten McKenzie (University of Sydney) and Dr Naomi Parkinson (UNSW). Drawing on hundreds of volumes of testimony and correspondence, Inquiring into Empire, complicates the prevailing understanding of this period as a great age of enlightened reform.
“We see a much messier picture of imperial governance”, says Professor Roberts. “The inquiries were frequently overtaken by local politics and elite influence, but they were also confronted with the voices of the enslaved, the dispossessed, and the colonised. What emerges is a dynamic story of reform shaped from the ground up as much as from the top down”.
The authors spent six years trawling through the immense and diverse body of documents left behind by the colonial inquires – over 200 large bundles by their count.
“This archive is extraordinary,” said Professor Roberts. “We found powerful, affecting testimony from every stratum of colonial society — governors and judges of course, but also enslaved people, convicts, women, and Indigenous communities. They all came out to speak directly to these agents of imperial power. Everyone wanted to have a say in the remaking of Empire.”
The book speaks to a timeless story. Across its chapters, Inquiring into Empire shows how even genuine efforts at reform are undone by entrenched interests, political compromise, and the “machinery of power”. The commissions were a “political technology”, designed to gather information while managing and moderating calls for change. “This is a history of how reform is softened or contained,” Roberts notes. “Inquiries like these were often a way for imperial governments to appear responsive, while controlling the pace and direction of actual change.”
That’s a lesson with enduring resonance. In the words of Professor Roberts: “It reminds us that reform is rarely linear, and that official inquiries often serve as much to channel dissent as to deliver transformation.”
The book has been warmly received by historians. Professor Alan Atkinson praised its “serious detail and deep humanity,” while Professor Zoë Laidlaw, who launched the book, described it as “brilliantly argued” and an “essential account of how reform and resistance shaped the nineteenth-century empire.”
For UNE, the book marks another contribution to its long-standing profile in colonial history. As the home of the Journal of Australian Colonial History and for seventy years a centre for scholarship on colonial societies, the University continues to play a vital role in shaping our understanding of Australia’s place in the colonial world.
“This book takes that trajectory further’, says Professor Roberts. “It connects what happened here in New South Wales to the wider machinery of empire, and showing how a small convict colony helped set the tone for imperial reform.”
Inquiring into Empire is now available through Cambridge University Press.
