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.

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.

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

The theories of rights articulated in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were innovative in their own time and have exerted widespread influence ever since, but they were marked by profound contradictions that spurred generations of critical engagements. This chapter offers an explanation for these dynamics by considering the social position occupied by rights theorists within the Americas. It begins with the British and Spanish American independence movements, considering the roles of universalist and particularist rights claims within the ideologies of the movements’ European-descended leadership. Next, it explores how, in the instances where Americans that occupied less privileged social positions took over the leadership of struggles for independence, the kinds of rights claimed, the grounds upon which these rights were claimed, and the range of persons on behalf of whom rights were claimed varied in such a manner as to reflect the difference of leadership. Finally, it traces the ways that Americans initially excluded from enjoyment of the rights claimed by the independence movements and enumerated in the Americas’ early constitutions sought both recognition as equal rights-bearers and revisions to the rights that they and other Americans bore over the course of the nineteenth century.

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Steamships removed the message speed limit imposed by horses and sails, and telegraphy made communication almost instantaneous. Top state sizes expanded accordingly. Graphs superimpose the growth–decline curves of major post−1800 Engineer Empires. Britain became the largest empire ever (24% of world dry land area), but it lasted at more than half of its maximum size only for 110 years, comparable to nomad Xiongnu. State collapse in China also made Britain briefly the most populous of the world, due to its control of India. For most of the Engineer period Russia has been the largest and China (Qing and People’s Republic) the most populous. India’s population surpassed China’s in 2023. At the 1925 peak of European domination, 64% of Earth’s dry land area was ruled from Europe. It is now down to 21%, mainly Siberia. But European-stock Russia, USA, Canada, Brazil, and Australia remain part of the top seven, along with China and India. Population proportions differ. Since 1800, six to ten states have held more than 2% of Earth’s dry land area. Every half-century, three to four have entered or exited this category. By this pattern, 2000−2050 has been unusually quiet, up to now.

This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

In 1823 and 1824, two newspaper editors, James Silk Buckingham and George Greig, were subjected to extrajudicial banishment after their respective newspapers were deemed dangerous influences on colonial society in Bengal (Buckingham) and the Cape of Good Hope (Greig). There are important resonances in the way in which these two separate episodes attracted controversy over the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of colonial government and the practice of using state-sanctioned banishment against dissenting political voices. They were also taken up in similar ways by British reformers who sought to embarrass conservatives at home by linking political struggles in the metropole with those of the imperial periphery. As a result, the cases raise legal and constitutional questions over personal liberty, state security, and subjecthood that extended far beyond their original colonial contexts.