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.

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.