This guide is an updated version of Mandy Banton's indispensable introduction to the records of British government departments responsible for the administration of colonial affairs, and now held in The National Archives of the United Kingdom. It covers the period from about 1801 to 1966. It has been planned as a user-friendly guide concentrating on the organisation of the records, the information they are likely to provide and how to use the contemporary finding aids. It also provides an outline of the expansion of the British empire during the period and discusses the organisation of colonial governments.

Over recent decades, the responsibility for the past actions of the European colonial powers in relation to their former colonies has been subject to a lively debate. In this book, the question of the responsibility under international law of former colonial States is addressed. Such a legal responsibility would presuppose the violation of the international law that was applicable at the time of colonization. In the ‘Scramble for Africa’ during the Age of New Imperialism (1870-1914), European States and non-State actors mainly used cession and protectorate treaties to acquire territorial sovereignty (imperium) and property rights over land (dominium). The question is raised whether Europeans did or did not on a systematic scale breach these treaties in the context of the acquisition of territory and the expansion of empire, mainly through extending sovereignty rights and, subsequently, intervening in the internal affairs of African political entities.

First Published in 1965. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Crown Agents Office played a crucial role in colonial development. Acting in the United Kingdom as the commercial and financial agent for the crown colonies, the Agency supplied all non-locally manufactured stores required by colonial governments, issued their London loans, managed their UK investments, and supervised the construction of their railways, harbours and other public works. In addition, the Office supervised the award of colonial land and mineral concessions, monitored the colonial banking and currency system, and performed a personnel role, paying colonial service salaries and pensions, recruiting technical officers, and arranging the transport of officers, troops and Indian indentured labour. In this important book, the first in-depth investigation of the Agency, David Sunderland examines each of these services in turn, determining in each case whether the Crown Agents' performance benefited their clients, the UK economy or themselves. His book is thus both an account of a remarkable and unique organisation and a fascinating examination of the 'nuts and bolts' of nineteenth-century development. DAVID SUNDERLAND is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.

Volume II of the Oxford History of the British Empire examines the history of British worldwide expansion from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a crucial phase in the creation of the modern British Empire. This is the age of General Wolfe, Clive of India, and Captain Cook. The international team of experts deploy the latest scholarly research to trace and analyse development and expansion over more than a century. They show how trade, warfare, and migration created an Empire, at first overwhelmingly in the Americas but later increasingly in Asia. Although the Empire was ruptured by the American Revolution, it survived and grew into the British Empire that was to dominate the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. series blurb The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. It deals with the interaction of British and non-western societies from the Elizabethan era to the late twentieth century, aiming to provide a balanced treatment of the ruled as well as the rulers, and to take into account the significance of the Empire for the peoples of the British Isles. It explores economic and social trends as well as political.

This volume discusses a short history of British Colonial policy. With all its faults the book represents much reading and some thought. In writing what is, to some extent, a history of opinion, it has been impossible altogether to suppress my own individual opinions. I trust, however that I have not seemed to attach importance to them. In dealing with the later periods, I remembered Sir Walter Raleigh's remark on the fate which awaits the treatment of contemporary history; but obscurity may claim its compensations, and atleast I am not conscious of having written under the bias of personal or party prejudice.

The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.

A dramatic history of the British public's confrontation with the iniquities of nineteenth-century colonial rule. James Epstein uses the trial of the first governor of Trinidad for the torture of a freewoman of color to reassess the nature of British colonialism and the ways in which empire troubled the metropolitan imagination.