David Campion






Highways of Empire, MacDonald Gill, Empire Marketing Board, 1927 © National Archives of Britain

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THE BRITISH EMPIRE ONLINE


ONLINE PRIMARY SOURCES AND RELATED WEBSITES

Watzek Library's Subject Research Guide for History and Digital Primary Sources contain hundreds of online research resources searchable by title and subject.

Colonial Film: Detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British Empire. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse by country, date, topic, or keyword.

Institute of Commonwealth Studies: This research center at the University of London has dozens of useful links for researchers and students.

British Empire & Commonwealth Collection: A collection of objects, artworks, photographs, films, papers, and sound recordings maintained by the Bristol Archives. Items were donated by British people who lived and worked in many parts of the former empire and Commonwealth and reflect their occupations and interests.

BBC Archive: An online archive of hundreds of film and radio recordings of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) dating back to the 1930s.

British Pathé: a producer of newsreels and documentaries in Britain from 1910 until 1970. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. This collection of newsreels and films is fully digitised and available online.

Digital South Asia Library: Information about contemporary and historical South Asia including full-text documents, statistical data, electronic images, cartographic representations, and language instruction.

Eastern Encounters: Four centuries of paintings, photographs and manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent in Britain's Royal Collections Trust.

Sarmaya: Online Museum of South Asian history, cartography, photography, culture and art.

The British Library: A catalogue of thousands of documents and scanned images relating to the British Empire from the library's vast collections.

Hansard 1803-2005: Hansard is the official publication of the proceedings of the British Parliament. This database contains digitised editions of Commons and Lords Hansard, the Official Report of debates in Parliament.

National Archives of India: The repository of the non-current records of the Government of India holding them in trust for the use of administrators and scholars. Originally the Imperial Record Department founded in 1891 and transferred to New Delhi in 1926.

Royal Geographical Society: Founded in 1830, the RGS has sponsored many missions of scientific and geographic exploration throughout the British Empire and other parts of the world (especially in sub-Saharan Africa the polar regions).

The Gazette Online: Official Newspapers from London, Edinburgh, and Belfast.

Royal Photographic Society: Founded in 1853 with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as patrons, the Society's mission today, as in 1853, is "to promote the Art and Science of Photography".

British Empire Links: Contains links to institutes, online courses, and data relating to the British Empire.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A database with information on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly transported over twelve million Africans to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Prize Papers Project: Documents and artifacts that trace the daily lives of people around the globe in the time of European colonial expansion and resistance. These documents were impounded by the Admiralty High Court of the Royal Navy between 1652 and 1815 and are currently held in the UK National Archives.

Legacies of British Slave-ownership: A database tracing the ways through which the wealth of slave labor in the British Empire was transferred to Metropolitan Britain. Sponsored by University College London and the Hutchins Center at Harvard.

Institute for British and Irish Studies: An Internet clearinghouse run by the University of Southern California listing electronic resources in British and Irish Studies.

Black Cultural Archives: Founded in 1981 and located in Brixton, London, the BCA's mission is to collect, preserve and celebrate the heritage and history of black people in the United Kingdom.

Victoria Research Web and Victorian Web both contain useful links for research on the British Empire.

Views of the Famine: A catalogue of English and Irish newspaper articles and illustrations relating to the Irish famine of 1845-49.

Archives of Parliament: An electronic catalogue containing descriptions of around three million records from the archives of Parliament.

British Cabinet Papers: This collection curated by the National Archives of Britain, contains cabinet papers for the following subjects: war and the politics of defence; empire, commonwealth and de-colonisation; diplomacy and foreign relations; finance and the economy; industry, agriculture and commerce; infrastructure, energy and natural resources; law and society: and welfare, social security and education.

Early English Books Online (EEBO): Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

Eighteenth-century Collections Online (ECCO): Contains over 180,000 titles including books, pamphlets, essays, and broadsides published in Britain and abroad during the eighteenth century in English and other languages.

Nineteenth-century Collections Online (NCCO): A resource for 19th century studies. Collections are sourced through partnerships with major world libraries as well as specialist libraries. Content includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more.

The Times Digital Archive: Full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page of The Times of London from 1785 through 2007. Each entire newspaper is held, with all articles, advertisements, illustrations, and photos divided into categories. Subject indices can help locate relevant articles.

Gerritsen Collection: The largest online resource for documents and primary sources relating to women's history (access only from LC server).

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy: Documents relating to foreign policy of the Irish Free State between 1923 and 1932. This site is sponsored by the National Archives of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, and the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Ireland.

DIPPAM: Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration. An online virtual archive of documents and sources relating to the history of Ireland and its migration experience from the late 18th to the late 20th centuries.

Proceedings of the Old Bailey: A fully searchable online database containing the records of nearly 200,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court. The largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published.

Convict Transportation Registers Database: This database sponsored by the Queensland State Library in Australia contains data from 1787 to 1867 compiled from the British Home Office (HO) records. You can find details for over 123,000 of the estimated 160,000 convicts transported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries including names, term of years, transport ships, and more.

Digital Panopticon: A consortium of British and Australian universities allows for the search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the British Empire.

ANZAC Commemorative Site: This official site of the Government of Australia Department of Veterans Affairs contains information about the Australian and New Zealand forces in the Dardanelles Campaign of the First World War. For other empire war memorials see the Somme Association of Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Founded in 1917 as the Imperial War Graves Commission, the CWGC maintains the graves and memorials of over 1.7 million servicemembers from Britain and the British Commonwealth (and former Empire) in over 2500 cemeteries around the world. The CWGC also contains an online database of military records of war dead as well as locations of war graves and commemorative sites.

High resolution images of British imperial architecture in India, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Singapore, Penang (Malaysia), and various works in the "Moghul Style" (courtesy of Victorian Web).

Indian Independence: Partition of India and Pakistan: Government documents relating to the partition of India and Pakistian from the British Library.

Old Maps of India: Contains antique maps of the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Indian Ocean area, and regions and localities.

Historical maps of India: Contains antique maps of towns and cities in British India from 1893 to 1924.

British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA): This UK organization raise funds to maintain British gravesites in South Asia and is a valuable resource for family research and historians of British India.

Rudyard Kipling Society: Photographs, biographical data, literary selections, and commentary from Anglo-India's greatest writer.

Harappa: Educational website with hundreds of articles, photos, lithographs, and postcards from British India.

Sources related to Imperialism: Imperialism: analyses, motives & attitudes, celebrations & objections; India under British rule.

Sources related to Islamic History: Sufism, Islamic nationalism, Islam & liberal democracy, Islam & 19th century European imperialism, maps.

Sources related to Nineteenth-century Britain: Radicalism, liberal reform, social class, Ireland, Victorian sensibility, Victorian literature.

Sources related to India since 1900: The Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi, British policy in India in the 20th century.

Sources related to Decolonization: Retreat from Empire, the Non-Aligned Movement.

Sources related to general Indian History: The Mughal Empire, Western expansion, Indian nationalism, India since Independence, Pakistan since Independence.

Prof. Campion's other course directories of online resources: HIST 217 Modern South Asia, HIST 224 Modern Britain, HIST 400 Modern Ireland, HIST 450 The Victorians, HIST 450 The British Raj



Created by campion@lclark.edu | Updated October 2024