Access Denied

In 1839, the historian Patrick Fraser Tytler complained to the home secretary Lord John Russell about the difficulty of accessing records held in the State Paper Office. There was something “evil,” Tytler argued, about a world in which “the State have turned Publishers and Historians, instead of leaving that task to the activity and enterprise of literary men,—and facilitating their labours by a free communication of their manuscript stores.” In Tytler’s opinion, government was supposed to maintain archives so “literary men” could use them, not sequester records as their privileged source of policy, or even historical, wisdom. In fact, Tytler asserted, the state was not a historian. Such an attitude toward the relationship between government and scholarship overlapped with a growing conception in early 19th-century Britain that access to government archives should be widened to the public, not restricted to government officials.

A growing discourse emphasized that archives of old administrative records should not be the exclusive province of officials because historical records were irrelevant to making policy. A telling expression of this sentiment came in an 1851 article in the Gentleman’s Magazine on the subject of “The Accessibility of Our Historical Materials.” Writing with specific reference to the State Paper Office, the author contended that the consultation and use of the records contained therein should not be subjected to restrictions. While “English history may be guessed at … from other sources,” the author contended, “it can never be written without access to the materials in the State Paper Office.” Still, the author complained about the restrictive conditions of access, under which “no one, without the permission of a Secretary of State, and then for only some definite purpose fully explained to the Secretary of State beforehand,” could gain permission to read the documents in the office. The author contrasted these terms of access with those that pertained at the British Museum, where a researcher “chooses to pursue his course of inquiry in his own way,” with free access to any “materials” desired. But a researcher visiting the State Paper Office found themself “under an entirely different system” in which they were restricted to viewing only those documents which the Secretary of State had given explicit permission and “cannot see anything or obtain anything without inquiry and explanation.” Such distinct access policies, the author conceded, might be defended by arguing that “public detriment may arise” from exposing such papers “to prying eyes” given their utility for policymaking. It was precisely this claim of utility that the author disputed. Old papers were irrelevant to guiding present policy decisions: they could assert “with perfect certainty that a diplomatic correspondence of Henry VIII or Elizabeth (although it may operate by way of historical illustration) can have no possible practical bearing upon public or private business of the present day.” “To subject papers whose only use is that of being materials for history” to such restrictions was “ridiculous,” the author concluded.

Over the course of the early 19th century, access to government records had gradually liberalized, though evidently not to the degree that the 1851 writer deemed sufficient. One wonders whether the writer was satisfied by the decision of government a year later to allow “literary men” access to records without payment of fees, or the transfer of records from the State Paper Office to the Public Record Office in the 1850s, where they could be consulted without prior approval of government officials. These mid-19th-century developments that enabled unrestricted access to historical government records emerged in the context of a transformation in the nature of politics itself. Governing institutions expanded public access to a past now conceptualized to have limited relevance to policymaking while continuing to restrict public knowledge about present-day government activities.

“In order to write even a paragraph in a newspaper on finance,” the Scottish banker Walter Boyd observed in the early 1810s, it was conventionally understood “that the author should be possessed of certain data, certain authentic documents upon which his reasonings may rest.” Boyd admitted, however, that he “possessed … no authentic documents.” Yet, he still insisted that he could reason about “the finances of Great Britain.”

As Boyd explained, “the finances of the kingdom” were governed by “principles” whose existence was not contingent on their written expression. Once known, these Principles could be used in lieu of records to generate knowledge for policymaking. Even if numerical data continued to be written down on paper, records merely recorded the workings of such principles, which operated to shape political and economic relations like laws of motion shaped the physical world, entirely independent from their description in language. During the early 19th century, a language of exactitude characterized by a lexicon of “principles,” “science,” “fact,” and “mechanics” came to be attached to nonarchival methods of political reasoning. Producing knowledge about politics and political economy came to be widely understood as involving the search for principles that were “not the offspring of legislative enactments.” Instead, these principles were “part of the original constitution and of the physical world.”  Therefore, the method for discerning them was through a “science” of “fact and experiment,” comparable to how physicists derived “mechanical principles” about the operation of the universe.

Boyd was writing at an inflection point between two worlds: one in which “data” and “authentic documents” had been synonymous and seen as the fundamental grounds of political economic reasoning, and an emerging world in which the finances of a state could be reasoned about without reference to such documents. Straddling between these two worlds was the figure of George Chalmers, whose career in office and in public life encapsulated the shift. Born in northern Scotland and baptized in 1742, Chalmers studied law at the University of Aberdeen before embarking for Maryland in 1763. Chalmers spent the next several years practicing law in Annapolis and Baltimore in a number of different courts, as well as before the governor, council, and House of Burgesses. Like administrators, lawyers in 18th-century Britain and its empire privileged the authority of written evidence — in the form of court records, published compilations of laws, and administrative documents contained in archives — as the source of factual knowledge.Transcribed and circulated in manuscript or privately printed form, such documents were especially important with respect to the American colonies given the irregularity of official printing of statutes. Chalmers applied these archival methods to the analysis of commercial history. As he wrote in 1780, “abundant intelligence on every subject” related to British America was to “be found” in the “Archives” of the imperial state, and “every topic” related to its “genuine history” was knowable based on what “the State papers demonstrate.”

Chalmers’ claim in 1780 to know the contents of the state archives was odd, since he had not yet held an office that would have enabled him to access them. His access was instead a product of the fortuitous alignment of his political advocacy and the interests of metropolitan administration. Vocal in defending imperial prerogative as a polemical writer and speaker in Maryland during the late 1760s and early 1770s, Chalmers fled to England in 1775 to escape the rising anti-imperial sentiment. There, he endeared himself to pro-imperial officials by publicly defending ministerial policy. In early 1780, as Chalmers was preparing a history of the imperial crisis, he applied to George Germain, secretary of state, and William Knox, undersecretary of state for the American department, for access to government records contained in the State Paper Office, which he hoped to use as research materials. Knox was particularly interested in the use and publication of state papers to advance political views, and during the same period he was actively collecting government documents as he performed his official duties, copying or taking them from state archives into his personal possession. Recognizing that Chalmers’ antipathy to the colonists made him useful to the government, Germain and Knox granted him use of the records in March 1780, instructing clerks in the State Paper Office to give Chalmers “access to such papers … as relate to the said Colonies & to permit him to make Extracts of such as he shall judge proper for his purpose.” Chalmers prepared transcripts and took notes from these documents for his own use and in some cases removed the documents themselves, compiling in the process a massive personal archive of state papers.

 “From the days of Elizabeth to the present … a twelvemonth has scarcely passed away, in which a treatise has not been published, either by ignorance, by good-intentions, or design, bewailing the loss of our commerce, and the ruin of the state,” Chalmers noted in his 1782 work, An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Britain during the Present and Four Preceding Reigns; and of the Losses of Her Trade from Every War Since the Revolution. But these accounts were erroneous, he argued, for they were Based on “delusive speculation,” not “accurate research.” His account of the history of commerce, by contrast, derived from “documents” he had “collected” that “authenticated” with “unvarnished evidence” that the “losses” to British commerce as a result of imperial warfare were merely “temporary.” In Chalmers’ view, archival records added “the authority of experience to the decisions of judgment.”

The institutional arrangement of imperial government was changing from its earlier configuration in ways that bore on the status of official archives. In the immediate moment, these changes benefited Chalmers’ projects. But in the longer term, the appeal of archival methods among administrators waned. In 1783, in the aftermath of the American war, the Privy Council dissolved the Board of Trade and shifted both responsibility for administering commercial affairs and control of the records of the old board to a new Committee of Trade. The Estimate caught the attention of Charles Jenkinson, president of new Committee of Trade, who invited Chalmers to testify before the body in 1784 as an expert on Maryland’s role in imperial trade, and asked him for papers on the historical export statistics from Scotland to the West Indies. In 1786, Jenkinson appointed Chalmers as the committee’s chief clerk, entrusting him with control of the accumulated records of imperial government. Now Chalmers had direct access to official archives, which earlier writers who shared his confidence in the power of records to supply commercial knowledge had not enjoyed. As both a polemicist and an administrator in William Pitt’s governmental machine from the mid-1780s, Chalmers worked in parallel to other officials who also brought early modern practices to bear on policymaking and political debates in these years. Yet, these figures confronted an environment in which there was a shrinking audience who shared their assumptions that claims about policy required references to archival records in order to be considered authentic.

These gradual changes did not cause practitioners of the archival style to vanish from government overnight. But as administrators and politicians showed less interest in their techniques, Chalmers and his fellow early moderns invested in using their privileged access to records to pursue projects directed at audiences beyond policymaking circles. Although Chalmers remained chief clerk at the Privy Council’s trade committee during the early 19th century, the administrative leadership did not make significant use of his archival research. Nevertheless, he continued to draw on the records to indulge projects that he understood as both historical and intimately connected to the practice of politics. In some cases, this meant the politics of present-day policymaking.

In 1814, for example, Chalmers published a two-volume transcription of 18th-century royal legal opinions concerning the colonies that he based on his transcriptions of records from various government collections. By collating and publishing these documents (which otherwise lay “separated” and “obscured” “in different depositories”), Chalmers intended for them to serve as guiding “rays of knowledge” for contemporary British officials “setting out” to “execute” their service to the empire. In other instances, Chalmers located the stakes in the politics of historical interpretation, as with his hagiographic Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, in which he defended Mary as “innocent of the crimes … imputed to her” based on the evidence of “new documents” drawn from “state papers” whose unimpeachable authority allowed for “many old falshoods” to be “detected” and “many new truths” “established” in their place. Chalmers’ intervention into the controversy over the authorship of the Letters of Junius, a series of radical pamphlets critical of George III pseudonymously published between 1769 and 1772, also evinced the melding of the archival and the programmatic: since Junius advocated “anarchical violence” against the monarchy, Chalmers argued, determining the author’s true identity was a question of “political importance” and required the collection and review of “documents.”

But a dwindling number of audiences shared this understanding of the political. By the early 19th century, for example, commercial affairs were increasingly thought to be intelligible through reading publicly available parliamentary legislation, rather than through researching handwritten records housed in restricted state archives. In 1772, the political economic writer Thomas Mortimer had defended the Board of Trade’s archive-centric “political wisdom,” but in 1801 he argued that while an archival approach to commercial governance might have been “well adapted to the infant state of our trade,” it was “by no means suited to the present extensive commerce of Great Britain.” Instead, the knowledge required to govern a mature imperial economy lay in the compilation of a single, “digested,” “complete mercantile code, or body of commercial laws” — replacing the plethora of letters, reports, account books, and scraps of paper that Chalmers and his predecessors at the Board of Trade had sifted through to find authorities for their policy proposals.

Although the past remained a valid source for deriving economic fact, the relevant form of historical knowledge was no longer understood to reside either exclusively or even primarily in old official records.

In the 1810s, Chalmers was still insisting that government “documents” provided “facts,” “facts” constituted “Experience,” and “Experience” in turn provided “certainty” about matters of “commerce.” Other writers on political economy invoked the wisdom of history, but they had a different understanding of “Experience.” The “whole business of political economy” was “to study the causes which have thus cooperated to enrich and civilize a nation,” the writer Jane Haldimand Marcet observed in 1816. However, Marcet elaborated, although this “science” was “essentially founded upon history,” it was “not the history of sovereigns, of wars, and of intrigues” but instead that of “arts,” “discoveries,” and “civilization” — subjects not clearly knowable through archives whose function was to preserve the documentation of these sovereigns’ activities. Within government itself, in fact, a “information revolution” in the early 19th century saw quantitative data become increasingly disaggregated from the archive, collected as documentation of current conditions in both national and imperial space by an expanding army of officials. Administrative investments shifted from the development of policy based on detailed research into old documents and came to focus instead on ruling through what Sir John Sinclair described in 1793 as both a “science” and “a new branch of politics” that promised to illuminate “the real state” of a country’s “commerce” in present time: statistics. Whereas history could still be found in archives, policy knowledge would be generated not from reading state papers but by reasoning in terms of both this new “statistical philosophy” and less-granular understandings of the past.

Excerpt adapted from The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World by Asheesh Kapur Siddique. Copyright © 2024 by Asheesh Kapur Siddique. Used with the permission of Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

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