The Commission of Legal Enquiry into the Caribbean (1822-1826) showcases the careful colonial politics of conservative inquiry into law and legal administration. The commissioners worked to keep planters onside in a successful effort to build consensus for sweeping law reforms. Their inquiries produced a bold (yet widely supported) endorsement of legal modernisation and professionalisation which garnered remarkable bipartisan support that swayed legal reform across the empire. Updating law and, most importantly, creating independent and professional Supreme Courts, formed key strategies of conservative reform here and elsewhere in the 1820s. In the Caribbean, law reforms promised not only to better manage trans-imperial business (by protecting creditors and heirs), they also formed the most important and consistent conservative strategy for ameliorating slavery. In the end these reforms failed because of a combination of penury, indecision and, ultimately, the fall of the conservative government.

This chapter surveys the fate of the commissions in the Age of Reform from the 1830s and traces their key legacies. While the new Whig government took a hard line on some reforms (imposing a uniform slave code on all crown colonies in 1830, for example), an endless series of colonial secretaries, in dialogue with James Stephen Jr and Treasury, prevaricated about others. We show how systematic efforts to reform colonial constitutions and courts waxed and waned in the face of political turmoil, imperial penury, constitutional nerves, and/or waning Whig interest. We explore the complicated transition of the commissioners’ recommendations into partial and often abandoned reforms, ironically, as the ‘Age of Reform’ dawned.