Research Guides: HIST 4300: Nineteenth-Century British Empire &amp; India: Primary Sources

Databases

SMU Databases (requires log on) that focus on primary resources

18th & 19th Century Resources

C19: Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new window
Publications on the Anglo-American world, 1790-1919
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Parts I & II) This link opens in a new window
Titles printed in the United Kingdom from 1701-1800, full-text

Indian Resources

Historical Newspapers: The Times of India (1838-2019) This link opens in a new window
Revolution and Protest Online This link opens in a new window
Examine how revolutions, protests, resistance, and social movements have shaped and transformed the human experience globally from the 18th to 21st century. Includes India Civil Disobedience / demand for independence.

East India Company

East India Company This link opens in a new window
India Office Records from 1599-1947
India, Raj and Empire This link opens in a new window
Documents the history of South Asia from 1615-1947

Government documents: English Empire

Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 This link opens in a new window
1947-1980 -Collection of files from the Foreign Office (later the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and Dominions Office focuses on the political and social history of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How to look for records of Parliament
Almost all the original records of the House of Commons were lost in the fire that destroyed the building in 1834.
HaToRI (Hansard Topic Relevance Identifier)
Github repository for HaToRI
Hansard
The official report of all parliamentary debates
Find Members, their contributions, debates, petitions and divisions from published Hansard reports dating back over 200 years.
UK Parliament: Publications & records
Hansard archive (digitised debates from 1803). These pages include links to parliamentary debates from 1803 and have been scanned from hard copy sources. They are in Xml format and held within a zip file. Each zip file contains one days sitting of debates.
Hansard corpus
This Hansard corpus (or collection of texts) contains nearly every speech given in the British Parliament from 1803-2005 (about 1.6 billion words total).

The corpus was created as part of the SAMUELS project (2014-2016), which was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The lemmatization, part of speech tagging, and semantic tagging was carried out by the UCREL team at Lancaster University in England.

Newspapers, Periodicals & Pamphlets

19th C. UK Periodicals II: Empire/Colonial, Travel, Culture, Missions This link opens in a new window
Role Britain played as an imperial power throughout the 1800s
Times Digital Archive (London, England 1785 - 2014) This link opens in a new window
Archive of the Times, 1785-2014
British Library Newspapers, Part I-VI This link opens in a new window
Regional & local newspapers, 1700-1950
JSTOR 19th Century British Pamphlets This link opens in a new window
Pamphlets chronicling political & socioeconomic issues in Britain during the 1800s
Connect to resource, then click on "Pamphlets" to view

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Religion, Reform, and Society This link opens in a new window
Primary sources of religious & philosophical movements in the 1800s
Church Missionary Society Periodicals, 1804-2009 This link opens in a new window
Publications from the Church Missionary Societies from 1804-2009

Searching the SMU Library Catalog

The following standardized terms can prove helpful when searching the SMU Library Catalog for published primary sources:

Add search terms specific to the country, era or event you are interested in.

Books: Balance basic keyword searches in the library catalog with advanced searches that permit searching by the "subject headings"

Books can be secondary or primary resources.

Search these resources for books

WorldCat This link opens in a new window
Near comprehensive list of books from libraries worldwide, includes links to request materials through ILL

HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
For digital humanities research, includes text mining tools
Current SMU students and employees with documented print disabilities are eligible to access additional materials in HathiTrust. Contact libraryaccess@smu.edu for more information.

ILL (InterLibrary Loan)
Use the ILL Service to obtain materials not owned by SMU libraries

Southeast Asia Visions
The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism.
British History Online
BHO was founded by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust in 2003. Our collection currently contains over 1,270 volumes and is always growing.

Until 30 September 2020 we're making all transcribed BHO content freely available for individual users.
Georgian Papers
Contains digitized images of material dating from the reigns of George I to William IV held in the Royal Archives.
David Rumsey Map Collection
The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. Items range in date from about 1550 to the present.
Digital Colonial Documents (India) Homepage
The Digital Colonial Documents Project (India) is intended to promote study of the rare seminal documents which were influential in the formation of the notions of nation, state and culture during the colonial period.

Centre of South Asian Studies: oral history collection
A collection of interviews conducted in the 1970s and 1980s with both Indian and British people describing their experiences of life in British India