DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH. 183 



reasons for making a guide to the West Indian papers of the period 

 before 1775 are two: First, a proper understanding of the British 

 colonial empire of that period requires that it, or at any rate its 

 American portion, be studied as a whole, both as regards the imperial 

 administration, acting on all colonies alike, and as regards the con- 

 stitutional history of the colonies themselves, in whose forms and 

 methods of government types prevailed which can not be rightly 

 understood without taking into consideration all representatives or 

 instances of those types. In the second place, the colonies of the 

 mainland had constant relations with the island colonies, especially 

 in the way of commerce; indeed, in the commercial history of the 

 continental colonies there is hardly any chapter more important 

 than that of their West Indian trade. Now, from the beginning of 

 American independence the first of these reasons, on the whole, falls 

 away. The United States enter upon a constitutional evolution, in 

 federal and state forms, in which the West Indian colonies of Great 

 Britain have no share and on which they exert no appreciable in- 

 fluence. The interest of the West Indian papers of the period from 

 1775 to 1815 lies in the contacts — military, naval, and commercial — 

 between the United States, or American citizens, and the colonies of 

 a foreign power, with which the United States was involved in two 

 wars during the period named, one occupying the first eight of these 

 years, the other the last two, while the years between, 1783-1812, 

 were full of commercial conflict and friction, owing to the policy 

 maintained by Great Britain in the matter of commerce with her 

 colonies. For the years 1775 to 1815, accordingly, the compiler of 

 this inventory is expected to take note of those papers only which 

 have a relation to the United States or its citizens — documents re- 

 lating to military measures, naval operations or vessels, privateers 

 and prizes, seizures, impressments, customs, matters of commerce 

 and navigation, and the like. 



Mr. Bell, unable to devote the whole summer to work for the 

 Department, and obliged in any case to return in September for the 

 academic year at Bowdoin College, has spent the latter part of his 

 London time in instructing a successor in the treatment of the docu- 

 ments of this later period and in supervising the beginnings of her 

 work. Miss Lillian Penson, of the University of London, already an 

 accomplished student of West Indian history, has been engaged to 

 perform this service for the Department. When this search is com- 

 pleted, the proposed volume — since reports on the archives of Jamaica, 

 Bermuda, and the Bahamas are already in hand — will lack only the 

 examination of such archives as are preserved in the Lesser British 

 Antilles. 



Mr. Bell has also been able to make for the Department, in Dublin, 

 a summary report upon the materials for American history which are 

 to be found in the Public Record Office of Ireland. The amount of 

 such material to be found there is, as the Director of the Department 



