Early Modern


State Papers Online, 1509-1714


State Papers Online is a groundbreaking new online resource for the study of Early Modern Britain and Europe. By reuniting State Papers Domestic and Foreign with the Registers of the Privy Council and State Papers in the British Library, the collection creates a new backbone for research and teaching in politics, government, social economic and religious history. State Papers Online, 1509-1714 reproduces the original historical manuscripts in facsimile linking each manuscript to its corresponding fully-searchable Calendar entry. By overcoming the challenge of matching an individual Calendar entry to the original Paper, State Papers Online 1509-1714 marks an enormous advance in historical research.

Coming soon in 2010 State Papers Online, Part III: The Stuarts: James I to Anne, 1603-1713, State Papers Domestic


British Literary Manuscripts Online c.1660-1900

British Literary Manuscripts Online c.1660-1900 provides an intimate look into the lives and works of Britain’s major writers across two hundred years. From the rise of Charles II to the death of Queen Victoria British Literary Manuscripts Online c.1660-1900 contains complete facsimile copies of author manuscripts including poems,plays, and novels, private correspondence, diaries and journals as well as drawings and handwritten notes. The collection traces the development of literary movements from the classicism of Pope and Johnson to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and the gothic novels of the Brontës. Users can search across 400,000 pages by metadata which includes author, named person and title of the work.


Slavery and Anti-Slavery

Slavery and Anti-Slavery is a digital archive in four series devoted to the study and understanding of the history of slavery in America. Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition is a scholarly collection of approximately 1.5 million pages of primary source documents focussing on the abolitionist movement and the conflicts within it, the anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period, and the debates on the subject of colonisation.




The Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850

An online fully-searchable archive of over 12 million pages from The Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850. It contains 61,537 printed works, many multi-volume, plus 466 serials published during the period, 1460-1850. It provides a comprehensive overview of the theories, practices and consequences of economic and business activity in the West, from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century. With full-text searching across all titles, researchers can quickly access a magnificent library of primary source materials permitting scholars to bring together and forge new connections in the study of Western economic history.


The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926

This collection contains more than 2 million pages of fully searchable content and describes more than 10,000 trials that scandalised society in America, the British Empire and the world. The literature of legal transcripts and trial accounts offers an unfiltered narrative into the daily lives of everyday people. Trials publications may be the best historical source researchers have for examining questions of sex, gender, class, marriage and divorce and raises interesting questions about the nature of celebrity and crime within a given era.