“Contemporary records unique in range and depth in which we can observe the thoughts, groupings, self-criticism and sometimes flashes of imagination of a growingly free society trying to adapt itself to changes.”
Professor Percy Ford, Southampton University

“The list of topics which they cover reads like a litany of human problems consequent upon the industrial revolution. They lay bare the personal miseries on which industrial progress was made and explain the social and economic thinking of the years between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of World War I.”
Thomas O’Neill, University College, Galway

“In the hands of all professional scholars they are likely to have as profound an effect on contemporary historiography as did Macauley’s monumental work a century ago.”
Kenneth Rose, Saturday Review

“At a time when `interdisciplinary co-ordination’ is achieving the status of The Good Academic Thing, the British Parliamentary Papers are notably in by reason of their ability of serving Education, History, Law, Management, Political Science, Social Work and Sociology.”
Brendan Connolly, Boston College Library

“One of the most significant developments in publishing in recent years. The Parliamentary Papers represent essential source material for both research scholars and students, and are a necessary addition to any college or university library.”
John W. Osborne, Rutgers University

“Indispensable is not too strong a word [to describe British Parliamentary Papers] for in these days of comparative history, economists, political scientists, historical sociologists and many others will need to consult British records on crime and punishment, or children’s employment, or explosives . . . The Select Committee reports provide contemporary, consecutive information unique in world legislative records. The maps, appendixes and other annexes to the reports, so often torn from the average library copy, are now once again in place.
. . . In short the parliamentary papers are, cliché notwithstanding, a treasure trove without which no university library can be first class . . . Every university library should have a set.”
Choice

“It is a notable scholarly service for them to undertake what is certainly the most important publishing project for British history made this century, to be compared only with the publications of the Historical Manuscripts Commission.”
R.M. Hartwell, Times Higher Educational Supplement

“This change from a chronological to a subject organisation has two great advantages. Students and researchers will find it very convenient to have all the significant reports on certain subjects grouped together, and it now is possible for librarians to buy only those subject sets of parliamentary papers for which a demand is expected. For these reasons alone the series must be warmly welcomed.”
Times Educational Supplement

“. . . I think this is a magnificent publishing project, and one which will be a great boon to users of the British Parliamentary Papers.”.
Eleanor E. Magee, Librarian, Mount Allison University

“. . . In our library the Irish University Press series of British Parliamentary Papers have become a basic tool for research in all the social sciences. We have experienced little or no interest in other editions which are so difficult to use.”
Peter Spyers-Duran Director,
Western Michigan University Library

“Anyone doing research in American history or British history in the 19th century must consult the British Parliamentary Papers.”
Arthur Bestor, University of Washington

“I must say it is a most imposing programme and, as a historian, I particularly welcome your proposal to reprint the series of Parliamentary Papers.”
John Bastian, Department of History,
University of London

“The publication by the Irish University Press of the British Parliamentary Papers is obviously an act of first-rate importance for all modern historians. With the belated development of comparative history, it becomes all the more important for historians of one nation to have easy access to basic source materials on social change in another nation; so even American historians, like myself, will find the British Parliamentary Papers of inestimable value.”
Arthur Schlesinger, The City University of New York

“Indispensable is not too strong a word, for in these days of comparative history, economists, political scientists, historical sociologists, and many others will need to consult the British record on crime and punishment, or children’s employment, or explosives. Others will wish to examine the early background to Britain’s approaching shift to decimal currency, as shown in two volumes . . . on Select Committee and Royal Commission reports in 1852–58. Yet others will find the 34 volumes on Australia, the 36 on Canada, the unnumbered volumes on Africa, or the 94 on the slave trade, to be of great interest, cutting across geographical boundaries and subject matter limits. The Parliamentary papers abound in statistics for the scholar who needs data for quantification. The Select Committee reports provide contemporary, and consecutive, information unique in world legislative records; the Royal Commission reports, since commissions outlived the sessions, provide a continuity of inquiry unrivaled in 19th-century Britain. The maps, appendices, and other annexes to the reports, so often torn from the average library copy, are now once again in place so that one may see just what the British knew of the coast near Lagos during the slave trade, or where libraries of Paris, Rome, Dresden, and Berlin were in 1849, and how this information influenced the Select Committee on Public Libraries as it considered London. In short, the Parliamentary Papers are, cliché notwithstanding, a treasure trove without which no university library can be first class.”
Robin W. Winks, Choice, December 1970

“For the historian the most important by-product of British parliamentary government of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, undoubtedly, the parliamentary papers. This huge mass of social, political and economic information was a remarkable windfall gain for scholarship, and constitutes the natural beginning point for practically every inquiry into British history of the period.
The bulk of this source, however, is frightening – some 7,000 volumes of about four and a half million pages for the period 1800 to 1925. And although these papers constitute the most comprehensive and most detailed single source for modern British history they have not been used as much as their importance would justify. Why? In the first place, although numerous sets exist, there is nowhere, not even in the House of Commons, a complete set of the original papers.
And second, the sheer bulk, swollen by the relatively unimportant and the ephemeral, arranged chronologically for each parliamentary session, and inadequately indexed, makes it a difficult source for the researcher to use. Thus the relevant material on any particular subject is almost certainly embedded in scattered volumes over many years. It has been the admirable, imaginative and formidable task of the Irish University Press to make this source material more generally available, and moreover, available in a more convenient form.”
R M Hartwell, The Times Higher
Education Supplement (16 June 1972)

“Each volume, . . . is a delight to handle. The printers and draughtsmen who prepared the original Blue Books knew their trade, too. The reports are nicely presented, well indexed and usefully adorned with illustrations – in one volume maps of Canada, in another diagrams of slave ships, in a third drawings of the harsh practices to which children were subjected for up to fourteen hours a day in the coal mines of Queen Victoria’s Utopia . . . ”
Kenneth Rose, Saturday Review, 20 June 1970

“The British Parliamentary Papers on Africa therefore relate not so much to a history of Africa as to a history of the British in Africa through documents; a historiography in which as much or more can be learned about the Victorian mind as about the record of events taking place in the former British colonies which affected the British and Africans together. This factor is a limitation only insofar as the reader or librarian is concerned with getting Africans’ view of their own history exclusively. The African set of documents could never suffice as a history of Africa by itself, but provides original sources for the reconstruction of Africa’s nineteenth century history through the records of nineteenth century British civil servants. As the IUP editors themselves say, the Africa set “reflects the merits and limitations of the Victorian mind. It provides carefully written dispatches by officials who combined a sense of mission and self confidence with a curiosity and a capacity for detail.”
This “capacity for detail” of the nineteenth century British civil servant is actually a blessing to researchers using the Africa set. The greater the detail used to describe an event, a process, an analysis, etc., the greater the potential for the researcher to gain insight into a particular event. The documents relate stories that are often quite entertaining and enlightening and which are written in a clear lucid style; not the standard kind of government “officialese” one might expect of government correspondence. Newspaper accounts are included (the South Africa Cape Times, for example) as appendices to reports; hearings are recorded; whatever kind of information that might have been relevant in the investigation of some problem identified in the parliament can be found in the Papers.”
Susan K. Rishworth,
African Library Journal, Spring 1972