The Libraries are pleased to provide you with access to Electronic Enlightenment, a database of 58,555 interconnected letters and documents linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century.

Through EE you can see the ideas and concerns not only of thinkers and scholars, politicians and diplomats, but also butchers and housewives, servants and shopkeepers. With a wealth of detail revealed in these personal documents, you can explore as never before the relationships, correspondence networks and movement of ideas, the letters and lives of the early modern world.

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Colonial State Papers provides access to primary source documents from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The earliest English settlements in North America, encounters with Native Americans, piracy in the Atlantic and Caribbean, the trade in slaves and English conflicts with the Spanish and French are all covered in this database.

Colonial State Papers integrates two important research tools: Collection CO 1 from The National Archives (full name: Privy Council and Related Bodies: America and West Indies, Colonial Papers); and Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739. All documents have been reproduced as full-colour, high quality images, including several unique hand-drawn maps. Limit your search to records that include scanned documents or search all documents recorded in the Calendar.

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