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From the Victorian period to the present, images of the policeman have played a prominent role in the literature of empire, shaping popular perceptions of colonial policing. This book covers and compares the different ways and means that were employed in policing policies from 1830 to 1940. Countries covered range from Ireland, Australia, Africa and India to New Zealand and the Caribbean. As patterns of authority, of accountability and of consent, control and coercion evolved in each colony the general trend was towards a greater concentration of police time upon crime. The most important aspect of imperial linkage in colonial policing was the movement of personnel from one colony to another. To evaluate the precise role of the 'Irish model' in colonial police forces is at present probably beyond the powers of any one scholar. Policing in Queensland played a vital role in the construction of the colonial social order. In 1886 the constabulary was split by legislation into the New Zealand Police Force and the standing army or Permanent Militia. The nature of the British influence in the Klondike gold rush may be seen both in the policy of the government and in the actions of the men sent to enforce it. The book also overviews the role of policing in guarding the Gold Coast, police support in 1954 Sudan, Orange River Colony, Colonial Mombasa and Kenya, as well as and nineteenth-century rural India.
As imperial political authority was increasingly challenged, sometimes with violence, locally recruited police forces became the front-line guardians of alien law and order. This book presents a study that looks at the problems facing the imperial police forces during the acute political dislocations following decolonization in the British Empire. It examines the role and functions of the colonial police forces during the process of British decolonisation and the transfer of powers in eight colonial territories. The book emphasises that the British adopted a 'colonial' solution to their problems in policing insurgency in Ireland. The book illustrates how the recruitment of Turkish Cypriot policemen to maintain public order against Greek Cypriot insurgents worsened the political situation confronting the British and ultimately compromised the constitutional settlement for the transfer powers. In Cyprus and Malaya, the origins and ethnic backgrounds of serving policemen determined the effectiveness which enabled them to carry out their duties. In 1914, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) of Ireland was the instrument of a government committed to 'Home Rule' or national autonomy for Ireland. As an agency of state coercion and intelligence-gathering, the police were vital to Britain's attempts to hold on to power in India, especially against the Indian National Congress during the agitational movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1926, the Palestine police force was formally established. The shape of a rapidly rising rate of urban crime laid the major challenge confronting the Kenya Police.
establishing a professional police force. Glenelg suggested that among the principles shaping the framing of a police law should be ‘The confiding the business of Police to Public Officers paid for that purpose, and not to Constables nominated by the owners of different Plantations, or other private persons’. This stipulation was prompted by the earlier attempts of the planters to
society and economy. They would be both forced and cajoled into becoming a people of brown-skinned pakehas. 6 At the same time Grey sought to repress the unruly behaviour of the labouring and lumpen pakehas who inhabited the settlements and frequented their innumerable grog shops. A single type of coercively oriented police force would accomplish
difficult to uphold. This was reflected in the Palestine police force, which, during this period, underwent dramatic changes in its role and composition, becoming increasingly militarised and reliant on British, rather than local personnel. The early history of policing in Palestine The development of the police force, however startling, did not
Until the riots of 28 February 1948 occurred, the Gold Coast’s police force had played a relatively slight role in the country’s politics. From their inception they had, it is true, attempted to contain local ‘disturbances’, but the acquisition of political intelligence, a role usually associated with a specialist unit, the Special Branch, had not been part of their
commissioners at last agreed to the creation of a paid police force. 51 Initially the force of thirty men, almost immediately increased to forty, constituted a night watch, patrolling between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. Two day constables were appointed in October 1817, and by 1834 there were eleven day police out of a total force of eighty. Their duties extended not just to the preservation of public order and the pursuit of criminals, but to the enforcement of the growing body of by-laws and regulations governing the movement of traffic on the streets, the disposal of
with the drafting of formal police regulations. The creation of a police force, claimed its founder the Count de Frontenac, would allow Quebec City to ‘become worthy of the title which it will surely one day enjoy, that of the capital of a very large empire’. 5 This of course became the role of the British, who, by the mid-eighteenth century, allowed certain influences to remain in the modern police systems
From a law-abiding dependency to insurrection: a failure of intelligence? During the Malayan Emergency the police force was largely Malay while the police problem was fundamentally Chinese. This situation was the outcome of, firstly, the pre-war ideology and practice of colonial government, secondly, the plural society it administered, and thirdly, the cultural
opportunity to explore the institutional intricacies of various ‘closed communities’ including those of the legal system, the press, the government, the criminal underworld, and, of course, the police force. The relationship of one or a small number of central characters to these social groupings is the prime catalyst in so many of crime fiction’s stalwart dramatic scenarios. How many fictional detectives’ marriages fail due to the protagonist putting professional duty before personal commitments? Conversely, how many mavericks on the force risk the ire of their superiors