Policing the empire

Government, authority and control, 1830-1940

David Anderson, David Killingray, David Anderson, David Killingray

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162991
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

CHAPTER ONE

Consent, coercion and colonial control: policing the empire, 1830–1940

David M. Anderson and David Killingray

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. Such distinguished authors as Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Graham Greene and Paul Scott have provided us with characterisations of the policeman’s lot in the far-flung outposts of empire, although not surprisingly perhaps, they do not offer a consensus as to the nature and experience of colonial policing. Kipling’s unorthodox policeman, Strickland, breaks many of the rules of British society in India but is very much a ‘protector of the people’, knowledgeable about local cultures, sensitive to indigenous sensibilities and capable of remaining aloof from yet melding with ‘the native crowd’,¹ Contrast this with Paul Scott’s portrayal of Captain Merrick in The Raj Quartet : alien, alienating and alienated, a man at odds not just with the colonial peoples whom he must police but also with the wider European community of which he is a part.² Leaving aside the propaganda of the glories of empire in its heyday as viewed by Kipling, and the unpleasantness of its nadir as seen by Scott, perhaps the petty corruption first surrounding and finally embroiling Greene’s Inspector Scobie in West Africa and the sense of the mind-numbing futility of the colonial service conveyed in Orwell’s Burmese Days come closest to reflecting the realities of colonial policing.³

Whilst these, and other writers of fiction, have seized upon the colonial policeman as a vehicle for exploring the complexities and ambiguities of imperial power and control, colonial policing seems to have held less fascination for the historians of empire. The neglect is both surprising and puzzling. It is true that archival sources on the history of policing are fragmented and incomplete for many colonies. On the other hand, the study of the exercise of power and the establishment and maintenance of authority lie at the very heart of the historiography of empire: as the most visible public symbol of colonial rule, in daily contact with the population and enforcing the codes of law that upheld colonial authority, the colonial policeman – be he a European officer or a local native recruit – stood at the cutting edge of colonial rule. The blending of military and civilian roles in colonial police services tended to reinforce the position of the policeman as the colonial state’s first line of contact with the majority of the populace. The centrality of policing in the wider social and political history of colonialism appears undeniable. Yet Sir Charles Jeffries’ The Colonial Police,⁴ published in 1952, still remains the only work of synthesis and, despite its many limitations, continues to mark the starting point of any discussion. Alongside this account by a former civil servant in the Colonial Office there is, of course, a wide range of published personal career biographies and reminiscences of former colonial policemen. This colourful genre merits serious study in its own right, and although such accounts tend to present a somewhat lopsided and often idiosyncratic picture, they have frequently proved a valuable source for the historian.⁵ Aside from these essentially anecdotal personal reflections, the historical study of colonial policing has remained an underdeveloped field.

In recent years this deficiency has begun to be made good with the completion of a number of research theses and scholarly publications dealing with the history of policing within individual colonies and territories. Some of these have been institutional histories of particular police forces, but most have been driven by the wider concerns of social history, and have been firmly rooted in the local history of the colonial experience. By examining policing as part of broader social, political and economic processes writers such as Arnold (for India), Haldane (for Australia) and McCracken (for central Africa) have added a colonial dimension to English and European writing on the social history of crime and the role of the state in seeking to prevent crime and maintain social order.⁶ That colonial dimension has emerged as distinct from its English counterpart, and at the same time highly differentiated in its various parts: it is apparent that the colonial experience did not mirror that of England, and was not even consistent from one colony of another. Most fundamentally, the collective impact of this work has raised serious questions about Jeffries’s oft quoted assertion that Irish and Metropolitan models of policing determined developments in the colonies.⁷ The colonial reality was clearly much more complex.

This volume marks the first attempt to draw together the various parts of this emergent ‘new history’ of colonial policing. The thirteen essays gathered here share a wide range of common themes, yet the collection does not offer a singular approach to the history of policing: no such consensus has yet emerged. The value of the collection lies in the range and diversity of cases, and the opportunity for comparison that they afford. Comparative studies in this field seem particularly worthwhile and appropriate, for the questions addressed are relevant both to an understanding of the broader pattern of imperial history and to the reconstruction of the social and political history of specific colonial societies.

England, Ireland and the empire: models or muddle?

With the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in London during the later months of 1829, legislation to create similar police forces in the provincial boroughs in 1835, and the obligation laid upon every local authority in 1856 to set up and maintain its own police force, the modem era of British policing can be said to have begun. Although historians have disagreed as to the immediate impact of these directives, there can be no doubt that the emergence of the ‘New Police’ marked a significant shift in British efforts to deal with the problems of crime and social order.⁸

The extent to which these developments were reflected throughout the parts of the British Empire was to be gradual and partial. The conventional, and now long accepted, wisdom is that the development of policing in the colonies in the mid-nineteenth century was founded not upon the New Police in England but upon the principles of the Royal Irish Constabulary and, later, its successor in the north, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Descriptions are legion of various colonial forces in this period which refer to ‘the Irish model’ or ‘the Ulster model’ by way of explaining the organisation, structure and functions of the force. Sir John Macdonald said that he used the RIC as a model in creating the North West Mounted Police in Canada in 1873, although the RIC was not a mounted force.⁹ Killingray (chapter 7) reminds us that in the Gold Coast in 1865 Colonel Conran similarly styled his locally recruited policemen in the mould of the force he had known in his native Ireland, while Finnane and Hill (chapters 3 and 4) state that in Australia and New Zealand Irish ‘models’ were commonly invoked by senior commanders and governors in the reorganisation of police forces until the late nineteenth century. More substantively, Phoenix Park, and subsequently Newtownards, became important training centres for colonial police officers. The apparent explanatory power of the export of such ‘models’ has impressed itself upon many historians of policing in the British Isles. Stanley Palmer’s magisterial study of crime and policing in England and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, draws heavily upon Jeffries, and upon sources cited by Jeffries, to assert that the colonies adopted English and Irish models of policing – an English model for urban policing and an Irish model for rural policing. ‘Both were exported,’ states Palmer, ‘but the Irish dominated the colonies.’¹⁰

But what was meant by such references to ‘the Irish model’? And how do such statements stand up when tested against the actual practice of imperial policing? As Richard Hawkins asserts in this volume, such ‘models’ were exceedingly difficult to define precisely. In most cases the reference to an Irish element in the structure and organisation of a colonial force served to highlight three distinctions not found in the English (or Scottish) police of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries: the police were to some extent – and this varied from force to force – organised along military lines (which meant they were armed), were housed in barracks rather than living among the community they served, and were directed and centrally controlled as a national or territorial force. One or other of these distinctions applied to all police forces throughout the empire until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and persisted in many parts of the African and south-east Asian colonies much longer.

Yet, as Hawkins points out and subsequent chapters reiterate, no colonial force was quite like the Irish or Ulster constabularies, whatever claims may have been made for the influence of any model. Nor was the distinction between forms of urban and rural policing as sharp as Palmer’s neat categorisation would imply. The gulf between the rhetoric of theory and the reality of practice in colonial policing was in many respects striking. Most obviously, whereas Ireland was heavily policed, the colonies were not. Single European officers frequently presided over huge tracts of territory and large, if scattered, populations, with only a handful of locally recruited and often untrained constables under their charge. Less obviously, although many forces in colonial Africa adopted an RIC structure of command and organisation, they did not follow RIC practices in training, method or development.¹¹ Moreover, some colonial forces claimed to be organised on the basis of English models, whilst others were deliberately hybrid. Hong Kong’s first police force, established by Sir Charles May in the 1840s, was modelled on the Metropolitan Police.¹² With centrally controlled forces, which functioned mainly in rural areas (as Peter Robb here describes), Indian policing drew heavily on the style and practice of both the Met and the RIC (rather in the manner Palmer supposes was commonplace elsewhere in the empire).¹³

In short, the assertion that colonial police forces followed one or another model tells us precious little about their history and development, and may indeed obscure more than it reveals. Especially in the early stages of the establishment of colonial control, or in the process of its extension over outlying territories, in function and form the colonial police were often indistinguishable from a military garrison. Troublesome frontiers, unruly peoples and ‘unsettled’ territories required military force to guard, extend and uphold the authority of the Crown and what was often new and alien law. Simply in terms of the small numbers of policemen involved in this task, the policing of the empire – the maintenance of ‘the thin blue line’ – was a conjuring trick of enormous proportions. Of course, it was achieved by police forces which were armed (unlike the police in England), often mercenary bodies, with the army and other quasi-military forces in close attendance to aid the civil power, and bolstered by many other forms of institutional and informal structures of authority, from the District Commissioner and Resident Magistrate to the estate or plantation manager and the labour recruiter. The powerful coalition of interests these forces represented was more overt and direct in its combined actions and attitudes in the colonies than in England, especially in those territories where the element of race played a significant role in establishing and maintaining the hierarchies of authority. It would be wrong, therefore, to assume that policing the empire was much the same as policing Limerick, or London, or Leicestershire.

Government, authority and control

The administrative and legal systems within which the colonial police worked and the laws which they sought to enforce were often significantly different in many respects from those which prevailed in England. To assume that a common system of law bound the empire together is to assume too much: English law was transplanted in the colonies, but that transplantation bred several mutant strains. Colonial legislative codes were invariably hybrids, formed of parts from other colonies as well as from England, these being moulded by the local political and social environments into which they were placed. Examples of this abound: legal codes were taken from the Caribbean islands to Nigeria, where they operated alongside Islamic codes and customary practices in local courts; in East Africa, Indian legal codes dominated the statutes until the 1930s.¹⁴ This all had profound implications for the forms and methods of policing, as Anderson (for Kenya) and Robb (for nineteenth-century India) each demonstrates in this volume. Legal and administrative categories that would be distinct and separate in England were often confused and overlapping in the colonies, especially on the frontier of settlement and control: administrator and magistrate might be one and the same official, the operation of the criminal law a de facto mixture of local customs and legislative codes neither of which was likely to be familiar to the police recruit. Colonial policing evolved as part of these hybrid legal and administrative systems, and so the practices of policing in each colony came to ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables
• Illustrations
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Consent, coercion and colonial control: policing the empire, 1830–1940
• Part I. Policing the colonies of settlement, 1830–1900
• Part II. Colonial policing in Africa and India, 1860–1940
• Part III. Policing the colonial city
• Index