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    Policing the empire: Government, authority and control, 1830-1940
    Policing the empire: Government, authority and control, 1830-1940
    Policing the empire: Government, authority and control, 1830-1940
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    Policing the empire: Government, authority and control, 1830-1940

    By Manchester University Press

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2021
    ISBN9781526162991
    Policing the empire: Government, authority and control, 1830-1940

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      Policing the empire - Manchester University Press

      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 acquire certain distinctive features.

      Yet a general pattern to the development of colonial policing can be discerned, albeit one that displays a different temporal frame from place to place. Like their counterparts in England, the colonial police of the nineteenth century had more to do with the protection of property and of the propertied classes, and with the maintenance of social order (and the pax britannica), than with the prevention or detection of crime. 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. Colonial governments aspired to move towards more distinctly civilian forms of policing. This was true everywhere, but within individual colonies the process could be uneven. Resources were limited, and choices had to be made: not all areas of the colony could be effectively policed. The choices were inevitably political, and it is impossible to divorce the changing practices and functions of policing from the evolving politics of the colonial state.

      The frontier, marking the temporary limit of conquest, administration or settlement, was an inevitable feature of colonial life. All colonies initially required a frontier style of policing. In the Australian territories nineteenth-century policing tended to follow a commercial frontier, defined by the gradual extension of settler pastoralist farming and by discoveries of gold and other minerals.¹⁵ In early colonial Africa the demands of commerce dictated that customs posts, factories and trade routes should be policed, but police garrisons were also deployed to bolster the authority of political allies.¹⁶ As the frontiers of colonial administration pushed onwards, policing extended but became more varied in its forms and practices: in Canada, Sturgis shows, new forms of urban policing were being employed towards the end of the century in the major cities to combat what were perceived as emergent social problems, whilst Morrison’s study of the Yukon in the same period shows that a paramilitary police force continued to operate in this outlying region, where the writ of government still depended more upon coercion than consent.

      As settled administration was established over the economic and political centres of each colony, governments commonly sought to isolate the problems of the frontier, leaving such troublesome and backward regions as militarised zones and concentrating policing in the settled areas. The frontier became an area apart, which required special forms of administration and which could not be expected to develop at the same pace as the rest of the colony. The frontier districts of north-west and north-east India, the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, and the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast all continued with a military style of policing long after it had been given up in other areas of the colony. In such regions the colonial state made no pretence of seeking to police communities by consent.

      The initial and often continuing role of the colonial police force as an arm of the conquest state was reflected in patterns of recruitment. Men of the ‘right quality’ were hard to find, and recruits to the local police had to be cut from whatever cloth was available: rank-and-file ex-servicemen, vagabonds and adventurers dominated in Australia, Canada and New Zealand,¹⁷ and added to this motley crew in the African colonies were former slaves and refugees of various sorts, along with a substantial number of men who may have been compelled into service by one device or another.¹⁸ The standard of recruits to the ranks of European inspectors and of ‘native’ constables improved in time but only rarely came up to the expectations of Colonial Office inspectorates.

      The uncertain legitimacy of the colonial state in the eyes of many of its subjects added to the problems of recruiting reliable constables from among the local population. Like the military, the police actively sought recruits from areas peripheral to the colony: the trustworthy stranger to police other strangers was the man required.¹⁹ In some colonies specifically favoured ethnic groups originating from other colonies dominated the police – for example, Indians in Mauritius, Trinidad and Fiji, Chinese and Indians in Malaya, and Sikhs recruited from India for the Hong Kong police. As Howard Johnson indicates, the martial races notion was strongly apparent in the West Indies during the nineteenth century, allied to a firm belief in the importance of policing with ‘other-islanders’. Thus Barbadians were employed to police Trinidad, deeply unpopular though they were.²⁰ These patterns suggest the tenuous nature of colonial control and reveal the significance of imperial prejudices about the attributes of different races and cultures.

      In colonial Africa the West Indies, the Pacific, south-east Asia and in India²¹ race was a crucial element in policing. The structure of recruitment and command in these colonies was based upon race. Gazetted officers were for the most part white, or different in race from those of the rank and file they commanded, and were therefore commonly recruited from outside the colony. Changes to this pattern were slow in coming, and although there were greater opportunities for the advancement of locally recruited men in south Asia, the structure of most forces retained a markedly racial division until at least the end of the 1930s.²² African, Asian and West Indian constables tended to work in a world where those with white skins generally policed themselves: it was a bold ‘native’ constable indeed who would, of his own initiative, have sought to police a member of the white ruling class.

      By contrast, for the European police recruit to any part of the dependent empire from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century the power and authority of empire, underscored by a clear sense of racial superiority, were profoundly manifest. After limited training, the recruit was soon invested by his race and his rank into a position of considerable authority. The young colonial policeman had greater latitude in his daily work than his English or Irish counterpart; his power over those under his command was significantly greater; he could expect responsibility at a younger age and with less experience. Many colonial forces earned an unenviable reputation for excess and high-handedness, and whilst this was commonly attributed to the over-zealousness of ‘native’ constables the European inspectors cannot escape criticism. Even as the quality of European recruits to forces in the dependent empire improved after 1920 the rough image of the early days lingered on.²³

      Failings in discipline within the ranks of the colonial police were undoubtedly less acute than the poor standards of service to be encountered in the many other policing authorities that were to be found in every colony. In all colonies the colonial police were augmented by other uniformed bodies which also performed a policing role. Most operated as distinct authorities, each with differing functions – water police, district watchmen, ‘boss boys’ in the mines, company security guards, forest guards, cattle and sheep patrols, game guards and so on. Each was subject to the control of the colonial administration or of commerce, and all were perceived to be part of the structure of the colonial state (whether directly so or not). The most important of these groups were the tribal or Native Authority police forces, which were responsible for the policing of the countryside in large parts of colonial Africa and India.²⁴ These bodies commonly incorporated local structures of authority – chiefs and headmen and other ‘native’ appointees of the state – and were often under the command of the local district administrator. Minimally trained, poorly equipped, and often comprising numbers of former soldiers whose suitability for a civilian policing role might be highly questionable, the Native Authority police had a low reputation almost everywhere. In every sense viewed by the imperial power as a second-rate force performing second-grade tasks, their existence was often justified as being a valued element of indirect rule. In fact the reason for their employment was more financial than ideological. Other than as a cheap means of maintaining a presence in the colonial countryside, their merits were dubious. Inefficient, unreliable, corrupt, and too often operating simply as a coercive force at the disposal of the local chief, the Native Authority police did little to enhance the reputation of colonial policing, though their actions often bolstered the authority of the colonial chief.²⁵

      Coercion and consent

      Police commanders in the colonies of Africa and south-east Asia, where the majority populations were not of European descent, were little concerned even in the twentieth century with any notion of policing by consent. In his perceptive analysis of policing in Madras, David Arnold argues that the police, although often inefficient, first and foremost served the interests of the state and were little accountable to representative bodies or the community.²⁶ Increasingly the police took over the internal security role of the military, expanding to become the main coercive arm of the state in combating the growing weight of nationalist opposition. Throughout the period of the Raj the police were identified with the interests of the propertied classes, but they paid scant regard to any ideal of the need to cultivate a community of consent. Similarly, in all parts of colonial Africa the ideology of colonial trusteeship and the practice of indirect rule (in its many varied forms) did little to make the police accountable and indeed tended to ingrain the coercive character of policing: in the Sudan, as Douglas Johnson shows, policing never lost its military element, whilst in many other African colonies the gradual trend towards the prevention and detection of crime in police work was not matched by any move towards policing by consent. But with the European settler populations in Canada, Australia and New Zealand the themes of consent and accountability did develop over the nineteenth century as these societies assumed an increasing degree of political responsibility. The difference between the development of policing ideologies and practices in the Old Empire’ of white settlement and the ‘New Empire’ of colonial Africa during the twentieth century was marked.

      Through their coercive internal security role the colonial police in India, in Arnold’s words, serve as a metaphor for the colonial regime as a whole.²⁷ As Finnane argues here for colonial Queensland – a case surely applicable elsewhere – policing played a vital role in the construction of the colonial social order. In Australia, as in India, the police were among the first institutions established by the colonial state, and quickly became one of the state’s major bureaucracies. Senior colonial officials were inclined to give the police a prominent role in the forging as well as the regulation of a new society: magistrates and policemen were the primary ‘instruments of civilisation’, in the view of Governor Maclean on the Gold Coast.²⁸ In similar vein, Grundlingh (chapter 10) reminds us that the South African constabulary were presented as ‘the standard bearers of a new and better order’ by the British administration seeking to establish its authority over the countryside in the wake of the South African war. Policing lay very much at the centre of the ideologies of imperial rule that informed social construction as well as political domination.

      It was a view held by the ruling classes in nineteenth-century Britain that social regulation would help to ‘civilise’ the industrial and rural classes. The idea was exported to the colonies, to be applied to the white lower class of settlers and, with greater paternal vigour and force, to native peoples. The ‘dangerous classes’ of industrial Britain needed close policing, as did those identified as dangerous classes, both white and native, throughout the empire.²⁹ This colonial mentalité was most visibly evident towards the end of the nineteenth century in an urban context – in the towns of Australia and Canada, as well as in those of India and Africa – where we see the emergence of forms of policing that closely resemble those then prevalent in England. Constables in colonial towns walked a beat, or patrolled in twos and threes, covering the commercial and upper and middle-class residential areas of the town. Much urban policing was concerned with minor offences – petty theft, assault, public nuisances and civil cases, and (increasingly) traffic offences. Protection of property and the propertied classes was self-evidently the principal aim of urban policing, and increasingly the colonial police forces adopted modern techniques and procedures in the prevention and detection of urban crime: fingerprinting, forensic testing, detective work and intelligence gathering all became part of the weaponry of colonial urban policing by the early 1900s.³⁰

      It was also in the towns that the colonial police most directly enforced the moral and political imperatives of the state. The urban social ills of vice, vagrancy and liquor were as much the enemy of the ruling classes of the colonial world as they were of their late Victorian and Edwardian counterparts in England.³¹ Whether the East End of London was policed with any more consent in the 1890s than were the poorer areas of Bombay, Durban or Melbourne is to be doubted. However, the demands of the colonial political economy were not always the same as those of the metropole, and this had an impact on the ruling classes’ expectations of the policing of the city. First, legislative controls in these areas frequently gave colonial police greater powers than would be acceptable in London. This was especially so in Africa and India, where the question of policing by consent may have been desirable but was in fact largely immaterial. For example, Nasson and Willis show that pass laws in Cape Town and their equivalent in Mombasa allowed the police to regulate the population of the city closely through the policing of labour registration. In deciding how rigorously to enforce such legislation the police were making an essentially political choice, and were accordingly subject to political pressures. Their reluctance to become involved in the policing of labour registration stemmed partly from the constraints imposed by limited resources, but also from an awareness of the difficulties of policing such laws without a degree of public consent. Second, social morality took on a different guise where matters of race were concerned. It is interesting to contrast the political struggles over liquor prohibition in Hamilton – essentially a ‘white’ city – described here by Sturgis, with the motivation behind the enforcement of liquor laws in Mombasa in the same period. In Hamilton the policing of liquor laws was a matter of contestation on grounds of social morality, and the regulation of liquor consumption required a large degree of public consent. In Mombasa, as Willis makes clear, agitation for the regulation of liquor consumption was directly tied to the regulation of African labour, and the police were urged to act in order to protect the supply of labour rather than to prevent the supply of liquor.³²

      While the metropolitan and county forces in England moved closer to the ideals of consensual policing during the twentieth century, this trend was not mirrored in the dependent empire. Colonial rule in India and Africa simply would not permit such a development: the policing of labour disputes, and then of political agitation linked to nationalist or other anti-government activities, pushed the colonial police into a prominent internal security role. They continued to carry arms, and to be viewed as an important element in the defence of the colonial state: coercion was a necessary element of control, consensus at best a dim and distant goal.

      This was not, of course, how the Colonial Office liked to see things. The evolution of a ‘civilised’ colonial society might be measured by the style of policing required, and from time to time the Colonial Office expressed concern at the failure of colonial forces to keep pace with reforms in Britain. For the most part it was prepared to allow for ‘local conditions’, but by the late 1930s pressure was growing within the CO for the implementation of reforms aimed at regularising policing in the colonies and introducing practices more akin to those then in vogue in England and Wales. The senior officers from the Home Office who advised the Colonial Office in this period frequently expressed astonishment at the nature of policing in the empire, shocked by the absence of ‘modern methods’, by the inappropriateness of the structures of command and deployment, and by the low success rates in arrests and prosecutions. That the standards of colonial forces were not up to those of the Metropolitan Police or the county constabularies was apparent, but this had more to do with improvements in policing in Britain than with any decline in the colonies. The gap in performance between English and colonial police by the 1930s reflected the great gap in resources directed at policing. To some extent the colonial police were always a ‘Cinderella service’, conditions of work and terms of pay rarely keeping pace with local civil servants’ and invariably running well behind conditions in England. But the shortcomings of the colonial police service were perhaps especially acute during the 1930s, when economic depression caused retrenchment in all arms of the colonial administration, with reductions in expenditure and manpower.³³

      More effective reform came in the late 1940s. Good policing, on the British model, came to be thought of as one of the benefits or empire in this phase: but there were contradictions implicit in the intention of policy and the practice of colonial government. In the 1940s the colonial police invariably served the political interests of the colonial state more overtly than ever before, and were nowhere in any real sense accountable to the community. The colonial police were able to carry out their duties more efficiently and with greater reliability, but the nature of those duties remained coercive rather than consensual. The improved policing of the 1940s was to a large extent directed at strengthening the ability of the colonial state to coerce an increasing number of industrial, agrarian and political opponents more effectively.³⁴

      Imperial linkage: making the connections

      We began by questioning the validity of the models of policing that have been used to describe and explain the origins and development of the colonial police. The chapters which follow do not completely reject the influence of Irish or English policing in the colonies, but instead set that influence in perspective by giving greater emphasis to the local context in which policing evolved. From the range of cases assembled here a number of related themes emerge as significant – the importance of the conquest phase; the existence of frontier zones; the continuing paramilitary role of the police; their status in the colonial social system; the type and quality of recruit attracted to the service; colonial attitudes towards race; and the political aspect of colonial policing. It is doubtful whether one could reconstruct a ‘colonial model’ of policing from these elements, but it is clear that the realities of policing the empire were simply too varied and complex to be held within the models of nineteenth-century policing that emerged in England or Ireland.

      The work of the sociologist Michael Brogden has recently turned on its head the conventional wisdom that the British Isles exported models of policing to the colonies, by suggesting that, far from British practice informing and directing the empire, it was imperial experience that informed Britain. According to Brogden, colonial methods of policing disturbances – labour disputes, riots and political protests – have been employed with increasing frequency in Britain since the early twentieth century. The interface between the colonial and the British forces can also be measured by the high number of officers who returned from service in the colonies to take up senior appointments in the Metropolitan and county constabularies.³⁵ Seen in this light, colonial service was itself an important element in the profile of British policing.

      While this brings an important corrective to the study of the relationship between British and colonial policing, it is more helpful to the historian of policing in Britain than the historian of colonial policing. From a colonial perspective Brogden’s view needs further, and important, modification: the empire was a system in which ideas flowed not only outward from the metropole and back again but between the various colonies themselves. In some very real senses imperial policing was part of a single system – bounded by shared institutions and common expectations. Ideas and practices from one colony were borrowed and applied in another; this was especially true both of administrative practice and of legislation. But the most important aspect of imperial linkage in colonial policing was the movement of personnel from one colony to another. The pool of experience that senior officers in the colonial police were able to draw upon was likely to have been a significant element in defining the character and development of policing. By examining these imperial linkages and by comparing the experience of the colonies we may yet learn a great deal more about the policing of the empire.

      Notes

      1     Strickland first makes an appearance in ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’, published in the Civil and Military Gazette, 25 April 1887. He subsequently features in four other Kipling short stories, Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills (London, 1888), and as a minor character in Kim (London, 1901).

      2     Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (London, 1966); The Day of the Scorpion (London, 1968); The Towers of Silence (London, 1971); A Division of the Spoils (London, 1975).

      3     Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (London, 1948); George Orwell, Burmese Days (New York, 1934; London, 1935).

      4     Sir Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (London, 1952).

      5     See, for example, M. Wynne (ed. ), On Honourable Terms: the memoirs of some Indian police officers, 1915–48 (London, 1985); C. Harwich, Red Dust: Memories of the Uganda Police, 1935–55 (London, 1961); L. van Onselen, A Rhapsody in Blue (Cape Town, 1960).

      6     David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986); R. Haldane,

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