Williams2003 State Exception Modern Policing

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A state of permanent exception: The Birth of Modern

Policing in Colonial Capitalism
Randall Williams
a
Research Analyst, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union
(HERE)
Published online: 04 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: Randall Williams (2003) A state of permanent exception: The Birth of Modern Policing in Colonial
Capitalism, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 5:3, 322-344, DOI: 10.1080/1369801032000135602
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RIIJ1369801032000135602 (JB/D) Page 322 Tuesday, October 28, 2003 9:17 AM
articles A STATE OF P E R M ANE NT E X C E P T I O N

Th e Birth o f Mo d e r n P o licin g in C o lo n ia l C a p ita lis m
Downloaded by [Stony Brook University] at 07:23 17 October 2014
Ran dall Wi l l i a m s
Research Analyst, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International
Union (HERE)
The London Metropolitan Police was established in 1829. Dominant

colonial historical accounts presume that the formation of this modern police force
capitalism was a response to changing conditions in forms and levels of criminal activity
and the inadequacy of existing means of suppression in and around the
crime
London metropolitan area. Counter-explanations focus on the economic and
Ireland social upheavals wrought by accelerated industrial production. This essay
proposes a different explanation by examining the broader context out of
London which various ideas for a new concept of police emerged in the late eighteenth
Metropolitan and early nineteenth centuries among Atlantic political economists, commer-
Police
cial theorists, colonial administrators and parliamentarians. Decisive in the
political shaping of this novel force of repression in London were the confrontations
economy encountered, the experiments undertaken, and the discourse of crime that
emerged out of colonial territories, particularly in that most proximate of
world systems ‘alien’ terrains, Ireland. Conditions in Ireland served as the basis upon which
new conceptions of policing and repression began to circulate throughout the
British Empire. Contrary to alternative policing histories which have assumed
that two primary police forms emerged in the early nineteenth century, the
metropolitan and the colonial, this essay argues that these forms were of like
origin. The institution of modern policing was colonial in form, whether
interventions Vol. 5(3) 322–344 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1369801032000135602
THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 323

Randall Williams
instantiated in colonial outposts or inside the metropole. There was but one
model of policing that emerged in the early nineteenth century, despite
significant variation owing to local and national conditions, because each
particular form was bound up in a project of reshaping forms of capitalist
circulation (of goods and bodies) rendered obsolete by colonial expansion.
New forms of repression were the product of resistances to a colonial
capitalism that was remaking the world inside and outside England.
1 Marx is here Security is the supreme social concept of civil society; the concept of
responding to Article the police.
8 of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man,

(Marx 1978: 43) 1
which reads: ‘Security
consists in the Eventually a new juridical function must be formed that is adequate to
protection afforded by
the constitution of Empire. Courts will have to be transformed gradu-
society to each of its
members for the ally from an organ that simply decrees sentences against the
preservation of his vanquished to a judicial body or system of bodies that dictate and
person, his rights, and sanction the interrelation among the moral order, the exercise of police
his property’ (cited in
Marx 1978: 43). action, and the mechanism legitimating imperial sovereignty.
This kind of continual intervention, then, which is both moral and
military is really the logical form of the exercise of force that follows
from a paradigm of legitimation based on a state of permanent excep-
tion and police action. Interventions are always exceptional even
though they arise continually; they take the form of police actions
because they are aimed at maintaining an internal order. In this way
intervention is an effective mechanism that through police deploy-
ments contributes directly to the construction of the moral, normative,
and institutional order of Empire.
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 38)
1 Histories of the moder n police: from crisis to exception
The Metropolis Police Improvement Bill was introduced into the British
House of Commons on 15 April 1829. A series of similar police reform bills
had been summarily rejected since as far back as 1785. This bill, however,
passed through parliament with virtually no discussion and on 19 June 1829
received royal consent – opposition would be waged elsewhere. By September
of that same year, the London Metropolitan Police appeared on the street for
the first time in history. This momentous event is frequently assumed to have
inaugurated the ‘birth’ of modern policing in the form of a regularized, paid
professional police force. In this essay I want to return to the historical origins
of modern policing when the institutionalization of a visible force of
professional policemen began throughout the imperial world. What I offer in
interventions – 5:3 324
this account is a systemic perspective that understands innovations in policing

as not only reactive or responding to a crisis, but also strategic and active,
developed in excess of, or ex-centric to, the conditions of crisis normally
assumed to have caused innovations in policing. The reshaping of class
warfare was in part a response to a series of crises, but it also involved
something more of an appropriation of crisis-discourse in the service of
forging a ‘response’ that was not necessarily intended to redress immediate
conditions of crisis. The crises in England at the time of the adoption of the
Metropolis Police Improvement Bill did not in and of themselves necessitate
the reorganization of policing that was implemented in 1829 (or those
‘national’ forms generated in 1839 and again in 1856). Rather, the particular
form designed drew upon a new calculus of repression that had been deeply
transformed by emergent and expanding forms of colonial warfare and
compromised attempts to secure hegemonic colonial domination. The
emphasis on the cultural restructuring of the working classes in the metrop-
olis through increased state vigilance, control, observation and moral refor-
mation was derived largely from the desire to direct and structure future
movements of proletarians (both organized and disorganized), as learned
from and anticipated by experiences and techniques of colonial control and
subjugation in contexts where the legitimacy of the state confronted perma-
nent and growing opposition. Police reform served as an important catalyst
for conceiving and effecting new forms of state, and my hope is that by
returning to this period of emergence for modern colonial policing, with its
divergent but interlocking forms in Ireland and England, we can enrich our
understanding of contemporary neo-colonial forms of control and discipline
in which the police, the criminal and the ‘dangerous classes’ have been largely
naturalized beyond historical recognition.
I thus begin in section 2 by tracking how the idea of the new police took
shape in England, not as a way to determine its exclusive origin, but to get a
sense of how the discourse of crime was marked by an excess out of all
proportion to actually existing conditions of domestic crisis. This involves
tracking how the many different ideas of policing were formulated, amended,
and reformulated by political economists, commercial theorists, colonial
administrators and parliamentarians from the mid-eighteenth century
forward. We know that the criminalization of the laboring poor was a
decisive factor in garnering widespread elite and middle-class support for an
idea which had long been stymied on grounds that it was an institution
antithetical to liberty and democracy. However, what is less commonly
discussed is how this process of criminalization took its cues and ultimate
shape from contemporaneous, expansionist attempts to control and dominate
colonial subjects and colonized nations. Thus in section 3 I attempt to locate
the critical source for this excessive supplement by attending to the alarming
reports of colonial disorder, especially as they sought to create an exceptional

Randall Williams
difference in the nature of violence in Ireland. I take the manufacture of an

essential Irish difference around the question of violence at this historical
conjuncture to be central to the reconceptualization of crime in the metropolis
and the subsequent refashioning of the architectonics of modern repression
in both the metropolitan and colonial territories. My emphasis on Ireland as
the primary colonial laboratory for the development of modern policing owes
not only to the fact of prolific traffic between England and Ireland, but also
to the peculiar crisis of alien rule and state legitimation, which had profound
effects on the transformation of hegemonic strategies of domination. Indeed
Ireland was repeatedly cast as a state of permanent exception for which it
was deemed necessary
to grant the intervening authority the capacity to define, every time in an excep-
tional way, the demands of intervention and the capacity to set in motion the forces
and instruments that in various ways [could] be applied to the diversity and the
plurality of the arrangements of crisis. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 16–17)
In the final section, I will look at the arrangement of crises by bringing

together the analysis of criminalization in England and Ireland as figured
through the systemic context of colonial capitalism. It is within this wider
administrative context that the institutional innovations of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries in Ireland, England and elsewhere can be
understood as having been facilitated and limited by the existing capacities
of the imperial state to regulate and police the growing empire. I submit that
the question of state capacity and subsequent restructuring of the state form
cannot be reduced to problems of crime and disorder (conventionally under-
stood), class interest (narrowly construed), or industrialization. Rather, we
need to think the question of modern policing as a critical strategic maneuver
in the transformation of national techniques of governance into an inter-
national network of centralized state powers. And for this passage to the
modern, the power to rule over the (colonial) exception and the capacity to
deploy police force will serve as our guiding principles, for, as Hardt and
Negri say of contemporary police activities, ‘the legitimacy of the imperial
ordering supports the exercise of police power, while at the same time the
activity of global police force demonstrates the real effectiveness of the
imperial ordering’ (ibid.: 17)
2 The new science of police and the delirium of capital
The idea for a ‘public police’ had been circulating among political econo-
mists in Britain, at least since the mid-eighteenth century (in the works of
Blackstone, Ferguson, Robertson, Smith, etc.). Adam Smith’s now famous
2 I use the term Wealth of Nations first appeared as ‘Lectures on police’, and the intellectual
‘commercial theorists’ idea of the police was considered central to questions of political economy
here and elsewhere to
refer to those scholars and the role of the state in achieving the first principle of ‘Moral and
whose formulations Political Science’: ‘wealth comes from inequality’ (Ferguson). The state was
explicitly increasingly called upon in these treatises to take up the tasks of maintaining
acknowledge their
class allegiance and
order and to develop new techniques of social ordering to keep pace with
business interests. the massive expansion of capital circulation. A world capitalist system was
Colquhoun, who is in the making, and the successful reproduction of such a system required a
here treated as
reconceptualization of the state within which the ‘police’ would need to play
exemplary in this
regard, states that he an increasingly important role. It is important to note, however, that these
approaches the political economists did not explicitly single out the working classes as the
subject of crime in the object, or exclusive target, of control for the new police. For these theoreti-
metropolis ‘with the
mind of a man of cians, the working classes as producers of value required ‘right guidance’,
business’ and not so much as a repressive function but as a means of securing the efficient
conceives his audience organization of production. What may have tempered the conception of the
to share such interests
(1969 [1806]: 600).
police as a repressive force was the recognition that labor was the producer
This is of course not to of all value. At the same time, however, it was conceived that the produc-
imply that ‘political tivity of labor was dependent upon both the stratification of laborers
economists’ do not
(Smith’s division of labor principle) and the inequality of wealth distribution
share such allegiances,
but rather to suggest (Ferguson’s first principle). We can glean from these contravening principles
that how they that ‘right guidance’ would have to entail some sort of mechanisms to force
conceive of their acceptance of inequality and stratification, and yet these political economists
function as scholars
and/or advocates would leave the question of economic disparities up to nature. Commercial
affects the way they theorists would not, however, leave this lacuna of repression in invisible
depict and evaluate hands.2
current socio-
economic crises.
While these ideas of political economy were taking shape among (prim-
arily) Scottish intellectuals, the material practice of private policing in
3 As Colquhoun
declares at the outset
England was undergoing dramatic changes led by business organizations
of his Treatise: ‘Police such as the West India Merchants’ Committee. For these business collectives
in this country may be the function of the police was more explicitly one of the repressive control of
considered as a new
the laboring poor. For business interests it was the work of the Scottish
science; the properties
of which consist not in textile owner Patrick Colquhoun (advocate for the West Indies merchants)
the Judicial powers which most adequately theorized a new science of police.3 In Colquhoun’s
which lead to conception, the idea of the working classes as producers of value was subor-
punishment, and
which belong to dinate to the idea of the working classes as a teeming mass of criminality: ‘the
magistrates alone; but chief object of this class being plunder alone’ (Colquhoun 1969 [1806]: 421).
in the prevention and In this vitriolic figuring of the working classes, the super-exploited poor were
detection of crimes,
and in those other
considered primarily as producers of idleness, drunkenness and disorder, not
functions which relate value. This was the insidious beginnings of a ‘new police science’, not
to internal regulations altogether unrelated to the general principles of political economy, but calling
for the well ordering
forth a significant (and explicit) reformulation of the function which a ‘public
and comfort of civil
society’ (1969 [1806]: police’ force would serve. Colquhoun’s conception of the need for a new
i). police took as its object and raison d’être the active repression of the essential

Randall Williams
criminality of the working classes – in particular their ‘criminal’ attempts to

organize themselves on behalf of workers against merchants and industrial-
ists. It was the success of this class warfare vision that made a critical
difference in the ultimate acceptance of the police idea which led to the
creation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. As social historian Peter
Linebaugh has written: ‘If a single individual could be said to have been the
planner and theorist of class struggle in the metropolis it would be [Patrick
Colquhoun]’ (1992: 425).
As the primary architect of a policing form that wedded the private and
the public (the Thames River Police), Colquhoun can be said to have forged
the conceptual conditions necessary for mobilizing support for an idea which
had to overcome widespread opposition from working, middle and landed

elite classes together. Opposition to the establishment of a centralized police
force in the ‘home of liberty’ led to the repeated defeat of police bills from
1785 up until the smooth passage of 1829. What ultimately made the
difference between the rejection of a new police (from 1785 to 1828) and its
subsequent adoption was a change in proponents’ arguments as to why a
centralized police force was necessary. Before the 1820s advocates for a new
police emphasized, almost exclusively, the inadequacies, inefficiencies and
costliness of the parish-constable system. By the 1820s, however, this
argument of inadequacy was bolstered by the claim that a new phenomenon
was increasing at an alarming rate: ‘crime’. This new specter of crime ener-
gized bureaucratic arguments of inefficiency by concocting a novel enemy
which was rapidly overtaking the streets of London: the professional criminal
organization. This collective breed of criminal which began to populate the
arguments of police advocates had been identified by Colquhoun as the
scourge against which ‘a correct system of police’ was to be directed.
Colquhoun’s conception relied heavily upon medical and military meta-
phors to cast the essential criminality of the working class as proliferating
and organized. As Linebaugh points out, Colquhoun was relentless in his
assault upon the working classes as the source of social disease, viewing them
as ‘an epidemic’ (ibid.: 423). The working class was conceived as a diseased
social body within which the mass of laborers was ‘contaminated’ and one
group of workers ‘infect[ed]’ another. ‘It was not pecuniary aid’, according
to Colquhoun, that would ‘heal this gangrene’; rather, it was the task of the
police to ‘reach the root and origin of this evil’ (1969 [1806]: 358). In other
words, the very nature of the relation between the state and the laboring poor
had to be remade in order to confront the proletariat as an enemy. The spread
of this working-class parasite was in turn made possible by its militaristic
organization, whose ‘various detachments and subdivisions . . . [form] the
general army of delinquents’. The new enemy was ‘disciplined in acts of
Criminal Warfare’ and formed bodies of ‘conspiracies’ that constituted its
‘phalanx’ (Colquhoun, cited in Linebaugh 1992: 428). Thus Colquhoun
4 Stuart Hall et al. acknowledged his debt to the political economists, but saw fit to attack the
describe a ‘moral essential criminality of the working classes over and against their political
panic’ as follows:
‘When the official
economic function as producers of value:
reaction to a person,
groups of persons or The enlarged state of society, the vast extent of moving property, and the unex-
series of events is out
ampled wealth of the metropolis joined to the depraved habits and loose conduct
of proportion to the
actual threat offered, of a great proportion of the lower classes of the people . . . [will] reconcile the
when “experts”, in attentive mind to a belief of the actual existence of evils which could not otherwise
the form of police have been credited. Let it be remembered also, that this Metropolis is unquestion-
chiefs, the judiciary,
ably not only the greatest Manufacturing and Commercial City, but also the general
politicians and
editors, perceive the receptacle for the idle and depraved of almost every country; particularly from every
threat in all but quarter of the dominions of the Crown – where the temptations and resources for
identical terms, and
criminal pleasures . . . almost exceed imagination. (Colquhoun 1969 [1806]: iii–iv;
appear to talk with
“one voice” of rates, emphasis added)
diagnoses, prognoses
and solutions, when Here, in its most explicit form, we have the conception that the expanding
the media
representations
scope of capitalist enterprise was producing, in like measure, a global
universally stress depravity, idle yet threatening, which was returning to the metropolis itself,
“sudden and taking root and finding pleasure in subverting the dictates of commercial
dramatic” increases
prosperity. The very mobility of labor which capitalism forced through
(in numbers involved
or events) and primitive accumulation at home and abroad was now cast as the primary
“novelty” beyond condition of threat to the reproduction of capitalist schemes of global exploi-
which a sober, realistic tation. What Colquhoun and others were discursively fabricating at this
appraisal could
sustain, then we
juncture was a ‘moral panic’ which would strike fear in the hearts of an
believe it is expanding capitalist class and condition acceptance for a repressive mobiliz-
appropriate to speak ation with far-reaching consequences. Such a ‘moral panic’ was critical to
of the beginnings of a
consolidate the disparate conceptions of a ‘public police’ into a unified
moral panic.’ Or
further, citing the program that could be packaged and sold to a hitherto resistant public.4 What
work of Stan Cohen: is noteworthy is the extent to which this obsessive figuration drew upon
‘Societies appear to be concerns that anticolonial agrarian struggle had developed modes of social
subject, every now
and then, to periods of
organization increasingly impervious to existing modes of state intervention.
moral panic. A Colquhoun’s Treatise is remarkable for its painstaking delineation of the
condition, episode, proper object and target of the new police: the poor, and the poor exclusively.5
person or group of
Colquhoun’s conception sought to contain two conditions: wagelessness and
persons emerges to
become defined as a the mobility of labor. The perceived danger was that the disorganized move-
threat to societal ments of proletarians were becoming organized in novel ways and were
values and interests: seizing a degree of political autonomy out of conditions of socio-economic
its nature is presented
in a stylized and
upheaval. According to Colquhoun, the forms of criminal activity worth
stereotypical fashion pursuing were those that were becoming organized and systemic (‘the system-
by the mass media; the atization of the nefarious trades’) among the poor. That is to say, the very
moral barricades are
mobility of labor, a necessary condition for capitalist schemes of exploitation,
manned by editors,
bishops, politicians had begun to generate new and unexpected forms of connection that threat-
and other ened the future continuation of capital expansion.6 This mobile army was

Randall Williams
right-thinking people; massively expanded when, during the thirty-year period from 1801–31, more
socially accredited than 3,000,000 acres of common land in England were legislated from the
experts pronounce
their diagnoses and
agricultural population. This accelerated theft had analogues throughout the
solutions; ways of growing empire wherein not only land was being stolen but people as well.
coping are evolved or These, however, were not the crimes which Colquhoun sought to examine.
(more often) resorted
When considering the origin of criminal offenses, Colquhoun set as his task
to . . . Sometimes the
object of the panic is ‘tracing the progress of those habits which are peculiar to the lower orders
quite novel and at of the Community in this great Metropolis’. For the lower orders were,
other times it is according to this vicious version of class snobbery, ‘restrained by no principle
something which has
been in existence long
of morality or religion (they know nothing of either) and only wait for
enough, but suddenly opportunities to plunge into every excess and every crime’ (Colquhoun 1969
appears in the [1806]: 311). It is as if Colquhoun held up a mirror and saw in his class image
limelight. Sometimes
a reflection of the enemy other.
the panic is passed
over and is forgotten, Despite his occasional allusion to the ‘honest poor’, Colquhoun’s medical
except in folklore and metaphors made it clear that all poor people were susceptible to criminal
collective memory; at contagion and therefore required vigilant patrol. Even when considering
other times it has
more serious and long
forms of criminal activity which one could suppose were more frequent
lasting repercussions among the business classes, such as forgery, swindling, counterfeit and other
and might produce finance crimes, Colquhoun argued that these practices had long been put in
such changes as those
check among the propertied while they were increasing among the depraved.
in legal and social
policy or even in the Colquhoun carefully avoided any mention of price-fixing, deplorable housing
way society conceives conditions, environmental devastation, political bribery and corruption
itself.’ See Hall et al. (rampant at the time), imperial plunder, colonial pillage and a whole range
(1978: 16–17).
of actions which did not fall within the compass of ‘crimes’ to be analyzed in
5 Colquhoun’s model his Treatise – precisely because there was no intention for the police to be
of ‘preventative’ concerned with such ‘crimes’.
policing relied heavily
Indeed readers of Colquhoun must have been in awe at the criminality
upon organized
networks of informers rampant in the metropolis at the turn of the century, as E. P. Thompson has
who would serve to calculated:
infiltrate political
organizations of
[According to] Colquhoun . . . there were in London 50,000 harlots, more than
workers. Indeed
within his own 5,000 publicans, and 10,000 thieves; and given that he extended his estimates of
industry Colquhoun the criminal classes to include receivers of stolen property, coiners, gamblers, lottery
had become infamous
agents, cheating shopkeepers, riverside scroungers, and colourful characters like
for organizing spies to
infiltrate the Mudlarks, Scufflehunters, Bludgeon Men, Morocco Men, Flash Coachmen,
‘mischievous Grubbers, Bear Baiters and Strolling Minstrels, the total ‘criminal’ population of
Confederacies’ of the London was 115,000 out of a total population of less than one million. (Thompson
silk industry. It was
1980: 59)
quite clear to those
groups and
organizations who Is it too much to suggest at this point that the specter of crime here fabricated
were the primary
even exceeds the delirium of fear and enters into other domains of
targets of an
intensified assault via imagination and desire not yet accounted for in the historical archives?
repressive legislation Granted, the Atlantic working class was a very real political threat, increasingly
and criminalization well-organized and sophisticated (and altogether novel in its transnational
throughout the 1790s make-up), but the rhetorical specter evoked here stretches the imagination to
that preventative
policing had little to
its limit – which we can suppose it was precisely intended to do. Thompson
do with crime and a concludes: ‘[Colquhoun’s] estimates for the whole country, including 1
great deal to do with million in receipt of parish relief, totals 1,320,716’ (ibid.: 60).
suppressing organized
As a rhetorical instrument of class warfare the specter of crime here
working-class
resistance. As presented certainly has strategic efficacy, but as a description of reality it is
sociologist John surely wanting. It is, of course, impossible to ascertain whether crime was
McMullan has written rising in any significant fashion in the early nineteenth century in England,
of Colquhoun’s
model, it ‘amounted
although it is not difficult to suppose that Colquhoun’s figures are grossly
to an operational exaggerated. The ideological specter of crime worked because it created a
framework through conception of criminality that flattened all forms of resistance into illegality
which the State could
– whether the forms of resistance were organized or disorganized, revolu-
institutionalize power
over its subjects and tionary or recalcitrant. Moreover, this conception of criminality worked
implant an because the unpropertied poor were indeed pressed into surviving by illicit
administrative means that were increasingly subject to criminalization. Indeed many activi-
infrastructure to
provide security for
ties hitherto customary had become criminalized and the legal expansion of
the operation of the categories of crime had produced more ‘criminality’; but even this cannot
capitalist social account for the discursive onslaught which saw behind the face of every
relations.’ This new
worker a revolutionary or a thief – which amounted to the same thing. For
conception of
industrial order with many working-class radicals, however, the arguments about rising crime were
its differential class simply a ruse to intensify the exploitation of workers increasingly subjected
application would to wage-based labor. As Peter Linebaugh has argued, the ‘essence and
allay elite concerns
that the new police
purpose’ of the Thames River Police force, designed by Colquhoun and
would trample on Bentham and installed in 1799, was ‘to remove customary taking’ (1992:
their liberty, and 428). By 1829, however, the idea of the police did begin to find support
increasing support
among working-class wage-earners, and it is here that the arguments about
among the upper
classes for the idea rising crime and the new criminal were successful in garnering the active
followed Secretary cooperation of a certain sector of the working class (the disorganized prole-
Peel’s more diplomatic tariat). The monetary wage was an effective wedge that transformed class
assurances that not all
would be subject to
relations, splitting the ‘customary taker’ from the waged maker. Or, as
‘continental style’ Linebaugh says of the changes in class relations, ‘at their base was the power
spying. See McMullan of the wage, which concealed the division between unpaid and paid labor,
(1997: 42).
between men and women, adults and children, slaves and free’ (ibid.: 385).
6 For an excellent While the imposition of the wage structured and concealed the growing
account of these new
forms of transnational
divisions within the working classes, it was the new criminal and the specter
proletarian of crime which did the work of ideological mystification. ‘Crime’ was more
connection and the than just a supplemental argument to the claims of parish system inefficiency;
revolutionary threat
it was a qualitatively new dimension in class struggle, and the ‘new criminal’
posed by them, see
Linebaugh and was a composite figure, altogether novel in its referential complex, made up
Rediker (2000). of the political radical, the customary taker, and the colonial subject. No
doubt for many, particularly from the organized working classes, the police
remained an ‘odious and repulsive idea’; but for others, elites and wage

Randall Williams
7 For example, riots earners – who internalized the delicate dividing line between the honest
have figured working class and the vice-ridden poor – the new police was an idea whose
prominently in
historical accounts
time had come. The real threat was the particular and unique form of
seeking to corroborate translocal and transnational laboring-class organized agitation that had
the contentions of the begun to exceed the local methods of repression hitherto adequate to policing
fathers of modern
the metropolis. For a registering of the real threat to capitalist expansion we
policing (see, for
example, Critchley have to attend to how the discourse of criminalization provided by
1970) and have been Colquhoun was taken up in parliamentary debates and carried forward by
reproduced as an the ultimate architect of modern policing, Secretary Peel.
explanation for
subsequent police
Secretary Peel, often considered the father of modern policing, made exten-
formations as well. In sive use of Colquhoun’s arguments when presenting a case before parliament
the accounts of Silver for the new police. If we were to take Colquhoun’s formulations and Peel’s
(1967) and Walker
recitation of them at face value we would be forced to conclude that indeed
(1977) riots serve as
indices of a growing ‘crime’ was the primary cause behind the need for a new police – and whole
social disorganization, traditions of police history have concluded just this. But there are many
which in turn reasons why this tactical discourse, designed to mobilize anxious business
stretches and undoes
traditions of
interests and cajole parliamentary support, should not be taken as a direct
tolerance. As articulation of the conditions which necessitated new forms of social control.
tolerance for public The rhetoric of advocacy is one thing, but conditions of necessity are quite
disorder waned,
another. Rather than assume a direct lineage from the theoretical writings of
urban property
owners began Colquhoun and the administrative appeals of Peel, wherein the police idea is
clamoring for more understood in an evolutionary frame of influence among the founding fathers,
protection against we have to attend to the very different motivations that drove the commercial
angry mobs. The
decline in ‘traditional
theorist and the parliamentarian. Nevertheless, entire schools of thought have
values’ of tolerance is been predicated upon collapsing any distinction between rhetoric and reality
said to have marked a and have sought instead historical evidence for the claims of the leading
new balance of class
advocates of the new police.7
power and a new
bourgeois sensibility. While the colonies may not have been for Colquhoun anything but the
The clash between source of goods, revenue and vice flowing through the ports of London (not
lower-class by any means insignificant to his conception of policing), for the adminis-
disaffection and new
bourgeois standards
trator Peel the colonies were the central force behind his advocacy for a new
of order brought forth police. For this history of English policing we must look to the experiments
a reaction in the form in centralized policing implemented in Ireland. According to historians
of the professional
Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder, ‘Ireland drove Peel [and Pitt before him]
police, as one element
in the new disciplinary and a number of other influential English viceroys, ministers, and secretaries
order. Here then we to experiment with highly centralized coercive measures’ (1989: 13).
have the police However, the Irish police (whose developments will be discussed later) were
understood as the
effect of a cause
expressly organized as a civil force on military lines and this invention of
(riots), which was a Peel’s ‘could never be openly used as a model for England’ (ibid.). The
product of the shifting operative word here is ‘openly’. So while the discourse of police advocacy for
class antagonisms in
Ireland explicitly invoked the need for a paramilitary police under the specter
the newly
industrializing city. of ‘real or suspected insurrectionary conspiracies’, the militaristic character
Criticisms of the riot of policing could not enter the discourses of advocacy in the metropolis
explanation have (ibid.). We should not, then, be misled by parliamentary debates which made
proliferated in recent little or no mention of the colonial dimensions that conditioned the structures
years (since the work
of Monkkonen
of modern policing. As Hay and Snyder suggest:
(1981), Field (1981)
and Emsley (1984)), Although the Irish precedent could not be used publicly to justify the creation of
and have centered
English forces, the experience of organizing and recruiting the Irish police undoubt-
around historical
studies which have edly informed a central English political elite of the feasibility of police, their
found there were in usefulness in times of disorder, the advantages of disciplined professionalism, and
fact few such the desirability . . . of an appearance of strict neutrality if they were not to be
precipitating riots in
destroyed by the hostilities of the community. All these Irish lessons, and indeed
London leading up to
the adoption of the much of its personnel, were brought to the creation of the new English forces and
Metropolitan Police those of the Empire after 1829, even if the extreme centralization of Dublin’s
(the last occurring in
political control over the police was not to be re-created (not, at least, in England,
1821). Peel of course
made full use of the in the nineteenth century). (ibid.: 14)
specter of riots in
advocating the The relative importance of multiple influences on the timing and form of
adoption of the new
police, but the more
police reorganization points to the centrality of the imperial experience of
intense periods of policing, which is as yet the least understood dimension.
rioting were over (and It was, in fact, in the colony of Ireland that the conception of and desira-
yet to come), although
bility for a system of police first took shape. We need then to reconsider the
perhaps still recent
enough to be an genealogy of the police idea from Colquhoun to Peel and beyond through the
effective rhetorical specter of colonial warfare. It was this directive and this possibility that
allusion. fundamentally transformed the nature of debates about domestic threats to
If riots were one
component of a
metropolitan social order. From the 1780s onwards, police reform debates,
rhetorical strategy whether involving the Irish peasantry or the London working class, were
predicated upon about developing new types of systemic, repressive response. According to
fomenting alarm, the
John Styles, the new terms of this debate were the product of the ‘threat to
notion of ‘rising crime
levels’ was another order posed by popular agrarian movements in rural Ireland’ (Brewer and
more frequently used Styles 1980: 20). And further, ‘irrespective of the source and precise nature
technique. Again, of the perceived threat . . . discussion in British governing circles of problems
many historians
suppose that this was
of order (broadly defined) increasingly came to revolve around the creation
the crucial element of a system of police’ (ibid.). I want then to examine this particular reference
which shifted lines of point (‘the problem of Ireland’) that prompted debates to turn increasingly
support for the new
upon questions of the capacity of the state to influence social life – given the
police. And, granted,
a concern with crime problems for imperial governance posed by the fact that Irish proletarians as
dominated the well as other proletarians from English colonial territories had begun moving
parliamentary debates about England in unprecedented numbers. Whatever the explicit terms of
(see Stead 1977). As
Brogden points out,
these debates, they cannot simply be reduced to problems of crime and
‘many of the Reithian disorder, to class interest or to industrialization; rather, they are most force-
historians have taken fully about questions of state structure and state capacity in an emergent
it for granted that the
international-imperial ordering that had unleashed, among its creative
creation of the police
was due to criminal destructions, a revolutionary proletariat whose contaminations spread far
threats to persons and and wide in the shadow of capital.

Randall Williams
3 Past and probable states of violence: the ideological manufacture of

Irish difference
property, and was a The Bill [the Peace Preservation Act of 1815] was not meant to meet
natural concomitant any temporary emergency, but was rendered necessary by the past
of urban growth’ (see
Brogden 1982: 5).
state of Ireland for the last fifty years and by the probable state of it
for the next five hundred.
(Robert Peel 1815; cited in Peel et al. 1899: vol. I, p. 145)
With the possible exception of greenness, no quality has more

frequently and repetitiously been attributed to Ireland than violence.
(Lloyd 1993: 125)
The 1760s are commonly assumed to mark the onset of major peasant
disturbances in the Irish countryside, with the appearance of Whiteboyism in
the winter of 1761–2. If we attend to the recorded pronouncements of
colonial administrators in Ireland we would be forced to conclude that there
was something peculiar about the nature of violence in Ireland, something
qualitatively different that made Irish violence more excessive, more extreme
and more dangerous than any expression of dissent in the metropole. But was
there any veracity to these reports? Were they mere descriptions of events as
they occurred, a mere ‘register of happenings’? How were these reports
generated and why were they consistently alarming? If we suppose, as recent
evidence suggests we should, that reports about ‘violence’ in the Irish country-
side were consistently exaggerated and misleading, our question becomes:
why did British official culture see things, or perhaps want to see things, in
the way that they did? Why did Irish disorder appear qualitatively different
to English administrators if, as has been argued by numerous contemporary
historians of agrarian disorder, its scope and scale were diminutive in
comparison to disorders in England itself? What was behind the repeated
characterization of the Irish and particularly Irish peasants as violent? What
was the past and probable state of violence that Peel held before parliament
in 1815 when discussing the need for a new police force beyond any imme-
diate circumstances of crisis? And most importantly for our purposes here,
how did these reports condition the conception of crime and disorder in the
metropolis in ways that allow us to reconceive metropolitan policing as a
colonial institution?
In a recent study of the ‘revolutionary era’ (in the 1790s) British historian
R. B. McDowell provides us with an outline of how ‘information’ about the
Irish countryside came to and was passed on by numerous administrators.
McDowell describes the chain of information in the midst of events in 1798
in the following manner:
many . . . upholders of law and order when corresponding with the government
displayed common characteristics, courage, energy, a sense of urgency (‘more army
is much wanted here’, wrote an agitated official in Westmeath), a readiness to
employ, if need be, rough measures to preserve the peace and some sense of self-
importance when pressing their opinions to the government. Their letters as a whole
comprise materials for a graph recording the fluctuations of disorder. The activities
of the turbulent (United Irishmen, defenders, whiteboys, Orangemen) are naturally
surveyed from without and, often consciously, from above and many of these
correspondents based their appreciation of the local situation on gossip, fragments
of conversation and trifling incidents. (McDowell 1979: 528–9)
Here the heroism of ‘upholders of law and order’ is couched in terms of their
primary source for information, gossip-mongering. However, when gossip,
rumor and ‘fragments of conversation’ proved insufficient to track the ‘fluc-
tuations of disorder’, government officials relied on a network of infiltrators
to complete their information-gathering enterprise. About one infamous
group of informers, McDowell writes:
The informants who were members of the United Irishmen’s society were undoubt-
edly useful, providing the government with very valuable insights into the workings
of the radical organization. But they had their limitations. They tended to over-
dramatize, much of their information was out of date by the time it reached the
authorities, they were at best only indirectly in touch with the United Irishmen’s
higher command and they would be of little value as crown witnesses, since, if they
were willing to appear in court, their evidence would be largely hearsay or uncor-
roborated. (ibid.: 534)
Despite being ‘undoubtedly useful’, the production of ‘information’ about

events in the Irish countryside followed a chain of correspondence which can
hardly be assumed to have produced any remotely accurate account of events.
And yet, even the historian who recounts this chain of fabrication continues
to take its findings as truth: ‘the picture which emerged when all these sources
were taken together was a thoroughly alarming one [!]’ (ibid.).
No doubt the picture which emerged was ‘alarming’, given that this was
one of the primary functions of counter-intelligence discourse. One of the
utilities of such representations was to convince legislators back in the
metropole that terror ruled the countryside and that if they did not act this
colonial enterprise would be lost. The raising of alarm was one of the
discursive techniques deployed in order to mobilize greater intervention
(‘more army is much wanted here’) and, most importantly, to expand the
capacities of the colonial state. These reports were not a mere register of
happenings, but an inscription of loose details (gossip, hearsay) into a frame-
work of ‘understanding’ (over-dramatized) that necessitated (and presumably

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legitimated) increased government control and repression. To code the Irish

as violent, to label all events – whatever their form – as violent, served
innumerable purposes and formed a general strategy to instigate, escalate,
and legitimate official violence. Despite the dubious nature of information-
gathering, the manufacturing of a colonial difference – marked by the stere-
otyping of the Irish propensity to violence – proceeded undisturbed as a
condition which mandated repressive action and state expansion. It has been
said that within Peel’s first few months as Home Secretary to Ireland he was
inundated with alarming reports of ‘outrages’ rampant in the countryside.
Armed with these reports of violence and disorder, Peel seized the opportunity
to implement what had been frustrated in England, namely an experimental
new police system. The repeated stereotyping of the Irish as violent was
sufficient to carry out a drastic experiment in policing, with the possibility
for such a response in the making since at least the 1760s when reports of
‘agrarian outrages’ in the Irish countryside first made their way back to
England as notices of alarm.
Was there in fact rampant violence in the Irish countryside? And, if not,
why did British administrators repeatedly characterize Irish forms of protest
as violent and out of control? As Lloyd has noted,
it is a striking fact that while traditional accounts of Irish history, historical as well
as literary, constantly stress the endemic and excessive violence of the culture, the
more detailed studies of agrarian disturbances tend to suggest that actual levels of
violence were far lower than such representations imply. (Lloyd 1993: 141)
Indeed, in Tom Bartlett’s study of agrarian protest in the period 1761–90 the
total number of deaths attributable to such protests in Ireland was approxi-
mately fifty – a figure which can be sharply contrasted with the 300 killed
during the Gordon riots of 1780 (see Bartlett 1983: 43). Agrarian protest has
been the subject of considerable study in recent years, and all suggest that the
agrarian campaigns of the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s were by any objective
measure non-violent in character. We should not conclude from these findings
that the reports about ‘violence’ in the countryside were merely fabricated; it
is more likely that the colonial administrators did indeed willfully read and
interpret the disturbances as violent and out of control. This suggests that
such reports tell us more about the minds of British colonial administrators
than they do about any Irish reality or about Irish people. The rhetorical
figure of ‘violence’ must be understood as a metaphor for the inability of
British colonial administrators to decode forms of social organization whose
‘demands’ vastly exceeded ‘acceptable’ claims upon the state – in so far as
such ‘demands’ did not take the form of appeals but rather inhered in the
very practices and organization of daily life which were incommensurate with
the production of a national identity.
Given the discrepancy between actual events and the immediate description
of such events we must begin by considering that official discourse did not
constitute a mere register of happenings but rather marked a willful inscrip-
tion of events into a narrative that legitimated colonial intervention. The
coding of agrarian dissent as outrageous and violent served this purpose well.
In other words we need to read these reports in terms of what sort of
ideological work such descriptions perform. As Lloyd argues, ‘the repeated
stereotyping of the Irish as violent permits the presumption of their incapacity
for self-representation and underpins in turn the “legality” of state violence
in terms of both ends and means’ (1993: 128). If we are to consider how the
police idea took its ultimate shape from experiences in the colonies, and in
particular Ireland, we should dismiss once and for all the claims that the Irish
peasantry were uniquely or peculiarly violent and instead attend to the
specific type of governmental insecurity which gave rise over the course of
the late eighteenth century to the establishment of the earliest modern police
forces in the colony of Ireland. Again, as Lloyd has argued,
if Ireland’s history offers peculiarly significant paradigms for developments in

Europe and elsewhere, this is no doubt due to its anomalous position as at once a
European nation and a colony. In consequence of its geographical proximity to
England, Ireland underwent, earlier than any other colony, a process of hegemonic
domination which was as experimental as pragmatic. (Lloyd 1987: ix)
The idea for a police system originates in the late eighteenth century, taking
shape simultaneously in England and Ireland, or, perhaps more accurately,
emerging out of the context of colonial capitalism. The close connection
between the two countries in the emergence of the police is evident from the
fact that the first attempt to implement a new police system in England in
1785 (rejected) was merely transferred a year later to Ireland. A further index
of the prolific traffic between metropole and colony is found in the fact that
both police bills were nearly identical in every detail. Any differences between
the implementations of policing would arise only much later. It seems reason-
able to suppose that such differences as did eventually emerge between the
police forces were based on the divergent political and socio-economic
conditions of England and Ireland, rather than on independent concepts of
policing being developed in each society. So where did this idea for a new
police system come from and what was wrong with older, more traditional
methods of local control?
The traditional system of domestic order deployed in Ireland since the
arrival of the English in the twelfth century was organized around a principle
of collective involvement by the community, at all levels, in its defense, peace-
keeping arrangements and the administration of its own affairs. This form of
local governance, despite modifications, persisted well into the eighteenth

Randall Williams
century. Local night-watch systems were the linchpin of the existing policing
system. In the early eighteenth century the largest center of population,
Dublin, was said to lack an effective night-watch, and in 1715 a statute was
passed which located the cause of this ineffectivity in ‘the neglect by the
citizen of his duty to serve’. This statute and subsequent measures in the early
part of the century sought to reinforce the effectivity of the night-watch by
compelling citizens through threat of punishment or by financial reward to
assist the night-watch in the pursuance of criminal offenders. Interestingly,
this early statute also sought to remedy the recalcitrant citizenry by
appointing only Protestants to perform the tasks of night-watch – apparently
only Protestants could be trusted to serve the Lord Mayor. Later this statute
would be modified in rural areas to include the participation of Catholics,

but only in times of relative stability, reserving the right to exclude Catholics
during periods of disturbance. The principle of ‘collective’ local involvement
was then severely curtailed in a colonial context where there was an over-
riding interest in preventing the Catholic majority from having any say in the
affairs of governance.
The persistent problem of insufficient support from the citizenry indicates
a larger political problem which the pre-Union administrations faced: their
lack of legitimacy. The fundamental illegitimacy of alien rule by a minority
different in creed and nationality from the majority established and main-
tained conditions of permanent insecurity which successive administrations
confronted as problems of law and order. Indeed the ascription of violence
to the Irish has more to do with the precarious nature of the political order
than with any actual levels of violence. With the supposed escalation of rural
dissent beginning in the 1760s a new form of counter-insurgent discourse
arose which forever altered the ways in which ‘problems of disorder’ would
be discussed and responded to. The struggles of the peasantry were the crucial
factor in producing a discursive transformation that radically shifted the ways
in which hegemony, both in the colonies and the metropole, was to be
secured. According to Lloyd, ‘successive imperial measures taken to discipline
and control this recalcitrant colony transformed it into a testing ground for
state apparatuses later adopted within Britain and throughout the Empire’
(1987: ix).
The weakness of civil authority in rural Ireland, as evidenced by the need
to send in troops to suppress dissent, was not in the early 1760s attributed
to the absence of police (as it would be later). The idea that a new police
system was the solution to controlling ‘agrarian outrages’ had not yet entered
official discourse. Rather, the failures of law and order were attributed to a
dereliction of duty on the part of the landed class, the power of the county
or barony, and measures were sought to shore up existing lines of ‘traditional’
control. Lord Lieutenant Camden stated: ‘I confess that I attribute the
continual disorders which have occurred to the little energy and attention
there is amongst the better sort of people in most of the Counties of Ireland’
(cited in Palmer 1988: 133). This was a common criticism of the Irish gentry
and served the purpose of reinforcing the idea that the Irish were generally
unable to govern themselves. One need only contrast this characterization
with similar criticisms of ‘traditional’ methods of control in England – whose
inadequacies were never said to be the result of ‘supineness’ among ‘the better
sort of people’.
During the 1760s, in response to the Whiteboy disorders, a series of
legislative measures were passed, which, as in England around the same time,
sought to secure greater citizen response. These measures were collectively
known as the Coercion Acts and involved various attempts to intensify
punishments and break the wall of silence that precluded the effective
gathering of information. Refusal to cooperate with an investigation meant
six months in prison. These special measures proved ineffective as peasant
solidarities remained unbroken despite either intimidation or reward, and
consequently the military remained the primary means of attempting to
suppress rural dissent. The continuous reliance on the military – a state of
emergency being a rather permanent condition – stimulated the search for
alternatives. Calls to reinvigorate traditional methods such as the posse comi-
tatus, the hue and cry, the raising of volunteers, militia or yeomanry, were all
put forth as remedies for inadequate internal mechanisms of control. One
major problem stood in the way of all the various measures designed to
suppress internal dissent, namely the government’s and the ascendancy’s
continuing distrust of the Catholic majority, a distrust only equaled by the
suspicion of a standing army. The idea for a new police system emerged out
of a set of colonial contradictions. These included the operative exclusion of
Catholics from the spoils of surplus extraction, which in turn militated against
the nonetheless imperative reliance on Catholics for local suppression of
resistance to those same structures of exploitation and underdevelopment.
These contradictions, however, did not remain confined to the colonial context
and in the 1780s we begin to see the pressures of a colonial capitalist system
beginning to assert themselves simultaneously inside and outside of England.
In the wake of urban disturbances at home (notably the Gordon riots of
1780) Prime Minister Pitt sought to coordinate and centralize the disparate
system of local controls which had repeatedly required military intervention
in order to contain riotous demands for food. Albeit without the criticism of
the landed classes, the argument resonated with those beginning to circulate
about Ireland concerning the increasing ineffectiveness of traditional
measures of domestic control. Pitt’s bill drew heavily upon the techniques of
suppression being used in the colonies, including special powers of search,
seizure and social control that were to prevent organized activities before they
could take the form of civil unrest. This bill, however, garnered little support
and was thought, among other things, to ‘entirely subvert the chartered rights

Randall Williams
of the greatest city in the world’. But this would not be the end of police
reform efforts in Britain, although a further thirteen years would pass before
another sweeping reform bill would make its way to parliament – this time
in June of 1798 in the midst of the Irish rebellion. Less than one year after
Pitt’s failed attempt to centralize the London police, however, the 1786
Dublin Police Reform Bill (with only slight adjustments) was passed despite
intense objections from the Irish House of Commons.
The arguments for a new police in Dublin were roughly the same as they
had been one year earlier for London: the inefficiency of local policing
mechanisms, the cost of frequent military intervention, the increasing
frequency of ‘tumultuous assemblies and aggregate meetings’ and the
spreading of rural unrest to the cities. Despite meeting with the same type of
opposition in Dublin as it had in London the year before (it was argued to
be an act of extreme, arbitrary tyranny), the bill passed, owing to a majority
assumption in the case of Ireland that the nature of disorder was fundamen-
tally different. What was sought, however, in both contexts was a significant
expansion of the state’s capacity to usurp local mechanisms of control in favor
of a centralized system. The difference was that the specter of criminalization
had been successfully manufactured in the case of Ireland but was as yet
indistinct in the ‘home of liberty’.
As has been argued, the coding of the Irish as violent marked the attempt
by the colonial administrators to cast the Irish as unable to represent them-
selves and thus to justify alien rule. This was the crucial factor in legitimating
the expansion of centralized state authority, in so far as it implies that the
Irish ‘had to learn to be represented through the intervention of political and
cultural institutions’ (Lloyd 1993: 144). The establishment of a national
police force was a first step in a general and massive state intervention into
Irish society which had as its primary directive the eradication of all modes
of organization and all ways of living that were inassimilable and threatening
to colonial conditions of surplus extraction. The construction of the Irish as
a threat effectively mobilized a much broader series of interventions by the
colonial state. It was this which would allow Peel in 1815 to state bluntly
that there were no immediate conditions of emergency which necessitated the
establishment of a peace preservation force in Ireland, but that Ireland had
long been violent and would continue to be so.
Shortly following the restructuring of the Dublin police, continuing reports
of violence in rural areas would be met with a vigorous response which took
its cues from the increasing centralization of administrative power. According
to one frustrated colonial administrator, the magnitude of unrest had ‘simply
outrun the capacity of ordinary institutions for the maintenance of public
order’ (cited in McDowell 1979: 522). These reports evidence a sense of the
obstacles thrown up against the exercise of an alien authority, and it was
through such reports that colonial administrators sought a wider exercise of
control and subjugation. Thus in 1787 numerous measures were taken to

attack the primary source of disorder, the so-called ‘agrarian disturbances’
which had continued unabated since the 1760s. The Irish County Police Act
and the Irish Riot Act, both passed in 1787, were but two examples of an
intensified assault on the specter of colonial disorder. The former Act marked
the first experiment at developing a coordinated national police force (still
comprised of local-indigenous structures) directed at suppressing a rural
Catholic threat commonly referred to, despite the specificities and local
character of the outbreaks, as the ‘Rightboy Movement’. This new police
system was given great latitude of enforcement through a host of repressive
measures including the Irish Riot Act, which ‘made unlawful assembly by a
dozen or more persons a felony punishable by death’. In addition to

precluding assembly, the Act also transformed a host of agrarian crimes from
misdemeanors to felonies and made ‘the administering of illegal oaths punish-
able by transportation for life’. And finally the harshest punishment was
reserved
for anyone who tried, by either threat or infliction of personal violence or property
destruction, to induce persons to enter into any unlawful combination, whereby
offenders shall suffer death with the body to be delivered to the county surgeon to
be him [sic] publickly dissected.
The Irish uprising of 1798 confirmed British fears that a widespread

insurrection was imminent and that traditional mechanisms of securing order
were ineffectual. The ‘crisis’ provoked by the rebellion would not, however,
be strictly contained within Ireland, though of course the harshest forms of
repression would be realized there. Instead it was during the Irish rebellion
that a parliamentary committee in Britain put forth a report recommending
the establishment of a ‘Central Board of Police’ for London – the first return
of a major police reform bill since Pitt’s failed attempt in 1785. At the same
time (also in London) a group of West India merchants led by Patrick
Colquhoun established a new method of policing the economy: a private
police force (the Marine Police establishment) to protect their portion of the
city’s dockyard. This non-uniformed, armed squad (only partially public
funded) was declared an immediate success as advocates claimed that
pilferage declined dramatically and government revenue collection substan-
tially increased; other eager merchants pressed the government to establish a
general river police force. A bill was drafted and passed in 1800, establishing
the Thames River Police. The primary architects were Patrick Colquhoun and
Jeremy Bentham.
Ireland after 1798 was an occupied province of Britain; Dublin the garri-
soned headquarters of a conquered colony. The persistent fear of rebellion
and the desire for hegemonic domination determined the institutional form

Randall Williams
8 Indeed the of the new Union (1800) – and resistance was continual and intense, leading
conception of a to the Dublin rebellion of 1803. The Dublin Police Act of 1808 established
peculiarly colonial
the first modern police force, some twenty-one years before a much more
form of violence as
derived from the Irish modest (and much less militarized) structure would be developed in London.
context would serve These early attempts to implement a police system in Ireland established the
as the template
terms from which all subsequent debates and treatises on ‘disorder’ would
through which future
colonial disturbances take their cues. The London Metropolitan Police of 1829 was the end product
would be understood of three designers, each of whom served as Home Secretary in Ireland: the
and responded to. In Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel and Henry Goulborn. Each in turn had
the wake of the Great
Rebellion in India
overseen the design and implementation of centralized police forces during
(1857–9), Sir Hugh their tenure in Ireland: Wellington, the Dublin Police Force of 1808; Peel, the
Rose argued that the Peace Preservation Police of 1814; and Goulborn, the Irish Constabulary of
crisis of colonial
1822. These forces established the model for a regular, permanent and
control would be
attenuated if the ‘Irish centrally disciplined force that would later be known as the London Metro-
model’ of policing was politan Police.
adopted. According to
The continual traversing of the police idea (with modifications, experimen-
Rose, ‘no system of
police has ever tations and innovations) between the colony and the metropole during this
worked better for the critical conjuncture of colonial capitalism accounts for the shaping of
suppression of ‘modern policing’ as a flexible, institutional form applicable to colonial and
political agitation, or
agrarian disorder,
class warfare – not as two absolutely distinct contexts but as an emerging
than the Irish imperial institutionalization of repression. The significance of Irish history for
Constabulary’. Rose’s other colonies or postcolonial states is not however, as Lloyd notes, ‘in some
argument came in the
possible level of identity between such disparate and historical situations’, but
context of a debate
over whether the rather in providing an account of one particular set of early experimentations
British administration by an imperial power to dominate subject peoples.8 A set of experiments
in India should imitate
which would not remain confined to either Ireland or other colonial terri-
the ‘London model’ or
the ‘Irish model’ of tories but which would also condition the experiment known as the London
policing. As historian Metropolitan Police.
4 Colonial capitalism and the architectonics of moder n repression
David Arnold has As I have argued, the architectonics of colonial and class warfare began to
written of this debate, overlap over the course of the emergence of colonial capitalism. The
‘although attracted by
the success of the
particular problems of order for which the development of modern forms of
London police in British policing (at home and abroad) served as a new response were the
checking crime and product of antagonisms and contradictions specific to the emergence of
replacing troops in the
colonial capitalism (roughly 1780–1830). The ‘industrial revolution’,
containment of civil
disturbances, the commonly believed to have produced the conditions out of which modern
Madras government metropolitan policing systems were formed, was only one of a complex of
felt that a police
factors and by no means the most decisive. In broad strokes, colonial capi-
system designed for
the imperial talism could be described as involving the grafting together (the regulation
metropolis would not and institutionalization) of hitherto disparate processes of mercantile plunder,
meet the requirements primitive accumulation and industrialization in a movement of coordination

of a colonial which increased the power of mercantile interests and their parliamentary
province.’ If the
London Metropolitan representatives, while greatly expanding the role and function of the imperial
Police came to serve state and its corollary institution, the colonial state. It is important to keep
over the course of the in mind that when we use the concept of colonial capitalism we are not simply
nineteenth century as
the ideal model of
referring to what happened in the colonies or to some form of capitalism that
policing, it was was only instituted outside the metropole. The metropolitan state was as
nevertheless the Irish much a product of colonial capitalism as were colonial states, despite obvious
Constabulary which
and important differences in the way power and control were practiced.
would serve as the
more often replicated The expanding colonial state, no longer able to rely upon a minimal
colonial model of apparatus of military protection and commercial regulation, was persistently
policing. Indeed, ‘in and vigorously dogged by the fact of illegitimate occupation – a permanent
looking to colonial
Ireland for its primary crisis of legitimacy. Haunted by this specter, the expanding colonial state
police model, British undertook a complex and contradictory task of mediation to maintain
India was setting a multiple systems of production in the interest of sustaining imperial, and thus
precedent to be
followed by many
industrial, advantage. A task of articulation arose in contexts where slavery
other colonial and wage labor, barter and commodity exchange, feudal production and
territories in Asia, primitive accumulation, serfdom and usury, guild apprenticeships and civil
Africa and the
service existed side by side, forming a discontinuous series of productive and
Caribbean in the
second half of the distributive relations. The multiple orders of contradiction – political,
nineteenth century’ economic and cultural – generated forms of local-collective resistance which
(see Arnold 1986: occluded a broad institutionalization of hegemony founded upon constitu-
26–7).
tional law. Given what was necessary to structure the colonial economy of
absolute surplus extraction and to maintain it, notions of the rule of law and
the separation of powers were submerged in favor of centralized, authori-
tarian regimes. ‘Modern’ police structures emerged against this background
as one of the central apparatuses used to mediate inter-group and inter-class
conflict and to protect and guarantee the activities of expatriate commercial
and extractive firms. As Philip Ahire has written in his history of colonial
policing in Nigeria in the late 1800s: ‘It is in the context of political survival
in a hostile environment and maintenance of commercial prosperity that the
police force emerged in relation to these objects, and its character and role
were influenced by their changing dynamics’ (1991: 17). In theoretical terms,
it was the non-convertibility of imperial violence into colonial law that both
inhibited and directed the growth of the colonial state for which the develop-
ment of new forms of repression and ordering served as a necessary
precondition for expansion.
The expansion of the colonial state, with its notable experiments in central-
ization, in turn transformed the discursive terrain upon which debates about
policing in the metropolis took place. Colquhoun’s vision for a new police
was as much a product of colonialism as were those of Peel and the other
founding fathers of the ‘modern’ police, irrespective of whether such a vision
was begotten out of direct experiences in colonial administration (although

Randall Williams
‘direct experiences’ played a crucial role for most of the early advocates of
the new police). This suggests that the modern processes of metropolitan class
war have been deeply shaped by practices of colonial subjugation, and to the
extent that we fail to acknowledge the colonial dimensions of class warfare,
we will fail to comprehend the function of the police in modern societies.
Modern policing developed through the inextricable interweaving of tech-
niques of colonial and class warfare and this tale of origins needs to be
pursued into present-day contexts of neo-colonialism and globalization. If the
differences between colonial and metropolitan policing have diminished in
the present-day context of ‘Empire’ (with the metropolitan form becoming
more militarized and the colonial form becoming more civilian, relatively
speaking) it is in part because the distance between the ‘two’ forms was never
as great as we had hitherto imagined. As useful as the Gramscian distinction
between force and consent may be, histories of the police would do well to
recognize that large segments of the working and subject classes in metro-
politan and (neo-)colonial territories have never consented to state police
institutions, and that brute force has persistently been the primary mechanism
by which alternative structures of law and justice (based in popular modes of
social organization) have been actively and violently occluded since the
formation of modern policing.
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This article was downloaded by: [Stony Brook University]

On: 17 October 2014, At: 07:23

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial

A state of permanent exception: The Birth of Modern

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801032000135602

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articles A STATE OF P E R M ANE NT E X C E P T I O N

The London Metropolitan Police was established in 1829. Dominant

interventions Vol. 5(3) 322–344 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 323

of the Rights of Man,

1 Histories of the moder n police: from crisis to exception

interventions – 5:3 324

this account is a systemic perspective that understands innovations in policing

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 325

difference in the nature of violence in Ireland. I take the manufacture of an

In the final section, I will look at the arrangement of crises by bringing

2 The new science of police and the delirium of capital

interventions – 5:3 326

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 327

criminality of the working classes – in particular their ‘criminal’ attempts to

had to overcome widespread opposition from working, middle and landed

interventions – 5:3 328

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 329

interventions – 5:3 330

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 331

interventions – 5:3 332

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 333

3 Past and probable states of violence: the ideological manufacture of

With the possible exception of greenness, no quality has more

(Lloyd 1993: 125)

interventions – 5:3 334

Despite being ‘undoubtedly useful’, the production of ‘information’ about

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 335

legitimated) increased government control and repression. To code the Irish

interventions – 5:3 336

if Ireland’s history offers peculiarly significant paradigms for developments in

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 337

would be modified in rural areas to include the participation of Catholics,

interventions – 5:3 338

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 339

interventions – 5:3 340

control and subjugation. Thus in 1787 numerous measures were taken to

dozen or more persons a felony punishable by death’. In addition to

The Irish uprising of 1798 confirmed British fears that a widespread

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 341

4 Colonial capitalism and the architectonics of moder n repression

interventions – 5:3 342

meet the requirements primitive accumulation and industrialization in a movement of coordination

THE BIRTH OF MODERN POLICING 343

interventions – 5:3 344

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