A state of permanent exception: The Birth of Modern Policing in Colonial Capitalism

Abstract

The London Metropolitan Police was established in 1829. Dominant historical accounts presume that the formation of this modern police force 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 London metropolitan area. Counter-explanations focus on the economic and social upheavals wrought by accelerated industrial production. This essay proposes a different explanation by examining the broader context out of which various ideas for a new concept of police emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries among Atlantic political economists, commercial theorists, colonial administrators and parliamentarians. Decisive in the shaping of this novel force of repression in London were the confrontations encountered, the experiments undertaken, and the discourse of crime that emerged out of colonial territories, particularly in that most proximate of ‘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 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.