Cotton Colonialism and the New Police in the United States and England, 1830s–1850s

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the spread of the civil police model. After the London Metropolitan Police was created in 1829, other local governments in Britain copied it, including Manchester. The civil police then spread across the Atlantic, influencing the formation of the New York City Metropolitan Police in the 1840s and the Savannah police in the 1850s, among others. The chapter shows how the racialization of crime and disorder triggered the birth of the new police in these cities and how the larger transatlantic interimperial network of cotton production and trade gifted their form, function, and targets. The chapter further shows how these new police forces were modeled after the London Metropolitan Police but also had various colonial and imperial influences, including slave patrols and settler colonial forms. This chapter finally discusses differences between the emergent policing formations in the different locations, including differences in armaments.