‘Paying the Butcher’s Bill’: Policing British Colonial Protest after 1918

Abstract

This article reconsiders the forms and functions of colonial police actions in the repression of organized dissent. In part, it is a study of changing patterns of repressive behaviour in worsening economic conditions, an approach which explains the concentration on the inter-war period, cleaved as it was by the acute economic disruptions of the Depression years. In part, it is an investigation of the connections between perception and action. Focusing on Colonial Office instructions regarding protest policing, it examines the ways in which police and military security forces in the British Empire constructed enemies of colonial state ‘order’. This, it is argued, shaped the resultant strategies of repressive restriction, riot control, and labour containment adopted.