Police Power and Colonial Rule

Police Power and Colonial Rule PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 9789361777998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Police Power and Colonial Rule analyses the increasing deployment and growing authority of the police in the Madras Presidency of British India, demonstrating the centrality of policing to the colonial regime and its legacies. Beginning with the formation of a colonial constabulary in 1859, the book examines the evolving organization and structure of the force, its racial hierarchies, and response to rapidly changing political and social conditions that led up to Indian independence. Based on cutting-edge research, this work explores the contested role of the police in combating nationalist opposition and labour militancy, and shows how the police, through the formation and expansion of armed units, replaced the military in enforcing internal order and suppressing anti-colonial resistance. The book also examines the impact of colonial policing on both rural and urban society in south India and discusses how nationalists opposed police brutality while ultimately seeking ascendancy over the force. Grounded in India's colonial history, the book is also directly relevant to the critical study of postcolonial India and colonial policing around the world. For this revised edition, the author has written a new Introduction setting out the scope of the work and placing it in the context of recent police studies.

Police Power and Colonial Rule

Police Power and Colonial Rule PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 9789361777998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Police Power and Colonial Rule analyses the increasing deployment and growing authority of the police in the Madras Presidency of British India, demonstrating the centrality of policing to the colonial regime and its legacies. Beginning with the formation of a colonial constabulary in 1859, the book examines the evolving organization and structure of the force, its racial hierarchies, and response to rapidly changing political and social conditions that led up to Indian independence. Based on cutting-edge research, this work explores the contested role of the police in combating nationalist opposition and labour militancy, and shows how the police, through the formation and expansion of armed units, replaced the military in enforcing internal order and suppressing anti-colonial resistance. The book also examines the impact of colonial policing on both rural and urban society in south India and discusses how nationalists opposed police brutality while ultimately seeking ascendancy over the force. Grounded in India's colonial history, the book is also directly relevant to the critical study of postcolonial India and colonial policing around the world. For this revised edition, the author has written a new Introduction setting out the scope of the work and placing it in the context of recent police studies.

Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859-1947

Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859-1947 PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Focusing on developments in the Madras presidency between the Rebellion of 1857-58 and independence 90 years later, this book studies the creation of a British constabulary in India as a powerful coercive tool of British colonialism. The author targets the use of police force against dacoits, nationalists, adivasi hillmen, and urban proletariats, and reveals, through the organization and social composition of the constabulary, how internally as well as externally, the police force mirrored the underlying character of the colonial system as a whole.

Penal Power and Colonial Rule

Penal Power and Colonial Rule PDF Author: Mark Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134056036
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book provides an account of the distinctive way in which penal power developed outside the metropolitan centre. Proposing a radical revision of the Foucauldian thesis that criminological knowledge emerged in the service of a new form of power – discipline – that had inserted itself into the very centre of punishment, it argues that Foucault’s alignment of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power will need to be reread and rebalanced to account for its operation in the colonial sphere. In particular it proposes that colonial penal power in India is best understood as a central element of a liberal colonial governmentality. To give an account of the emergence of this colonial form of penal power that was distinct from its metropolitan counterpart, this book analyses the British experience in India from the 1820s to the early 1920s. It provides a genealogy of both civil and military spheres of government, illustrating how knowledge of marginal and criminal social orders was tied in crucial ways to the demands of a colonial rule that was neither monolithic nor necessarily coherent. The analysis charts the emergence of a liberal colonial governmentality where power was almost exclusively framed in terms of sovereignty and security and where disciplinary strategies were given only limited and equivocal attention. Drawing on post-colonial theory, Penal Power and Colonial Rule opens up a new and unduly neglected area of research. An insightful and original exploration of theory and history, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Law, Criminology, History and Post-colonial Studies.

Violence and Colonial Order

Violence and Colonial Order PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521768411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
A striking new interpretation of colonial policing and political violence in three empires between the two world wars.

Violence as Usual

Violence as Usual PDF Author: Marie Muschalek
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501742876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives. Marie A. Muschalek's fascinating portrayal of the daily deeds of African and German men enrolled in the colonial police force called the Landespolizei is a historical anthropology of police practice and the normalization of imperial power. Replete with anecdotes of everyday experiences both of the policemen and of colonized people and settlers, Violence as Usual re-examines fundamental questions about the relationship between power and violence. Muschalek gives us a new perspective on violence beyond the solely destructive and the instrumental. She overcomes, too, the notion that modern states operate exclusively according to modes of rationalized functionality. Violence as Usual offers an unusual assessment of the history of rule in settler colonialism and an alternative to dominant narratives of an ostensibly weak colonial state.

Policing the empire

Policing the empire PDF Author: David Anderson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526162997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
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. This book covers and compares the different ways and means that were employed in policing policies from 1830 to 1940. Countries covered range from Ireland, Australia, Africa and India to New Zealand and the Caribbean. 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. The most important aspect of imperial linkage in colonial policing was the movement of personnel from one colony to another. To evaluate the precise role of the 'Irish model' in colonial police forces is at present probably beyond the powers of any one scholar. Policing in Queensland played a vital role in the construction of the colonial social order. In 1886 the constabulary was split by legislation into the New Zealand Police Force and the standing army or Permanent Militia. The nature of the British influence in the Klondike gold rush may be seen both in the policy of the government and in the actions of the men sent to enforce it. The book also overviews the role of policing in guarding the Gold Coast, police support in 1954 Sudan, Orange River Colony, Colonial Mombasa and Kenya, as well as and nineteenth-century rural India.

Policing and decolonisation

Policing and decolonisation PDF Author: David Anderson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526123681
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
As imperial political authority was increasingly challenged, sometimes with violence, locally recruited police forces became the front-line guardians of alien law and order. This book presents a study that looks at the problems facing the imperial police forces during the acute political dislocations following decolonization in the British Empire. It examines the role and functions of the colonial police forces during the process of British decolonisation and the transfer of powers in eight colonial territories. The book emphasises that the British adopted a 'colonial' solution to their problems in policing insurgency in Ireland. The book illustrates how the recruitment of Turkish Cypriot policemen to maintain public order against Greek Cypriot insurgents worsened the political situation confronting the British and ultimately compromised the constitutional settlement for the transfer powers. In Cyprus and Malaya, the origins and ethnic backgrounds of serving policemen determined the effectiveness which enabled them to carry out their duties. In 1914, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) of Ireland was the instrument of a government committed to 'Home Rule' or national autonomy for Ireland. As an agency of state coercion and intelligence-gathering, the police were vital to Britain's attempts to hold on to power in India, especially against the Indian National Congress during the agitational movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1926, the Palestine police force was formally established. The shape of a rapidly rising rate of urban crime laid the major challenge confronting the Kenya Police.

Policing America’s Empire

Policing America’s Empire PDF Author: Alfred W. McCoy
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299234134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies

Colonial Terror

Colonial Terror PDF Author: Deana Heath
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192646168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Policing and decolonisation

Policing and decolonisation PDF Author: David Anderson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526162989
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
As imperial political authority was increasingly challenged, sometimes with violence, locally recruited police forces became the front-line guardians of alien law and order. This book presents a study that looks at the problems facing the imperial police forces during the acute political dislocations following decolonization in the British Empire. It examines the role and functions of the colonial police forces during the process of British decolonisation and the transfer of powers in eight colonial territories. The book emphasises that the British adopted a 'colonial' solution to their problems in policing insurgency in Ireland. The book illustrates how the recruitment of Turkish Cypriot policemen to maintain public order against Greek Cypriot insurgents worsened the political situation confronting the British and ultimately compromised the constitutional settlement for the transfer powers. In Cyprus and Malaya, the origins and ethnic backgrounds of serving policemen determined the effectiveness which enabled them to carry out their duties. In 1914, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) of Ireland was the instrument of a government committed to 'Home Rule' or national autonomy for Ireland. As an agency of state coercion and intelligence-gathering, the police were vital to Britain's attempts to hold on to power in India, especially against the Indian National Congress during the agitational movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1926, the Palestine police force was formally established. The shape of a rapidly rising rate of urban crime laid the major challenge confronting the Kenya Police.