Policing and colonial control

Abstract

Police and policing were the intimate face of colonial control. For rural populations and frontier dwellers especially, the intermittent presence of police, whether local or not, represented colonial legal, fiscal, and social impositions in action. Colonial police, of which there were many forces throughout the European overseas empires, had numerous characteristics in common. Most were paramilitary. All were hybrid in composition, the vertical structures of a security force mediated, in practice, by reliance on local auxiliaries or recruitment of rank‐and‐file personnel from other colonies. Their changing role holds a mirror to the wider fate of empires, from expansion and consolidation to eventual decolonization.