A brief history of the British police (Part 1 - Up to 1800)
by John Moore
Police are an ever-present reality in twenty-first-century Britain. We are trained to see them as both natural and necessary. They are, we are taught, the first point of call for many problems. It is hard to imagine a world without police. But if we go back two hundred years we find in Britain, and much of the world, societies where the police simply did not exist.
Most British histories of policing start with the 1829 establishment of London’s Metropolitan police force by Robert Peel. This was, they argue, followed by the London police’s replication across Britain, British colonies and the United States. However, the police have a longer history, both in Europe and within Britain and its empire. In this first part, I want to first briefly look at Michel Foucault’s account of the establishment of police in 17th century France, before exploring British policing experiments in the quarter century before 1800. In the second part, I will look at nineteenth-century developments in British policing and set out why the invention of British policing, both in the colonies and in Great Britain, was a response to a need to establish and maintain order. An order based on the needs of capitalism and colonialism; an order the police continue to maintain.
Seventeenth-century French police
Whilst the connection with colonialism and capitalism is essential to understanding the development of British policing, it is important to recognise that this connection is not universal. Although British policing initiatives emerged in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, police forces already existed elsewhere in Europe long before capitalism. I have chosen to highlight Foucault’s account of the origins of the French police as its focus on the political functions of the police will help us understand the later development of British police forces.
Foucault traces the French police back to the Nu-pieds [bare feet] uprisings of 1639. The failure of the aristocracy in the country, as well as the emerging bourgeoisie in the towns, to suppress the uprising required the central state to deploy the army to restore its order (and collect its taxes). Once order was restored it needed maintaining. Wishing to avoid either arming the (disloyal) privileged, or incur the expense of maintaining an ongoing armed presence, the state’s solution was a police force, in Foucault’s words ‘an armed repressive apparatus, distinct from the body of the army, controlled by the civil State and not by the privileged’. For Foucault then, the birth of the police in seventeenth-century France was to enable the state to carry out ‘anti-seditious repression’ in response to ‘popular struggles’. In England, at this time and for well over a century, the state did not need a police force. Why was this? And why did it change towards the end of the eighteenth century?
Maintaining order before the police
Whilst the French police system was well known in England —see for example William Mildmay’s The Police of France, published in 1763— it was treated with suspicion, primarily because of the power it would give the central state. Whereas in France the introduction of the police had resulted from the failure of local aristocrats and bourgeois to facilitate the central state’s revenue collection, and the consequent need for a force to maintain its order, in England order had been maintained without any need for the police. In the countryside, where most of the population lived, the land-owning aristocracy maintained order through local government institutions at parish and county level. In the growing towns, Borough councils, dominated by the emerging bourgeoisie, were responsible for order-maintenance and it was here that some professional policing began to emerge with the establishment of night-watches. The City of London, the centre of the emerging capitalist revolution, was the most passionate opponent of a central state police force. These arrangements reflected the dispersed nature of state power in eighteenth-century England. When, in exceptional circumstances, popular struggles threatened to overwhelm them, the army or militia were available to repress it.
For very different reasons the British state was able to rely on other means to maintain order in its empire. Within slave colonies, order was maintained through the slave codes, which allowed slavers virtually unlimited disciplinary power. When this was threatened by rebellions, the army was called in to repress the revolts. In settler colonies, a mix of English civil and military law was deployed to maintain the colony’s internal order, whilst military power was deployed at the frontier to support the violence of settlers. In the newly established colonies in Africa and Asia, the coastal trading posts (often technically the property of private companies) were effectively under military rule. As they expanded through conquest they introduced a dual system of penal law: for the coloniser, a system based on English law; for the colonised a version (often perverted) of the pre-colonial customs. In the newly established Australian penal colonies, the state deployed military law on both convicts and settlers whilst the army was used to repress revolt and subjugate/wipe out the indigenous population
Growing problems of capitalist and colonial order
Therefore, although by the mid-eighteenth century the idea of a police force was well known in Britain and its empire, the British state continued to utilise other ways of exerting control both at home and in its colonies. But the Industrial Revolution and the expansion, and changing nature, of its empire was to result in dramatic changes in society which required new strategies of policing. In his book Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert has identified that in the last quarter of the eighteenth-century Britain moved from ‘War Capitalism’ to ‘Industrial Capitalism’. Britain and other European colonial powers were no longer focused exclusively on looting the colonies and instead developed an integrated global capitalist system. For example, rather than import textiles from India under industrial capitalism, India produced raw cotton that was then manufactured into textiles in Britain.
In Britain, the Industrial Revolution was to create dramatic changes to society. The settled, largely rural, population was forced to migrate to new industrial towns. Enclosure of common land increased dependence on paid employment at a time when increased agricultural productivity reduced the need for labour. At the same time, the industrial towns and commercial centres needed workers. Not only did populations become more concentrated, but the new towns saw a geographical separation between the classes. The new factories required disciplined labour that worked where and when they were needed by the factory owners. In this context the traditional mechanisms for maintaining order were increasingly inadequate for regulating the emerging working class. A new order was required.
Problems of order were also being experienced in Britain’s empire. In the slave colonies, whilst growing resistance by the enslaved on plantations continued to be responded to by a combination of private slaver’s discipline and interventions by the army, these were insufficient for maintaining order in the colonies’ growing urban centres. For example, by 1790 the population of Kingston, Jamaica was 27,000 and Bridgetown, Barbados was 16,000 (these compared to 25,000 in Boston and 33,000 in New York). The expansion of the territory controlled by the East India Company throughout the period brought increasing needs for order-maintenance. Similar issues were faced by British colonial expansion in Africa and in the penal colonies in Australia as they expanded and began their transition into settler colonies. All the colonies experienced the restructuring of their economies and all had an increased requirement for disciplined labour. Their new colonial orders, like industrial capitalist order in Britain, required both imposing and maintaining.
Eighteenth-century British policing experiments
To establish this new order, and in particular the need for the labour discipline required by its empire, across the globe various parts of the British state began to experiment with different forms of police. The experiments detailed below are not comprehensive, but seek to illustrate how in a variety of places in Britain and its empire problems of order were being seen as requiring the introduction of a police force as their solution. What is detailed below are actual experiments; it is important to note that at the same time there was a growing body of literature and press comment detailing the case for and against establishing a police force.
Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire, 1777.
In 1777, parliament passed the first of the Worsted Acts covering Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire. The Act allowed the Worsted industry to establish a private police force to detect and prosecute spinners who were fraudulently reeling worsted yarn. Further Acts between 1784 and 1791 covered Suffolk, the East Midlands and Norfolk. Although authorised by Parliament, these police forces were funded by private capital and had a very precise focus: enforcing capitalist order in a specific industry.
Calcutta, 1778 and Bombay, 1779.
In 1778, Governor-General Warren Hastings created the post of Superintendent of Police in Calcutta. In 1779, James Todd was appointed Lieutenant of Police in Bombay. The introduction of police by the East India Company was not universally welcomed by the colonial elites. The Bombay Grand Jury, echoing the anti-French prejudice and opposition to police then common in England, declared the new Lieutenant of Police:
a public nuisance, and his office of Police as a most dangerous tendency … that it be immediately abolished, as fit only for a despotic government, where a Bastille is at hand to enforce its authority.
Glasgow, 1779
In 1779, the magistrates in Glasgow established a police force of eight constables under the direction of an Inspector. This initiative failed in 1781 through lack of funds. To remedy this, the Glasgow City Council drafted a police bill in 1788 which would have authorised them to raise a rate to fund the police. They also established another police force in the same year. This also suffered funding issues. Although it was soon officially disbanded, some of its policing functions were continued by other council employees. The police bill, with its revenue raising powers, was finally approved by parliament in 1800 as the Glasgow Police Act, allowing the permanent establishment of a police force in the city.
Kingston, Jamaica, 1784
The population of Kingston, Jamaica had reached 14,000 by 1775 and 27,000 by 1790. Even in this urban centre, white settlers made up only about a quarter of the population and were outnumbered by enslaved Africans and “free” people of colour. The end of the American War of Independence brought an influx of white soldiers and other refugees who sat outside (and potentially threatened) the existing social structure. It was therefore in response to fears about both Black and white disorder that a 1784 Act established a guard for the town of Kingston. A 1794 Act provided for ‘better regulating the police within the said town’ and an 1801 Act listed the duties of the Head Constable as including the bringing before the town’s magistrates ‘all offenders against all or any of the public laws in any wise touching or concerning the order, government and police of the said city and parish’.
London, England, 1785
An attempt to establish a London police force through the 1785 Westminster Police Bill was defeated in the House of Commons.
Dublin, Ireland, 1786
The Westminster Police Bill may have been down but it wasn’t out. With a swift name change it was passed by the Irish parliament in the following year as the Dublin Police Act. It provided for 440 police. The force was armed and, as historian Stanley Palmer makes clear, the Dublin police’s primary function was order maintenance:
Prostitutes were hustled off the streets; beggars were periodically rounded up and taken to the House of industry; “idle vagabonds” were prevented from assembling in public places on the Sabbath; traditional locations for fairs and markets … were proscribed; and May Day festivities were discouraged.
Policing was extended in Ireland through the 1787 Irish County Police Act and the 1792 Irish Constables Act.
Sydney, New South Wales, 1789
In 1789 the British penal colony of New South Wales established a Water Police and Night Watch in its capital Sydney. The following year the Night watch was replaced by the Sydney Foot Police. Both forces were recruited from convicts.
London, England, 1792
After the failure to establish a police force in 1785 a more modest proposal was put forward in 1792 and passed as the Middlesex Justices Act. Seven new police courts were established, each with three full time paid magistrates and six constables. The government also incorporated the existing Bow Street court, and its magistrates and runners, into this arrangement. The stated intention of this reform was to improve access to magistrates’ courts, but in practice they also included other activities including establishing a network of paid spies focused on growing working-class unrest and the enforcement of the 1793 Aliens Act.
Outside London the government response to increased unrest was based around the army. In 1792 there had been 17 army barracks around the country. By 1805 this had increased to 168. In particular the small cavalry barracks built in 1793 and 1794 provided the government with mounted police who were swiftly deployed against unrest and revolt.
Back in London, in 1798, a public private partnership of the West India Committee (the lobby group of slavers) and the home office established the Thames River Police. An 1800 Act transferred the river police to full home office control and funding, making it the first English central government-funded and -controlled police force. It has operated continuously since, being absorbed into the Metropolitan Police in 1839.
British Policing, 1800
By 1800, some 29 years before the establishment of the Met, there had already been British police forces across the globe. Some were experiments that proved short-lived, but at this stage Dublin, Kingston, Bombay and Glasgow all had established police forces. In London, the Thames River police had been established and adopted by the state. A police force designed to protect the profits of slavery and impose discipline on workers in London. A police protecting the interests of both colonialism and capitalism. The Thames police and these other initiatives had been state responses to problems of order. In its empire and at home, the British state had begun to see the police as a necessary tool of governance.
This is the first part of a two part article. How the British police expanded across the globe to become the institutional bedrock of the British state’s imposition of its capitalist and colonial order will be explored in the second part of this blog series.