Violence and colonial order
Subtitle: police, workers and protest in the European colonial empires, 1918-1940
By: Martin Thomas
Series: Critical perspectives on empire
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780521768412
Subjects: Protest movements; HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century; Colonies; History; Administration; Political persecution
Description: "This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across colonial Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, Martin Thomas explores the structure of local police forces, their involvement in colonial labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent. His work sheds new light on broader trends in the direction and intent of colonial state repression. It shows that the management of colonial economies, particularly in crisis conditions, took precedence over individual imperial powers' particular methods of rule in determining the forms and functions of colonial police actions. The politics of colonial labour thus became central to police work, with the depression years marking a watershed not only in local economic conditions but also in the breakdown of the European colonial order more generally"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction: Violence and colonial order; Part I. Ideas and Practices: 1. Colonial policing: a discursive framework; 2. 'What did you do in the colonial police force, daddy?'; 3. 'Paying the butcher's bill': policing British colonial protest after 1918; Part II. Colonial Case Studies: British, French and Belgian: 4. Communal policing, policing work, or intelligence gathering? Gendarmes at work in Morocco and Algeria after 1918; 5. Policing Tunisia: mineworkers, fellahs and nationalist protest; 6. Rubber, coolies and communists: policing disorder in French Vietnam; 7. Stuck together? Rubber production, labour regulation and policing in British Malaya; 8. Caning the workers? Policing and violence in Jamaica's sugar industry; 9. Oil and order: repressive violence in Trinidad's oilfields; 10. Profits, privatization and police: the birth of Sierra Leone's diamond industry; 11. Policing and politics in Nigeria: the political economy of indirect rule, 1929-39; 12. Depression and revolt: policing the Belgian Congo; Conclusion.