Violence and Colonial

Violence and Colonial Order
This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship

between the politics of imperial repression and the economic struc-
tures 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 involve-
ment 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 prece-
dence 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.
m a rt i n t hom a s is Professor of Imperial History in the Department

of History at the University of Exeter. He is a director of the University’s
Centre for the Study of War, State and Society, an inter-disciplinary
research centre that supports research into the impact of armed
conflict and collective violence on societies and communities.
Critical Perspectives on Empire
Editors
Professor Catherine Hall
University College London
Professor Mrinalini Sinha
Pennsylvania State University
Professor Kathleen Wilson
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary

works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series
explore the connections, exchanges and mediations at the heart of national and
global histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge,
and the flows of people, ideas and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To
that end, the series not only offers a space for outstanding scholars working at
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their work; it also takes a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical
and critical knowledge, of the past and of ourselves.
A full list of titles published in the series can be found at:

www.cambridge.org/cpempire
Violence and Colonial Order
Police, Workers and Protest in the European
Colonial Empires, 1918–1940
Martin Thomas
ca mbr idge u ni v ersit y pr ess
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,

New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521768412
© Martin Thomas 2012
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2012
Printed and Bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Thomas, Martin, 1964–
Violence and colonial order : police, workers and protest in the European
colonial empires, 1918–1940 / Martin Thomas.
pages cm. – (Critical perspectives on empire)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-76841-2
1. Political persecution – Developing countries – History – 20th century.
2. Protest movements – Developing countries – History – 20th
century. 3. Europe – Colonies – Administration – History – 20th
century. I. Title.
JC585.T483 2012
303.609171′2409041–dc23 2012018833
ISBN 978-0-521-76841-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In memory of my father, Rex Thomas
Contents
List of maps page ix

List of tables x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Police, labour and colonial violence 1
Part I Ideas and practices 15

1 Colonial policing: A discursive framework 17
2 ‘What did you do in the colonial police force,
daddy?’ Policing inter-war dissent 42
3 ‘Paying the butcher’s bill?’: Policing British
colonial protest after 1918 64
Part II Colonial case studies: French, British

and Belgian 87
4 Gendarmes: Work and policing in French
North Africa after 1918 89
5 Policing Tunisia: Mineworkers, fellahs and
nationalist protest 112
6 Rubber, coolies and communists: Policing
disorder in French Vietnam 141
7 Stuck together? Rubber production, labour
regulation and policing in Malaya 177
8 Caning the workers? Policing and violence in
Jamaica’s sugar industry 206
9 Oil and order: Repressive violence in Trinidad’s
oilfields 235
vii
viii Contents
10 Profits, privatization and police: The birth of

Sierra Leone’s diamond industry 256
11 Policing and politics in Nigeria: The political
economy of indirect rule, 1929–39 277
12 Depression and revolt: Policing the Belgian Congo 301
Conclusion 325
Notes to the text 335

Bibliography 459
Index 517
Maps
4.1 French North African colonial territories page 94

5.1 French colonial map of Northern and Central Africa,
c. 1925 113
5.2 French War Ministry map, ‘Comintern activity in
North Africa’, produced in August 1936 (AN F60, 769) 139
6.1 French colonial map of Indochina, c. 1938 143
6.2 Economic map of colonial Indochina in 1930 146
7.1 Colonial Malaya 178
7.2 Rubber cultivation in Malaya 180
8.1 Caribbean territories 207
10.1 Map of West Africa prepared for the British Bank
of West Africa 259
11.1 Colonial Nigeria 278
12.1 Belgian Congo administrative territories, 1926 and 1933 304
ix
Tables
4.1 Gendarmerie personnel, May 1917 page 93

6.1 Vietnam rubber plantations, size in hectares (he),
distribution and ownership, April 1936 147
6.2 Size of Vietnam’s rubber plantations (in hectares – he),
April 1936 147
7.1 FMS plantation wage rates (in Malayan dollars),
January 1928 188
7.2 Straits Settlements Special Branch arrests of
communist suspects, 1932–3 201
7.3 Straits Settlements Special Branch anti-communist
section raids, 1931–5 202
12.1 Numbers of European-owned industrial, commercial
and agricultural businesses in the Belgian Congo, 1930–1 317
12.2 Union Minière du Haut Katanga workforce composition,
1925–30 322
x
Acknowledgements
When I began work on this book the oligarchic regimes of the Arab
world seemed deeply entrenched, the phrase ‘credit crunch’ meant
nothing and my favourite football team stood three divisions higher.
With so many years passed, I’m not sure that a few words can do just-
ice to the support I’ve had from friends and funders alike in bringing
this project to fruition. Writing a comparative study of colonial policing
has involved lots of travelling and lots of requests. The travel and the
writing it generated were made possible by the award of a Leverhulme
Trust Major Research Fellowship, which gave me the time and space
to pursue this study. An earlier pilot project grant from the Nuffield
Foundation allowed me to do essential preliminary foraging. The
requests were usually made to archivists and the gatekeepers of various
private papers. My thanks go to the staff at each of the archives and
libraries I’ve visited as well as to the trustees of the following private
paper collections: Clarence Buxton, Alfred Chester Beatty, Fernand
Gambiez, Jamaica Sugar Estates Limited, Henry de Jouvenel, Baron
Killearn, Guy La Chambre, Sir Percy Loraine, Louis-Hubert Lyautey,
Malcolm MacDonald, Georges Mandel, Alfred Milner, Marius Moutet,
Joseph Paul-Boncour, Gabriel Puaux, John Roland Phillips, the Rubber
Growers’ Association, Albert Sarraut and Maxime Weygand.
Several ideas and some of the case studies discussed in this book were
tested before audiences in France, Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland,
Qatar and the United States. Among the organizations involved were
the Al Jazeera Research Centre, Bristol University’s Centre for the
Study of Colonial and Post-Colonial Societies, the École Normale
Supérieure, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Institute of
Commonwealth Studies Decolonization Seminar, the International
Studies Association, Paris I Sorbonne, the University of Freiburg,
University College, Galway and University College, Dublin’s Centre for
War Studies. I thank them all for helping me to clarify my thoughts.
For reading chapters, offering hospitality, providing archival leads, or
talking over the research I am grateful to the following: Robert Aldrich,
xi
xii Acknowledgements
Andrew Barros, Robert Bickers, Emmanuel Blanchard, Dan Branch,

Raphaëlle Branche, Alison Carrol, Joshua Cole, Richard Drayton, Saul
Dubow, Marie Dunkerley, David Edgerton, Martin Evans, Kent and
Gudrun Fedorowich, Robert Gerwarth, Ruth Ginio, Chris Goscha,
Martin Horn, Stacey Hynd, Talbot Imlay, Julian Jackson, Peter Jackson,
Keith Jeffery, Anja Johansen, Sam Kalman, Feriel Kissoon, Simon
Kitson, Jean-François Klein, Patricia Lorcin, Richard Overy, Rogelia
Pastor-Castro, Jennifer Regan-Lefevre, Todd Shepard, Emmanuelle
Sibeud, Sarah Stockwell, Sylvie Thénault, Andrew Thompson, Mike
Vann, Helen Vassallo, Mathilde von Bülow and Kim Wagner. At
Cambridge University Press, I’ve been expertly advised by Michael
Watson, Nicola Philps and the editors of the Critical Perspectives on
Empire series as well as the anonymous readers of the original manu-
script. Rose Bell provided expert copy-editing. Colleagues at the
University of Exeter and its Centre for the Study of War, State and
Society have provided a supportive academic environment throughout.
Closer to home, to Suzy goes the biggest ‘thank you’ of them all.
Reproduction of images in the book is by permission of The National
Archives. Sections of certain chapters draw on articles that have been
published before. I wish to thank the editors and publishers of two pub-
lications for permitting me to make use of this earlier work: ‘“Paying
the Butcher’s Bill”: Policing British Colonial Protest after 1918’, Crime,
Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 15:2 (2011), 55–76, copy-
right Librairie Droz and the editors of Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime,
History & Societies, and ‘Eradicating “Communist Banditry” in French
Vietnam: The Rhetoric of Repression after the Yen Bay Uprising,
1930–32’, French Historical Studies, 34:3 (2011), 611–48, copyright
Duke University Press and the editors of French Historical Studies.
Introduction: Police, labour and
colonial violence
In early March 1937 workers at several iron ore and phosphate mines in
southern Tunisia downed tools. The minerals they excavated were the
most lucrative exports from France’s Tunisian protectorate at the time.
The value of these ‘strategic’ raw materials increased as war clouds
gathered over Europe, making Tunisia’s miners, supplemented by
labourers from neighbouring Italian-ruled Libya, integral to France’s
rearmament effort. But there was little sign of imperial unity or colo-
nial differences forgotten at Metlaoui, the worst affected mine-works.
Strikers there occupied the company offices, copying the sit-in strikes
that briefly paralysed French industry in the first weeks of the left-wing
Popular Front government the year before. Informed of the sit-ins, local
garrison troops tried, but failed to secure the compound. Meanwhile,
the strike’s alleged ‘ringleaders’1 – a term whose loaded connotations
will become familiar to us over the course of this book – broke into and
then blockaded another company building nearby. There they found
300 rifles and ammunition kept for civil defence purposes, as well as the
mine company’s stock of industrial dynamite. The strikers had stum-
bled on a veritable revolutionary arsenal.
It proved to be a fatal discovery. Reinforcements of gendarmes and
more heavily armed colonial soldiers surrounded the affected depot
once it became clear that the miners had access to weapons and explo-
sives. A gendarmerie officer was assaulted while trying to clear the area.
The dynamite was never used, but some rifle shots were fired from
behind the strikers’ improvised barricades. This was pretext enough
to send in the colonial assault troops. Within twenty-four hours, six-
teen mineworkers lay dead.2 Previously unheard of, ‘Metlaoui’ became
a milestone in the onward march of Tunisian nationalism and a byword
for the severity of labour control in the French colonial empire before
the Second World War.
This book contains a number of detailed, local accounts like these
from various locations within the French, British and Belgian empires.
The reason for their inclusion is simple. A detailed reconstruction of
1
2 Violence and Colonial Order
local protest or, to use specialist parlance, a micro-historical approach

to the study of colonial protest policing reveals broader trends and
deeper meanings about the direction and intent of colonial state repres-
sion – who it served and why.
Subsequent chapters will illustrate how typical the events at
Metlaoui were of colonial protest policing between the wars. Typical
in three ways: first, in showing that industrial strikes and other forms
of economic protest were issues of mounting concern to colonial gov-
ernments and police commands in the inter-war years; second, in
indicating the central importance of workplace regulation to changes
in the working practices of colonial police; and, third, in revealing the
connections between police practice and the economic configuration
of individual colonies. Cumulatively, the argument is this: political
economy offers the best guide to understanding what colonial police
were called upon to do.
Connections between colonial economic activity and labour coer-
cion help explain ‘why political economy?’ We need also to remind our-
selves that the study of popular dissent and of the repressive strategies
adopted to contain it has been embedded in broader narratives of the
expansion and contraction of empires, from conquest to decoloniza-
tion and post-colonial state formation. Put simply, colonial policing has
figured largest in histories of existential threats to colonial regimes.3
Using political economy allows us to dig deeper, offering another per-
spective on police activities and the colonial priorities implicit in them.
As the Metlaoui example suggests, between the 1910s and the 1940s
the most common call on colonial security forces was not to defend
the state against imminent overthrow. It was more prosaic: to police
internal industrial disputes, whether organized strike actions by indus-
trial workers or spontaneous work stoppages by plantation labourers.
This begs another question. Beginning from this observation, the next
step is to consider what was the relationship, if any, between the politics
of imperial repression and the economic structures of colonies?
To answer this question we need to dwell on certain features of colo-
nial states. A combination of three factors was common to numer-
ous dependent territories, particularly the larger ones. First were
their sheer geographical extent and the consequent unevenness with
which thin police resources were spread. French Algeria, the Sudan
Condominium and the Belgian Congo: these were, by some margin,
the three biggest administrative units on the African continent. Each
dwarfed the European nation states that governed them. British-ruled
Nigeria and French Indochina, both federated territories investigated
in later chapters, were also geographically large and, next to the earlier
trio, more densely populated. They each became sites of quintessential

experiments in styles of colonial governance – ‘indirect rule’ in Nigeria;
‘associationism’ in Indochina with the promise of ‘assimilation’ for a
naturalized Vietnamese elite.4 In practice, their status as laboratories
of colonial rule reflected two things above all: their ethnic heterogen-
eity and the practical difficulties of governing such complex, resistant
places on a tight budget.
Linked to problems of geographical scale and resilient, impenetrable
cultures was a second factor evident in each of the territories to be
examined here. This was the patchy administrative presence and lim-
ited infrastructural development characteristic of colonial rule. Imperial
governance, including police regulation, was, in consequence, absent
much of the time. Being ruled or repressed were phenomena that colo-
nial peoples experienced fitfully, often when economic expropriations,
labour exactions, or fiscal demands were made, rather than constantly
as part of their daily lives. That is not to suggest that colonialism as an
abstract social condition mattered less to subject communities than we
might assume. Occasional they may have been, but colonial demands
could be highly disruptive: forcible relocation, military recruitment,
labour service, or, less visibly, incorporation into an expanding wage
economy. As Samuel Popkin demonstrated long ago, fundamental
changes in authority relations ruptured the moral economies of peasant
societies, provoking ‘defensive reactions’ that were often violent and
which typically required police intervention.5 The nature of colonial
demands, their local variations and the responses they triggered raises
the third distinctive factor: the ties between a colony’s economic organ-
ization and the form and scale of repressive policing within it.
The widespread colonial turn away from subsistence agriculture and
towards waged labour in the early twentieth century was not matched
by industrial diversification. Imperial bureaucrats on both sides of the
English Channel remained deeply ambivalent about the consequences
of colonial industrialization. Most were hostile. They warned of sprawl-
ing city slums, juvenile ‘delinquents’ and an uncontrollable proletariat.6
Uprooted from their conservative rural milieus, colonial industrial work-
ers would lose the moral compass of traditional cultures.7 Less alarm
was expressed about attracting further investment into existing colonial
export industries. That is not to say that administrators regarded big
colonial business as unproblematic or benign. Working alongside a fast-
developing banking sector, numerous European-controlled enterprises
in colonial Africa and Asia remained extremely powerful. The Bank
of Indochina, for instance, was not only France’s largest finance house
in the Indochina federation but the biggest French investor in China
and Southeast Asia. It also issued Indochina’s colonial currency, the

piastre.8 The Bank’s accounts, its board membership and their annual
general meetings were, not surprisingly, subjects of formal discus-
sion and informal gossip inside the French Ministries of Finance and
Colonies.9 North of the French border, the Société Générale de Belgique,
a conglomerate with strong links to Belgium’s monarchy, developed
interests in mining, banking and other trading consortia throughout
the Belgian Congo.10
While the major colonial banks drew on their capacity to invest or
withdraw capital, the influence of the largest corporate exporters was
often enhanced by monopoly rights over the extraction, distribution
and sale of particular commodities.11 Planting consortia, mining com-
panies and other businesses seeking exclusive commercial concessions
were sometimes resented by colonial treasuries, whose resources could
look poor by comparison.12 Governments typically collected taxes to
meet their own administrative costs and, if surpluses were achieved,
to provide revenue for additional spending on infrastructure. Even in
good economic times surpluses were small.13 As Martin Klein notes,
fiscal constraint meant that ‘colonial administrators could exert nearly
absolute power, but only in very limited spaces’.14
Funds for longer-term investment evaporated with the onset of the
depression.15 Demands for free labour did not. There were widespread
requirements to work a set number of days each year at the behest of local
officials. Most colonial administrations in black Africa and Southeast
Asia maintained corvée systems tied to discriminatory legal codes to
ensure that public works were completed. Some massive projects started
in more propitious economic circumstances also continued – the Office
du Niger in French West Africa; an equally ambitious scheme for cotton
cultivation in Portuguese Mozambique; the completion of coastal rail
links in the Belgian Congo; and the construction of an arterial road
system in Vietnamese Indochina for instance. Often, the stringency of
labour recruitment increased as state funding dried up.16 Meanwhile,
the ties between European-run businesses and district officers (or, their
French and Belgian equivalents: commandants de cercle and Territoriale
agents) grew stronger. Closer co-operation made sense. It minimized
clashes between them in their quest for workers. And it allowed gov-
ernment and larger industrial concerns to pool resources in securing
migrant labour to work large-scale agricultural, industrial or min-
ing enterprises. These ties were also part of a longer-term regulatory
trend. New quotas, passport controls, travel permits and other legisla-
tive instruments restricted internal economic migration and large-scale
movements of workers within and between colonial territories.17 In
more remote areas especially, working relationships between officialdom

and commerce became social and informal.
White police officers also moved in these circles. All colonial govern-
ments assigned police to help maintain order on plantations, in process-
ing plants, factories, mines and other European-controlled workplaces.
Police worked alongside government labour inspectors in monitoring
the inflow of workers, their assignment to employers, and, in some
cases, their eventual return home. Policemen got to know estate man-
agers, business owners and other senior commercial staff in their area;
indeed, it was their job to do so. Locally, these relationships were medi-
ated through the networks of association between administrators, trad-
ers, managers and police officers. At the personal level as much as the
structural one, the political priorities and security practices of colonial
rule were thereby attuned to its economic organization.18
It follows that received wisdom about contrasting styles of European
colonial policing may be misguided. This is not to deny that analysis of
colonial policing has expanded thanks to its immersion in wider ques-
tions of social control and the nature of the late colonial state. Historians
of the new imperial history have contested whether repressive practices
were primarily cultural or political phenomena. In other words, there
is lively debate about whether the legislative restrictions, economic
discriminations and varying forms of social segregation common in
numerous colonies were the product of discrete ways of constructing
dependent populations. The case studies in this book indicate that,
rather than distinctive national traditions of colonial police practice,
the most salient factor in state repression was local economic structure,
specifically the coercive practices inherent to the operation of colonial
wage economies and the extent to which corporate and settler interests
controlled them. As a result, there were distinct political economies of
empire protest and police repression.
Each was shaped by the economic relationships between the late
colonial state, European producers and indigenous labourers, whether
in predominantly rural colonies or in those adjusting to rapid urbaniza-
tion and industrialization from the 1920s to the 1950s. These relation-
ships, some exclusively local, others more transnational, underpinned
workplace politics. And their flashpoints often culminated in police
intervention. A colony’s political economy helps us to map changing
police priorities and practices between the wars, but it does not offer a
comprehensive explanation for all police actions. Government and, in
some cases, corporate use of security forces to police colonial economies
suggests that repressive policing was critical, first to the configuration
of colonial rule, then to its eventual collapse. Unravelling this paradox
requires us to consider the dilemma involved. On the one hand, imper-

ial governments relied on police services in all their major economic
choices, from tax collection and land appropriation to the suppression
of worker dissent. On the other, such police deployments marked an
attempt to compensate for the state’s inability to satisfy its economic
requirements through co-operation. Police power and legal sanction
upheld coercive labour practices in the short term. But, the denial of
popular inclusion in key economic decisions ranging from working con-
ditions and wage rates to land use and resource extraction rendered
colonial states vulnerable to mass opposition in the longer term. The
book’s principal finding is that this paradox in colonial police actions –
repression as inherently self-defeating – makes more sense when factors
of political economy are given due weight.
This finding is compatible with the idea that the discrete national
traditions and intra-imperial borrowings of colonial police forces influ-
enced their character and development. British, French, Belgian and
other European colonial policemen acted as they did, at least in part,
because of their attitudinal formation, their past career experience and
the inculcation of distinctive national policing methods within their
own empires. The point, though, is that ethnicity and cultural back-
ground are insufficient explanatory tools for the directions taken by
colonial protest policing between the wars. Crucial to this viewpoint
is the fact that colonial police officers, much like the forces they com-
manded, became hybrids. Each blended metropolitan influences with
more exotic flavours derived from the multi-ethnic composition of local
security forces as well as the peculiar legal frameworks – part European,
part colonial, part customary – in which police work took place.
The same argument could be made about the subjects of police
attention – colonial populations. To use the example of Malaya’s
Chinese communities, as Lynn Hollen Lees has argued, the scale of
transnational, regional and internal migration around Southeast Asia
helped foster multiple identities among individuals who regarded them-
selves as, for example, simultaneously Anglo-Chinese, British subjects,
Chinese subjects and residents of British Malaya.19 Tim Harper agrees,
noting that ‘multilingual individuals learned to “switch codes and
styles” rather than to assimilate to one standard identity’.20 As Lees
concludes, in Malaya, ‘Britishness was a capacious identity.’21 Police
work required equal versatility. It was less hidebound by a particular
national tradition than might be assumed. Officers’ identities were
refashioned by encounters at the frontier. So were police practices,
aspects of which were locally derived. And ‘lessons’ of protest policing
built on supra-national influences. Transmission of police ideas was,
in this sense, redolent of the ‘material life of knowledge’ discussed by

Richard Drayton in relation to maritime imperial networks.22
Ann Stoler takes us further down this road of ideas in flux. She sug-
gests that using empire as both a descriptor and an analytical field
imposes needless constraints on the way we think about processes of
colonial change. Stoler offers the alternative ‘imperial formation’ as a
way to introduce more flexibility into our thinking about colonial rule,
the policing of empire included:
In working with the concept of imperial formation rather than empire, the
emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials, to gradated
forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial
rule – sliding and contested scales of differential rights. Imperial formations
are defined by racialized relations of allocations and appropriations. Unlike
empires, they are processes of becoming, not fixed things. Not least they are
states of deferral that mete out promissory notes that are not exceptions to
their operation but constitutive of them: imperial guardianship, trusteeships,
delayed autonomy, temporary intervention, conditional tutelage, military take-
over in the name of humanitarian works, violent intervention in the name of
human rights and security measures in the name of peace.23
There is much to be said for this approach when considering the involve-
ment of colonial police in the political economy of empires – or imperial
formations – between the wars.
Staying with the theoretical for a moment, there is also something to
be derived from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about forms
of capital and symbolic violence in analysing colonial police behav-
iour. Bourdieu, after all, cemented his reputation with fieldwork among
Algeria’s Kabyle Berbers before taking up a post at the University of
Algiers in the dying days of colonial rule.24 His suggestion is that social
actors who share a similar position within any particular society – colo-
nial police officers for instance – are likely to develop similar pre-disposi-
tions, practices and norms. Bourdieu’s analysis bears directly on the way
that the colonies studied in this book were policed.25 Defence of colonial
hierarchy was almost automatic for the police officers involved – a reflex
reaction based on their presumptions about what was socially correct
in the colonial society or, in Bourdieu’s terms, the ‘field’ in which they
found themselves. The outcome was the recourse to ‘symbolic violence’,
that is, the attempt to impose their own normative standards and social
meanings on other sections of society. In other words, dominant social
actors – colonial police officers acting in the name of colonial government
in this context – legitimized their own prevailing standards and expecta-
tions about individuals’ behaviour and deference to colonial authority as
the normal way of things, as the way the world should be.26
Putting these elements together, the argument plays out thus. Police
applied symbolic violence to uphold the rules and hierarchies inherent
to the imperial formation in which they operated. The point is import-
ant because it demonstrates that cultural presumptions and police
actions were subject to the political order and economic organization –
the political economy – prevailing in their colony.
The picture of European colonial rule presented in the chapters to
come is unflattering. Collective violence and security force repres-
sion were more or less constant features in the political landscape. But
what perspective should we adopt towards them? Should disorder and
the stresses of colonial policing be in the foreground or confined to
background detail? Were they indicative of incipient imperial collapse,
the precursor to decolonization? Or were dissent and protest policing
merely innate features of life in tense societies, not so much indica-
tors of governmental dysfunction as affirmation that, for all its iniqui-
ties, colonialism had put down roots deep enough to withstand internal
upheaval?
To investigate these questions the book is divided into two parts.
The first three chapters consider colonial policing generically. The
approach is less transnational than comparative, meaning that,
although the roles of sub-state actors – frontline police and their
opponents – are investigated, the colonial state remains central to the
analysis. Changing norms and practices of protest policing are exam-
ined between forces, colonies and empires. The connections between
them are also explored. These links were evident in several, overlap-
ping ways: in methods copied, ideas shared, or, more basically, in the
movements of police personnel and their political opponents between
territories. Before unpicking these threads, Chapter 1 analyses discrete
approaches to the study of security policing, strategies of repression
and colonial violence. The second chapter focuses on the colonial
police themselves. It discusses the structure of local forces, their pro-
fessional roles and priorities, their involvement in such things as labour
control and the running of prisons; in short, the material life or ‘stuff’
of policing. The third and final chapter in the book’s first section
concentrates on the phenomenon of protest policing. It has two major
concerns. One is the changing inter-war conceptualization of how
public demonstrations in general, and workplace protests in particular,
were to be policed. The chapter scrutinizes official thinking about how
such actions were to be either prevented, contained, or ended; by what
methods and at what human cost. The second concern arises from the
first. The discussion indicates that the policing of waged labourers and
their places of work – colonial labour control broadly defined – was
both a perennial feature and an increasingly prominent facet of police

work in the colonies between the wars.
The inter-war years lend themselves to such investigation because
numerous export staples – rubber, coal and tin in Southeast Asia, pre-
cious minerals in British West Africa, Trinidadian crude oil – were
only then being extracted on an industrial scale. In each case, rapid
growth was adversely affected by the impact of the global depression
which hit most colonies very hard in the early 1930s. Elsewhere, long-
established export industries – viticulture in French Algeria or sugar in
British Jamaica – suffered equivalent shocks. In all these cases, colonial
police confronted problems bound up with the economic fortunes of
the major exporters in their locality. The connection between colonial
policing, industrial concentration and economic conditions may seem
an obvious one. Even more so if we remind ourselves that theoretical
interpretations of policing as an inherently repressive phenomenon
have sometimes come with pronounced flavours of Marxist analysis
or Weberian sociology. Such readings attach primary significance
to abstract processes of state development and class formation, but
remain useful in explaining critical changes in police activity over time.
Put simply, the argument goes that police forces were tightly harnessed
to state efforts to impose social control once the society in question
became demarcated between dominant and subordinate groups welded
together under a single administrative authority. Whether social divi-
sions were governed by ethnicity, economic and political power, or
membership of customary elites, the result was broadly the same: the
police were used by the privileged in society to safeguard their access
to limited resources, wealth and property. Police forces were thereby
caught in a cleft stick, notionally obligated to serve the public but called
upon to uphold elite interests and the hierarchies of difference on which
they rested.27 Usually, it was public order policing that predominated.
These linear, theorized interpretations have limits. For one thing,
the evidence suggests that policing empires was more improvised and
inconsistent than they allow. For another, these theories leave little
room for consideration of distinct policing cultures, whether national,
colonial or institutional. More important, they overlook the fact that
the concept of colonial public order and of its opposite, public protest,
was fluid and subjective. Most colonial authorities and their indigenous
clients defined public order narrowly, enacting restrictions to match.
Protest, by extension, could mean virtually any expression of dissent
that came to official attention. Increasingly, it encompassed the actions
of waged workers whose numbers expanded hugely in the colonial
world from the 1920s onwards. Stripped of theory, it is in this sense of a
coercive workplace in which opportunities to press demands were lim-

ited that the connections between order and industry, between policing
and political economy become easier to discern. Responding to a June
1926 request from Britain’s service chiefs to reflect on ‘problems of
internal security in the Colonies’, the Colonial Office began its assess-
ment thus: ‘It may be stated in general that in any Dependency where
there is a mixed population there is under post-war conditions more
risk than at home that industrial disturbances will be so influenced
by colour questions as to lead to riots.’28 It is this relationship between
colonial governments, police forces and disorder in racially ordered
colonial workplaces that this book explores.
The themes that inform the opening three chapters recur in the nine
that follow. These are the colonial case studies that, together, com-
prise the book’s second part. They investigate the place of labour con-
trol in French, British and Belgian colonial policing between the two
world wars. Each examines the situation in a specific colony or region.
And all approach the depression years as a pivot point, not just in local
economic conditions but in colonial policing as well. From the mining
industries in French North Africa and British West Africa, through
Southeast Asia’s rubber plantations, to the sugar estates of Jamaica,
the oilfields of southern Trinidad and Katanga’s copper-belt, the book
allows readers to see how government priorities and the needs of key
industries affected colonial police work over the course of the inter-
war period. The various roles assigned to paramilitary forces, military
reinforcements and settler vigilante groups in assisting – sometimes, in
dominating – such policing also figures large in the narrative.
French territories feature first, followed by British and, finally,
Belgian. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate policing in the three French-
administered states of North West Africa: Morocco, Algeria and
Tunisia. They approach issues of internal order from the perspective of
a particular security force: the gendarmerie. The reason for doing so is
simple. Although a part of the French army, gendarmerie forces played
a leading role in rural police work. They were also in the vanguard of
protest policing, dedicated crowd-control units being drawn from their
ranks.
Chapter 6 remains with the French Empire, but throws the spot-
light onto the Indochina federation, the rubber-producing regions in
the southern Vietnamese colony of Cochin-China in particular. The
chapter explores the triangular relationship between colonial busi-
ness, imperial bureaucracy and colonial security forces in French-ruled
Vietnam in a key export industry – rubber production. The import-
ance of rubber revenues to the French colonial authorities in Indochina
ensured privileged treatment for the industry’s major plantation owners

throughout the depression years of the early 1930s. The core argument
is this: colonial security policing in Indochina, and also in Malaya, was,
first and foremost, a matter of the inter-actions between politics and
economics. The point is important insofar as historians have tended to
interpret patterns of colonial policing rather differently, placing offi-
cial threat perceptions about anti-colonial groups and inter-communal
frictions within individual territories at the heart of their analysis.
Nationalist politics and cultural rivalry have thus informed analyses of
colonial police work to the exclusion of economic affairs. Yet during the
rubber crash in colonial Southeast Asia, consequent problems of labour
control loomed as large, if not larger.
From Chapter 7 onwards, the book’s attention shifts from French
colonial police practice to British. Three discrete regions are studied.
First is Malaya, Britain’s foremost Southeast Asian territory, whose
r ubber plantations and highly regulated workforce of South Indian
labourers offer a natural partner for comparison with French Indochina
where workers transferred southward from the north Vietnamese ter-
ritory of Tonkin predominated. If the ‘invention’ of colonial politics
in Malaya centred on contested identities within a hierarchical multi-
ethnic society, the chapter indicates that policing priorities responded
to other, more proximate economic changes as well.29
The British Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Trinidad provide
the second region in which patterns of colonial protest policing are
reviewed. By 1930 Jamaica was a colony already profoundly affected
by the depression’s impact on the international commodities trade; it
was also one in which the correlation between collapsing raw materi-
als’ prices, falling wages and chronic unemployment in the sugar econ-
omy provoked a deeper crisis of state control. The labour rebellions
that convulsed the British Caribbean during the 1930s were nowhere
more acute than here. Disorders in Trinidad came close, however. The
island’s experience of strike actions, workplace violence and coercive
policing mirrored the Jamaican experience to a remarkable degree. The
parallel becomes more interesting in light of the fact that Trinidad’s
foremost export industry was oil production. Highly capitalized and
largely confined to the island’s southern oilfields, the financial and
political significance of Trinidad’s oil production increased mark-
edly in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war in 1939.
Trinidad’s oil workers were better organized than their counterparts on
Jamaica’s sugar plantations, adding to the problems of policing them.
And, unlike Jamaica, senior figures in Trinidad’s colonial government
broke ranks with business owners and police representatives once the
oilfields erupted into violence over the summer of 1937. In the short
term at least, the political fallout from clashes over protest policing in
Trinidad provoked a crisis of colonial rule as intense as Jamaica’s more
protracted labour rebellion.
British West Africa forms the third regional cluster of British terri-
tories analysed. Colonial police forces in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the
Gold Coast were reconfigured in the early 1930s to meet the demands
of the mining sector. These three territories formed a troika in which
the economic primacy of agricultural exports gave way to more intensive
mineral extraction in the inter-war years.30 In Sierra Leone and Nigeria,
the cases studied in Chapters 10 and 11, the established police role as a
paramilitary gendarmerie overseeing the internal life of the colony was
not abandoned. It did, however, acquire new focal points: the protec-
tion of mining compounds, oil installations and the internal movement
of precious metals and crude oil from their point of extraction to point
of export. In both colonies policing was shaped by wider structures of
governance, changing patterns of industrial production and critical
shortages of funding. The gearing of Sierra Leone’s police force to the
requirements of export production may even be ascribed to the promin-
ence that mining revenue occupied in British calculations about this tiny
colonial territory in the 1930s. What about Nigeria, a much larger, more
diverse colony, over three times the size of the United Kingdom and the
centrepiece of British imperialism in West Africa? Here, as we shall see,
police practice remained consistent insofar as defence of European com-
mercial interest and the advancement of colonial administration’s reve-
nue-raising powers consumed increasing proportions of police activity
after 1918. Mid-way through the inter-war years, the 1929 riots in the
south-eastern provinces of Calabar and Owerri exposed police inabil-
ity to cope with mass demonstrations that originated in widely shared
economic grievances. Chapter 11 reconstructs the popular origins and
security force responses to these disorders, known as the Igbo women’s
war, to highlight the economic determinants of security policing – and
their sometimes tragic consequences.
A final chapter departs the French and British empires to consider
the style and substance of security policing in the vast interior spaces
of the Belgian Congo. The presumptions that informed security force
responses to rebellions in much of southern and western Congo in the
early 1930s are investigated. So, too, are the problems of distance,
inaccessibility and isolation that beset colonial administrators and police
commands in the Congolese interior. This last chapter also reviews
another triangular relationship between colonial government, indus-
try and internal security forces by examining workplace regulation in
the copper mines of Congo’s south-eastern province of Katanga where

the Belgian conglomerate, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga reigned
supreme. Once again, aspects of political economy emerge as central
to the practices and priorities of Belgian colonial policing. For all the
national and regional variations encountered within and between the
colonies studied, what emerge are shared preoccupations and similar
patterns in the maintenance of European colonial order between the
wars.
Before turning to these regional studies, I need first to answer some
basic questions about the security of the European colonial empires
and how it was maintained. This is the departure point for Chapter 1.
Part I
Ideas and practices

1 Colonial policing: A discursive framework
This chapter has several aims. One is to show how historians and social
scientists have tackled colonial policing and its attendant violence as
discrete phenomena. From there, I move on to discuss the rationale for
making political economy an explanatory tool for the actions of colonial
police. This, in turn, brings economic distress and patterns of labour
usage within the inter-war colonies investigated in later chapters to the
fore. The result is to highlight the connection between policing and
the development of colonial economies, a link that strengthened as a
result of the depression of the early 1930s. As we shall see, these socio-
economic factors help make sense of what policemen – forces were still
exclusively male (and, predominantly, single male) at this point – were
instructed to do. The suggestion is that, for all the local variations
involved, colonial police forces between the wars may be usefully seen
as part of a complex economic enterprise, one that will be explored,
case-by-case, in later chapters.
Approaches to colonial policing:

protest, law and regulation
Disintegration of the European colonial empires in the twentieth cen-
tury has led historians to analyse the internal protest that convulsed
them in terms of its impact, firstly on processes of socio-political
reform, and, secondly, on the development of organized nationalist
groups, many of which assumed power when imperial governments
collapsed or withdrew. Neither approach places significant emphasis
on political economy as a determinant of colonial police work, a third
perspective and the one pursued here. Within the existing broad nar-
ratives, colonial policing, which, in this context, includes the internal
security operations of colonial militaries has become a story with two
overriding themes.
The first theme examines the discrete institutional cultures born of the
dominance of certain ethnic groups within individual forces: Irishmen in
17
Palestine and elsewhere; Corsicans, often of Italian descent, in French

North Africa; and, at the rank-and-file level, Punjabis, Moroccans,
Malians and Senegalese, Ambonese and other so-called ‘martial races’
that were prevalent in British, French and Dutch colonial police ranks.1
In this depiction of colonial policing questions of identity construction
and cultural transmission provide the key to understanding operational
activity.2
Underlying these arguments is the idea of exceptionality. British
colonial police forces were different from their French, Belgian or other
equivalents because ethnic composition, cultural background and dis-
crete patterns of training were necessarily unique to each force. Local
iterations of the ‘classic’ colonial police force model of rigidly verti-
cal organization were to be found within and between empires: white
officer leadership, life in barracks apart from the local community
and paramilitary style activity. Every force was also shaped by a com-
bination of imported practices, local requirements and the resources
available to them. For all that, the argument runs, each colony’s police
remained distinctive. Other analysts suggest that we should look to the
institutional setting – the expectations, modes of behaviour and discip-
linary codes of security forces – for explanations of the forms and scale
of repression.3 To Isabel Hull, whose study of police actions against the
rebellious peoples of German South West Africa makes the argument
persuasively, organizational culture was the root cause of extreme mili-
tary violence.4 Here, too, a security force’s characteristics reflect dis-
tinct national traits, this time measured in organizational norms rather
than simply in terms of ethnic composition and cultural borrowing.
The second theme relates to the first. It concerns what is presumed
to have been the growing preoccupation of colonial police forces almost
everywhere: their struggle to contain organized political opposition to
imperial control. In this interpretation, policing and political violence
are symbiotically linked. Both fed off each other with increasing appe-
tite as resistance to colonial incursion persisted or, to telescope forward
to the post-1945 years, as the momentum for decolonization increased.
Colonial policing was necessarily political and frequently violent
because its principal targets were oppositional groups that threatened
colonial supremacy.5 Insights from political scientists come in here,
providing more schematic approaches to authoritarian state violence
in which police and other security agencies played a part. Some have
used micro-histories of past colonial repression to discern patterns of
collective violence in conditions of acute asymmetry between the rights
and powers of rulers and ruled.6 Several work to a model of action and
reaction to explain escalations in political violence.7 In some cases the
Colonial policing: A discursive framework 19
inability of imperial nations to justify protracted colonial repression

before increasingly sceptical home populations emerges clearly.8 So,
too, does the political paralysis and pressure for negotiated withdrawals
produced by metropolitan revulsion at mounting death tolls and the
runaway costs of police actions spiralling out of control.9 In other cases
anti-colonial violence may be usefully conceptualized as civil war. Such
diagnosis, in turn, demands analysis of differing ‘markets’ of violence:
the local communities and colonial bureaucracies for whom – or against
whom – the use of force appealed.10
Decolonization conflicts, in other words, have been studied as locally
specific and internecine, but also as much more: as supra-local phe-
nomena that may usefully be compared.11 This approach – combining
the local with comparisons between territories and empires – renders
colonial rebellion more complex and yet, paradoxically, more compre-
hensible. At the local level, it helps clarify how internal security opera-
tions, broadly defined, could be appropriated by local communities to
advance their own interests. At the broader imperial level, it indicates
that such appropriation was sometimes facilitated, even manipulated,
by colonial authorities – in Malaya or Algeria for example.12 This was
a dangerous game to play. Colonial policing frequently became bound
up with inter-ethnic conflict or faction-fighting, leading to a loss of
state control over the resultant violence. Mandate Palestine during the
Arab Revolt of 1936–9 and Kenya during Mau Mau provide striking
examples of such downward spirals.13 In circumstances such as these,
the lines separating the use of police forces and their local auxiliaries
from sectarian support for particular loyalist groups become harder to
trace.14 Still, commonalities may be found. The practice of co-opting
client groups and recruiting local police from these favoured communi-
ties, was not only extremely widespread, but was usually in place long
before wars of decolonization erupted. Indeed, some have argued that
it was a cornerstone of colonial governance from its inception.15 It was
certainly integral to policing in the inter-war years as we shall see.
Other findings from social science have been largely overlooked in
otherwise innovative work on the socio-ethnic backgrounds and attitu-
dinal formation of policemen and the political cultures of colonial police
forces that resulted. Yet there are three perhaps discernible sociological
or sociologically influenced approaches to the repressive strategies of
modern imperialist powers from which we have something to learn.16
One sees the development of distinctly colonial types of repression as
written in the very formation of colonial states. Central to this inter-
pretation are three linked factors. First is the effort of colonial states
to transcend their origins as occupation regimes. Second is the influx
of European administrators, settlers and corporate interests and the

attendant requirements imposed on the state both to protect them and
to advance their interests. And third is the physical displacement of
indigenous populations as state consolidation and settler land grabs
gathered momentum.
The second, more sociological approach is exemplified by the work
of James Scott. His analysis of peasant protest movements in Southeast
Asia indicates that the fear or actuality of colonial state violence drove
indigenous populations to more innovative, surreptitious and subtle
forms of political mobilization and protest.17 Policing did – or, more
often, did not – respond effectively to what Scott dubs this ‘infrapoli-
tics’ or ‘politics below the line’: invisible to the naked eye but pervasive
nonetheless.18
The third approach rejects the idea that imperialism gave rise to
unique forms of state coercion. Instead, it proposes that methods of
state violence, policing, judicial regulation, incarceration and repres-
sion, were all, to varying extents, imported, whether from the imperial
mother country or from other colonial dependencies. In this model,
there is no new form of repression under the colonial sun, only the
reconfiguration of past precedents practised in other places at other
times. Not surprisingly, this final approach has appealed more strongly
to historians of colonial policing for whom, to return to the point made
above, cultural transmission between imperial police forces has been
considered paramount. This treatment of the violence of imperial rulers
as either the transposition of European practices to non-European set-
tings or, more broadly, just another variant of violent conflict between
a state and its internal opponents, intersects with the micro-dynamic
studies of recent civil conflicts by political scientists seeking to explain
the scale and form of collective violence practised by authoritarian
states and their domestic enemies.19
Colonial policing and labour rights

The work of colonial repression has also interested social scientists
inspired by ‘democratic peace theory’. They have tried to account for a
particular paradox: namely, the escalation of colonial dissent immedi-
ately after conflicts within western Europe came to an end, first in 1918,
then in 1945.20 Why was it that Europe’s democracies, many of them
also imperial powers, agonized about avoiding future wars in Europe
while prosecuting conflicts within their colonies? The question is a
variant of a staple theme in international history, which approaches the
modern states system by distinguishing between the ‘vital interests’ of
core actors in the industrialized ‘North’ and their ‘adjustable interests’

in the colonized regions of the ‘South’.21 The costs of conflict in the
former were much higher and rarely risked, whereas aggressive action
between or within colonies usually came at a lower price, at least for
the ruling power. A problem here is that international historians have
sought answers solely within the European context and, principally,
from a state-centric vantage point. Colonial peoples were rarely con-
sidered significant actors – agents of change in their own right – in
international relations, theoretical or otherwise.22 Returning to the
local level, as Benjamin Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn and Richard
Roberts suggest in relation to colonial Africa, ‘investigations into colo-
nial hegemony must actually turn on the Africans who were employed
in a variety of roles and on the nature of their “bargains” with colonial
states’.23
As wage labour became more widespread in the European empires
so colonial workers began to push for bargains of their own. During
the inter-war years, hopes that the new framework of international
treaties, League of Nations oversight and more robust international
laws might safeguard the rights of these colonial workers – as indi-
viduals or groups – were largely invested in the International Labour
Organization (ILO).24 Attached to the League, the ILO devised work-
place regulations and monitored their implementation. Little scholarly
work has focused on the ILO’s early impact in the non-western world,
including the colonial dependencies so widespread in the organization’s
first two decades after 1919.25 To be sure, ILO members set themselves
against the persistence of colonial forced labour by promoting four
conventions on Native Labour Codes between 1930 and 1939.26 And
some colonial governments bent to this new reformism.
Former police official, Joseph Byrne, Governor of Kenya from 1931
to 1938, introduced measures to comply with ILO conventions. Trade
unions were legalized, the right to strike acknowledged, and minimum
wage levels set for various categories of worker. Prior to Byrne’s arrival,
the Labour Party’s Colonial Office reformers, led by Under-Secretary
of State Drummond Shiels, also pressed for land reforms and a reduc-
tion in the tax burden borne by Kenya’s native population.27 In this
instance, the locomotive of reform built a considerable head of steam.
For one thing, the Colonial Office initiatives outlived the second
Labour government, which gave way to the National Government
coalition in August 1931. For another, prosecutions of settler farmers
who breached the colony’s ‘Master and Servant’ laws by flogging, beat-
ing and even killing their African workers increased markedly during
Byrne’s term in office.28
The ILO also campaigned tenaciously for free labour markets, an

end to coercive recruitment of workers and contractual obligations that
bound employers to uphold basic safety and hygiene standards. But
the organization’s limited horizons were revealed by its 1930 decision
to institute a Native Labour Code alongside the International Labour
Code devised for the industrialized nations of the West. Its members
accepted the premise that colonial workers should not expect the same
rights and entitlements as their European or North American coun-
terparts.29 Only with the ILO’s now famous 1944 Philadelphia declar-
ation, which wedded the organization to development in the world’s
poorer countries, did the organization focus its priorities on the colo-
nial world.30 Prior to this, the ILO’s gaze was more first world than
third, more Eurocentric than empire-centric. Its readiness to treat colo-
nial labour discrimination alongside that of white Europeans marked a
significant breakthrough even so: recognition that colonial economic
and labour conditions were pivotal to the long-term political stability
of empire.
The case of French West Africa, scene of an early twentieth-century
turn towards associationism, France’s variant of indirect rule, is espe-
cially instructive.31 There, confusion persisted among French admin-
istrators regarding the implications of official doctrines of ‘association’
and ‘assimilation’ for the ways in which internal order was to be upheld.
It had been pointed out before the First World War that the advocates of
associationist methods were conspicuously silent about the regulation
of native working conditions and the importance attached to the devel-
opment of an internal colonial market through heightened commercial
activity. One former official, Paul Bourdarie, argued in the pages of
La Revue Indigène, a specialist periodical for the administrator types
concerned by such matters, that methods of labour regulation were
integral to any ‘doctrine’ of colonial governance.32 The end of the war
had seemed to promise material improvements in the administration of
justice and working conditions for salaried employees. Summary pun-
ishments and arbitrary fines meted out by French officials to African
subjects under the infamous indigénat legal code were curtailed – but
not abolished – by decree legislation passed on 31 March 1917. And
a further law promulgated on 23 April 1919 instituted an eight-hour
working day for contract labourers (the application of which was patchy
at best).33 In France meanwhile, university courses in the legal and
economic principles of colonial commerce proliferated, sponsored by
regional Chambers of Commerce. The efficient management of colo-
nial enterprise achieved respectability in the academic corridors of
leading French business schools as a result.34
Alongside such reforms, forced labour persisted in the form of the

prestation system. Prestation afforded colonial governments legal pow-
ers to requisition local manpower (all able-bodied Africans aged over
fi fteen) to work for up to twelve days each year on public works projects
of wider benefit to the region. Bridge building, road clearance and the
maintenance of irrigation channels all relied on the practice, whose
enforcement usually fell to the police. Furthermore, the Labour Code
instituted by Governor-general Jules Carde in West Africa in October
1925 blurred the distinction between voluntary and forced labour.
Carde’s scheme effectively guaranteed that officials would provide
African workers to major private employers in return for the fulfilment
of certain obligations, including the provision of basic accommodation
and food, a minimum wage and a maximum working week.35 Old hab-
its, it seemed, died hard.
The state was thus integral to coercive labour recruitment, whether on
public projects or in the private sector.36 ILO criticism of such practices,
most notably at the organization’s 1930 conference on forced labour,
coincided with the first effects of the depression and a labour surplus
as export production ran down.37 The continuation of forced labour
in francophone black Africa was, in consequence, rendered less vis-
ible by the heightened availability of migrant workers and unemployed
day labourers who could be employed without the safeguards of any
workplace contract.38 Still, the wider inter-war trend was clear. Policing
colonial workplaces was becoming a matter of political concern. Nor
was it just the ILO that took an interest. Colonial ministries, sensi-
tive to domestic and international criticism, established colonial labour
inspectorates whose job it was to prevent it.39
In this changing workplace environment, colonial law, while
assuredly an instrument of social control, did not serve the interests of
privileged Europeans exclusively. After the First World War recourse to
law offered a means for colonial subjects to test the limits of imperial
claims to benevolence, challenging those in authority to live up to their
high ideals.40 Officials and police also turned to the courts to curb the
most egregious instances of exploitation of land and labour by settlers
or corporations.41
In the French case, government ministers could still find indigen-
ous allies prepared to defend the exigencies of economic extraction
even as the worst of the depression hit home. Some were representa-
tives of the few colonized communities with French citizenship rights;
hardly representative of the wider subject population.42 Blaise Diagne
was one such. The long-serving Senegalese deputy achieved promin-
ence through his successful 1914–15 campaign to extend citizenship
entitlements to the original African residents of Senegal’s four urban

communes. Yet this led him to endorse the extension of coercive con-
scription to West Africa during the First World War.43 French-educated
and thoroughly ‘assimilated’, Diagne even defended forced labour in a
1931 speech to ILO delegates in Geneva. His comments indicated that,
in the eyes of some elite Africans, colonial subjects could not expect
better treatment or more basic rights unless they fulfilled their desig-
nated duties to the state.44
Diagne’s views could also be viewed as merely orthodox: the articu-
lation of attitudinal norms about the treatment of colonial labour.
Perennially short of capital funding, politicians and colonial admin-
istrators resorted to labour-intensive plans when considering how to
make the agricultural economies of French West and Equatorial Africa
more productive.45 Although they preferred the term ‘labour mobiliza-
tion’ to the less palatable moniker ‘forced labour’, Albert Sarraut and
his successors at the Ministry of Colonies were quite prepared to defend
coercion as the only means to ensure that farming communities placed
the needs of the state above those of the household.46 Labour coercion,
variously disguised as compulsory resettlement, military duty or fiscal
obligation, remained essential to major economic projects such as the
completion of the Thiès-Kayes railway and the Office du Niger cotton
production scheme in French Soudan (now Mali).47
The latter, in particular, suggested that older practices of the con-
quest period persisted. Chronically short of local manpower to under-
take the vast tasks of irrigation and cultivation central to their scheme,
Office du Niger officials, with the connivance of commandants de cercles
(colonial district officers) were unscrupulous in their quest for work-
ers. Their tactics included mass round-ups of recalcitrant villagers
and their relocation to curfewed compounds, the misleadingly named
‘villages de liberté’. Long working hours and corporal punishment were
commonplace. Wages and food were withheld for ‘slack’ performance.
Women workers were manipulated under threat that their husbands
would be beaten if their work was unsatisfactory. In short, these were
working conditions analogous to debt bondage, if not to slavery.48 The
architect of the Office du Niger, the notoriously ruthless engineer Émile
Bélime, always insisted that ends justified means, despite mounting evi-
dence to the contrary by the mid-1930s.49 Bélime and his staff were not
wholly – or solely – culpable. Politicians and reformist colonial officials
also allowed such practices to continue, even though evidence of wide-
spread labour abuses surfaced repeatedly as a result of inquiries initi-
ated in the Popular Front years of 1936–8. Why? The answer lay in an
echo of Bélime’s instrumental thinking. Most administrators favoured
a transition from a coercive labour system to more widespread use of

contracted workers, but few thought this achievable because of the huge
regional variations in labour supply.50
The example of Émile Bélime is instructive. Work by imperial and
international historians suggests that the inter-war years marked a
transition period in which repressive colonial labour relations were
beginning to be transformed; at the same time, for contemporaries the
scope and direction of political reforms and workplace regulation was
far from clear.51 Colonial police were caught in the confusion, often
uncertain about what they were being tasked to do.
The political economy approach

By political economy I refer to the connections between the changing
political priorities and institutional forms of colonial government and
those local economic activities that most concerned it. These activ-
ities typically related to revenue generation and, in particular, to some
degree of export production. The point I wish to develop here is that
police operations reflected not just the colonial political order but
its economic structures as well. The actions of colonial police were
driven by this combination of the political and the economic, of what
the colonial state needed to combat internal threats on the one hand
and what export producers and other key economic actors required to
enhance their output on the other. Using political economy to explain
the ordering of colonial priorities and the differing roles of colonial
administrative services is far from new. It was central to arguments
advanced by dependency theorists about the colonial roots of African
under-development.52 Some thirty years ago, Bruce Berman and John
Lonsdale, subtle analysts of colonial implantation, noted that ‘most
analysts of the colonial state agree on its most salient feature: its cen-
trality in the political economy of a colony through the unusual scope
and intensity of its intervention into colonial social and economic
life’.53 Richard Price, reflecting on recent trends in imperial history,
has taken up the charge, writing: ‘Is it possible to write a history of
empire without considering political economy or without some notion
of the “state” as a historical actor in the imperial process?’ The ques-
tion begs an affirmative answer. But Price added an important rider
to it by stressing the ‘untidiness’ of cultural transmission and patterns
of colonial rule.54 His point is well taken. Treading warily and rec-
ognizing local variation, it seems reasonable to suggest that colonial
police forces promoted revenue collection and labour practices condu-
cive to heightened commercial exploitation. This was neither their sole
purpose, nor their avowed aim. It appears to have consumed a large

part of their time nonetheless. The case studies investigated in later
chapters will test this claim.
We also have the benefit of a number of outstanding studies that have
integrated political economy into their analysis of other, related aspects
of colonial life. These range from investigations of industry, banking
and economic output in French Algeria and French Vietnam to studies
of public health and the organization of plantation agriculture in British
Malaya and Dutch-ruled Sumatra.55 Others have unpicked the threads
that bound together colonial authorities, trading companies or public
sector conglomerates in imposing harsher labour regimes from French
West Africa’s interior territories to the Congo basin and Portuguese
Mozambique.56
For all that, there is a fustiness to political economy, the air of some-
thing left hanging too long at the back of the analytical wardrobe. Like
other more wholly economic approaches, it has scarcely featured within
the many innovative works of new imperial history.57 Nor has it figured
large in the imperial and international histories of European empires and
European colonial rivalries in the twentieth century.58 David Edgerton
is particularly forthright in this regard: ‘Most accounts of international
relations in interwar Britain ignore its crucial political-economic
aspects, both in relation to actual political-economic relations, but also
to the political-economic mode of thinking about international rela-
tions … Although some historians have noticed the continuing signifi-
cance of political economy, its full importance in the interwar years has
clearly not been appreciated; it has been seen as at best a curiosity.’59
Historians of colonial policing have also been remarkably silent about
the imperatives of political economy. There are several reasons for this,
but they are essentially reducible to a primordial concern with the ori-
gins of local colonial policing styles and a consequent preoccupation
with the transmission of institutional practices from one police force to
another. Put simply, the most incisive work on colonial police methods
and actions has been dominated by two linked questions: ‘Where did
the colonial police come from, and how far may this explain the why
and wherefores of what they did?’
Merely asking how the characteristics of particular colonial econ-
omies influenced patterns of internal dissent has its own pitfalls. It
invites crudely instrumental answers loosely derived from the economic
disparities and resultant social iniquities visible in most colonial soci-
eties. Observing that uneven distribution of wealth promoted instability
and unrest is a platitude. Yet if political economy presents the problem
here, it also offers solutions. Of the many aspects of colonial economic
structure that shaped institutional forms of state repression, three stand

out:
• First, the dominance or otherwise of a narrow range of primary goods
produced for export within the colonial economy, which, in turn, is
closely linked to the matter of goods prices and local wage levels.
• Second, the principal forms of employment within the local econ-
omy; a factor that obviously bore on types and degrees of worker
organization.
• Third, the relationship between sources of private capital, the state,
and the indigenous workforce.
Clinical separation of these factors is, in some respects, artificial. Falling
market prices for colonial exports as, for instance, in the early 1930s,
generated pressure from business managers, plantation owners or exter-
nal investors for cutbacks in workforces and wage levels. These, in turn,
catalysed new forms of worker organization and protest.60 Meanwhile,
the extent of state involvement in colonial economic activity, although
variable, was generally apparent at all stages of the process whether
the government acted as market regulator, major employer, labour
recruiter or police enforcer. Colonial administrations were, at the same
time, pulled in opposite directions. From the control of goods prices
and financial or fiscal support for corporate interests to the policing of
worker dissent, government identified its interests with expanding or,
at the very least, safeguarding the export sector of dependent territory.
As Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins have demonstrated so thoroughly,
government, business and City finance were imperially co-dependent.61
Yet relations between them could be fraught. As mentioned earlier,
colonial governments increasingly regarded themselves as guarantors
of basic workplace standards and minimum wage levels, typically work-
ing through labour inspectorates to do so.62 There is also no reason
to assume that colonial public servants took the idea of public service
any less seriously than their metropolitan counterparts. Police officers
experienced these conflicting pressures more directly than most – not
least in the depression years.63
The depression and colonial labour

To explain the book’s preoccupation with the depression years, we need
to consider prevailing conditions in the years preceding 1929 to 1935,
the hiatus period in which Europe’s imperial powers and their over-
seas dependencies were, at varying speeds and different intensities,
mired in economic crisis.64 As Michael Havinden and David Meredith,
analysts of British colonial development, point out, the twin founda-

tions of British colonial economic policy remained firmly embedded
during the 1920s. European and North American businesses domi-
nated international imperial commerce, figuring largest in the indus-
trial export of primary goods and controlling their onward movement
through shipping to distribution and final point of sale. In counterpoint
to colonial administrative support for these commercial networks, the
rise of native capitalism was resisted. The supposedly complementary
relationship between metropolitan powers and their dependencies,
which required colonial economies to supply foodstuffs and raw mat
erials while absorbing increasing quantities of European manufactured
goods, did not confer reciprocal benefits.65 Colonial officials lamented
the iniquity involved, but, as we saw earlier, their overriding fear of
social changes unleashed by rapid industrial growth kept their com-
plaints in check.
Official alarm over the consequences of industrialization points to a
deeper truth. European colonialism was, in many respects, the antith-
esis of modernity insofar as modernity may be linked to the rise of the
nation state, technological innovation and the growth of complex, indus-
trialized economies.66 Where imperial rule brought technological innov-
ation, it was primarily harnessed to the development of particular export
industries whose growth was, in turn, tied to the overarching demands
of the imperial power, whether for raw materials and semi-processed
goods to service metropolitan manufacturers, or, more simply, for rev-
enue from the sale of colonial commodities. Meanwhile, the growth of
colonial industries, based on import substitution, was antithetical to the
interests of metropolitan manufacturers and was anyway hampered by
central imperial control over colonial monetary policy, exchange rates
especially.67 Movements of people mirrored the economic disparities
within and between territories. White Europeans generally moved freely
within colonial worlds, whether as colonists, traders, officials or police-
men.68 By contrast, between the 1840s and the 1940s, the largest long-
term migrations of non-whites within the European empires involved
the shipment of indentured labourers to work colonial plantations after
the formal abolition of slavery.69 Their transport costs were often met
by employers who recouped the money as part of the indenture contract
that bound these workers to them for a specified period.70 Indentured
Indians and Chinese predominated, encountering intense workplace
discrimination both from employers and, sometimes, their local coun-
terparts as members of this transnational labour force.71
Colonial industrialization also generated peculiarly modern threat
perceptions within colonial governments in black Africa and Southeast
Asia especially. It remained axiomatic that political stability rested on

preserving the socio-economic fabric of the colonial countryside in
which the peasant family was, typically, the primary unit of agricultural
production. Waged work and the drift into industrial employment there-
fore provoked hand-wrenching anxiety among senior bureaucrats.72
Yet, here we confront a paradox. Throughout western Europe, ardent
defenders of empire in the early twentieth century insisted that its prin-
cipal justification was to inculcate political accountability and modern
forms of economic organization in dependent societies. In place of mis-
sionary zeal, the equation of imperial expansion with national vitality,
or a simple assertion of racial mastery, by the 1920s colonial governance
achieved validation through practical outcome. ‘Modern’ habits of pol-
itics, ‘modern’ ways of transacting business and ‘modern’ conceptions
of personal and social responsibility were conceptualized as the legacy
of colonial control and incontrovertible proof that European imperial-
ism was a force for good.73 The ‘night watchman’ colonial state of the
late nineteenth century, which interfered in local economies to meet the
demands of administration and goods extraction, was supposedly giv-
ing way to benevolent regimes committed to improving infrastructure,
nurturing commerce and providing basic welfare.74
The paradox lay in the temporal side of these equations. Numerous
colonial governments conducted surveys of land, population and trade
as precursors to modern revenue systems based on various forms of
taxation and excise. Promised development lagged far behind. Colonial
revenues may have grown, but a high proportion still drained away to
the mother country or was swallowed up by personnel costs.75 There
was thus an inevitable gap between the clearer enunciation of political
and economic targets and the remodelling of colonial societies envis-
aged. The problem was also an opportunity. A commitment to grad-
ual societal renovation offered the cast-iron justification of continuing
imperial rule: there was now an obligation to maintain empire until
such transformations occurred. Rhetoric of this kind bore the seeds
of philosophies of development that germinated in the altered inter-
national circumstances of the Second World War and its aftermath.
More pertinent was that the depression rendered such projects moot in
the short term, meaning that colonial police would be required to serve
established economic interests more than helping the consolidation of
new ones.
Not surprisingly, the depression also elicited firmer expressions of
opinion about empire on both sides of the divide between ardent imperi-
alists and anti-colonialists. What Norman Ingram terms the ‘new-style’
integral pacifists of Victor Méric’s Ligue international des combattants de
la paix (LICP), France’s fast-growing pacifist movement of the 1930s

were militantly, almost violently, opposed to colonial oppression, damn-
ing imperialism as the cause of wars and the clearest articulation of
man’s inhumanity to man. The LICP’s anti-empire critique hardened
in response to several factors.76 The crass commoditization of colonial
peoples at the 1931 Vincennes Colonial Exhibition was one. The colo-
nial rapaciousness of French businesses laid bare by the depression
was another. And European governments’ readiness to tolerate colo-
nial injustice, affirmed by Italy’s October 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and
the dilatory Franco-British response to it, only added to LICP disgust.
Worth noting in this context is that the LICP drew stronger support in
coastal Algeria during the early 1930s than either the colony’s commu-
nists or the other left-leaning groups that would later coalesce into the
Popular Front. Little wonder that the Algiers police clamped down on
LICP activities in 1933.77
British political argument about the depression’s impact on the
empire was less polarized. But the underlying economic factors that
propelled – and constrained – imperial policy were much the same. The
Treasury’s disinclination to pump funds into colonial industrial projects
and British manufacturers’ alarm about unwelcome new sources of
competition intersected with Colonial Office anxieties about the unset-
tling social consequences of industrialization for predominantly agricul-
tural societies. For all that, it seems doubtful that the poorer, non-settler
colonies’ economic misfortunes ranked high among British politicians’
priorities in the worst of the depression years between 1930 and 1935.78
There is even some evidence that leading imperialist advocates such as
former Tory Colonial Secretary Leo Amery and his Labour predecessor,
J. H. Thomas, who briefly returned to the Colonial Office in August 1931,
misunderstood the financial basis of the 1929 Colonial Development
Act. This legislation, less munificent than its title implied, was the
centrepiece of government efforts to ameliorate the depression’s adverse
effects on colonial territories. Both Amery and Thomas over-estimated
the funds likely to be made available. The Act provided a mechanism for
Treasury grants to empire infrastructure and public health projects dur-
ing the 1930s. But, contrary to the ministers’ claims, the funds involved
were small.79 Robert Boyce acidly describes J. H. Thomas as ‘a hard-
drinking trade unionist with no ideas of his own’. Amery is less easily
dismissed. An All Souls fellow maniacal in his empire devotion, the
fact that Amery shared Thomas’ misconceptions about colonial finance
points to its marginality within government thinking.80
Nor were the two ministers alone. Ramsay MacDonald’s second
Labour government, elected in June 1929, regarded development
spending as a stimulus to the British economy, not as a means to

improve colonial living standards.81 The irony here was that colo-
nial governments, too, remained extremely conservative in the sums
they requested, with applications and take-up of development loans
declining significantly in the trough of the depression between 1931
and 1934. Next to the funds being contemplated for defence spend-
ing as earlier hopes of disarmament evaporated, public spending in the
colonies was nugatory to the point of insignificance.82 And this, des-
pite the fact that the same economic crisis which propelled the arms
race also drove Britain, like France, to turn to empire in their search
for the last-ditch salvation of protected markets.83 Colonial producers
suffered as a result. Take Senegal’s groundnut farmers, producers of
French West Africa’s most remunerative export crop. Denied the power
to set more competitive tariffs, they were constrained to sell at market
rates determined by the mother country.84 In April 1933 a delegation of
peanut growers made their way from Louga in Senegal’s north-west to
implore Jules Brévié, the reform-minded Governor-general, to rectify
matters. Senegal’s colonial government had offered a higher fixed price
for groundnuts to help cultivators through the depression. But the fed-
eral administration also increased personal taxes and freight charges
at much the same time, leaving Louga’s farmers teetering close to des-
titution.85 Ironies, contradictions, errors: all were of a piece with what
Boyce terms ‘a rudimentary grasp of economics’ among most western
political leaders in the depression’s early stages.86
Uncertain of their economic footing, Britain’s political leaders trod
warily. Their French counterparts, impelled by premier Aristide Briand’s
schemes for European federation and a tariffs ‘truce’ to liberalize inter-
national trade, ventured more boldly. Briand’s far-sighted ambitions
came to nothing in the short term.87 Most French parliamentarians,
industrialists and farmers remained staunch protectionists. Few were
ready, as yet, for European economic integration (fewer still in Britain).
Both Entente partners chose more familiar routes to financial recov-
ery – a balanced budget, swingeing expenditure cuts and other meas-
ures designed to restore market confidence and curb inflation. This was
not just financial orthodoxy; it was as far as most politicians’, bankers’
and business leaders’ economic horizons stretched.88 Whitehall institu-
tions, Westminster voices and the City of London were thus ranged
against any abrupt departure from the long-established colonial com-
pact through which colonies furnished cheap raw materials and received
British manufactures. Their French counterparts, resolved to keep the
franc pegged to a gold standard and so avoid devaluation, had similar
deflationary priorities.89 Facing a chronic debt burden and still reliant
on customs revenue, colonial governments responded, in turn, to the

calamitous fall in the prices paid for their exports by raising the volumes
of produce exported. Unfortunately, so did their competitors.90
Depression and the colonies

For European colonial empires no less than for Europe itself, the depres-
sion years formed a ‘hinge’, connecting a decade of rapid growth to a
more troubled decade of contraction, economic nationalism and resur-
gent internal conflict.91 In the British Empire, as we shall see, Nigeria
and the Caribbean sugar-producing colonies were severely affected by
the increasing gap between declining export values and their mount-
ing public debt, which required servicing through interest payments.92
Other colonial authorities as far afield as the Belgian Congo and French
Indochina faced a comparable squeeze.
Aware that customs duties still accounted for over half of all Nigerian
government income, Nigeria’s Governor Sir Donald Cameron pored
over weekly statements of the sums collected at Lagos as the depression
deepened in 1933.93 The statistics told a grim story. Continuing over-
supply of foodstuffs and raw materials for export at a time of declin-
ing industrial production in the recipient markets only lowered prices
still further. Havinden and Meredith capture the dilemma of such eco-
nomic imbalance:
The colonies were not only poor but caught in a relationship of dependence
with the industrialised countries who bought their exports … As demand for
their exports grew [in the 1920s], and as the colonial government and expatri-
ate private enterprise developed export production, so dependence on one or
several products increased. Almost without exception, British colonies became
more dependent on a narrower range of export commodities between the wars
and in most cases secondary industry based on processing did not develop. The
colonies were therefore in no stronger a position to withstand the contraction
of the international economy in the 1930s than they had been at the beginning
of the 1920s.94
No corner of empire escaped the depression’s grasp. Indeed, so rapid
was the spread of the industrial world’s economic crisis to the colonial
world that historians have argued that it revealed a process of globaliza-
tion – of economic, political and institutional interdependence between
rich imperialist north and poor colonial south.95 The analysis requires
qualification insofar as colonial economies rarely achieved the growth
expected of them by governments, businesses and capital investors.96
Southeast Asia, another of the colonial zones studied in this book,
was especially hard hit.97 Here, again, caution is required. Anne Booth’s
analysis of public spending in Southeast Asia’s colonies indicates that the

pursuit of laudable policy objectives, such as infrastructure-building,
education and public health provision, varied markedly between terri-
tories. Government investment in transportation and welfare in British
Malaya during the 1920s outstripped that in more densely populated
Dutch Indonesia or in French Indochina where fiscal policy was rela-
tively arcane. In each of these cases, funds for development remained
conditional on export growth.98 Expenditure was rigorously pruned
when boom turned to bust. Throughout Southeast Asia the costs of
colonial administration became a major deficit burden. Previously prof-
itable business ventures faced ruin meanwhile.99 It was in these circum-
stances of economic adversity that colonial policing was tested to its
utmost, often in new and unexpected ways.
That Southeast Asia’s rural population experienced ‘severe economic
distress’ during the global depression is indisputable; the questions at
issue are just how severe those hardships were and what socio-political
consequences ensued.100 At one end of the spectrum, James Scott has
argued that colonial rebellion was provoked by combinations of col-
lapsing commodity prices, peasant producers’ crippling debts and
heightened taxation.101 At the other, Michael Adas suggests that cheap
foodstuffs were more generally available in the early 1930s and that
colonial authorities assuaged the effects of the economic slowdown by
reducing their fiscal impositions.102 Certain connections seem clear,
these disagreements notwithstanding. Falling commodity prices and
the contraction or collapse of internal agricultural markets contributed
in some measure to early 1930s peasant revolts in central and northern
Annam, to the Saya San rebellion in Lower Burma, and to an uprising
on the Philippine island of Luzon. Persistent low-level unrest, from food
riots and raiding of grain stores to attacks on government offices, also
suggests that violence provoked by extreme hardship was endemic to
Southeast Asia’s colonial states during the depression years.103 Pressure
on police resources increased.
But was such distress peculiar to the depression? Ian Brown’s foren-
sic analysis of governmental and academic surveys of rural incomes,
taxation revenues and living standards across Southeast Asia in the
early 1930s indicates that the acute deflationary pressure of 1930 to
1935 was less calamitous than often presumed. The colonial territories
he examines – from French Indochina through British Malaya to the
Dutch East Indies – certainly depended on primary product exports
for their economic buoyancy. But their rural populations were not pas-
sive bystanders to what was taking place. Farmers and smallholders
adopted various strategies to minimize the impact of falling prices for
their produce. Extra household consumption or the hoarding of food-

stuffs that would otherwise have gone to market helped avert starvation.
Those families that were not directly involved in the crop’s production
might even benefit from collapsing rice prices. The resulting glut in
local markets as producers struggled to sell surpluses made this basic
staple more widely available and affordable than in the pre- and post-
depression periods. Moreover, according to Brown, available statis-
tics regarding monetary expenditure on other essentials such as fuel,
matches and textiles do not reveal declines consistent with famine or
near-famine conditions.104 Finally, Brown deploys indirect evidence to
reinforce his overall conclusion that the depression, while unquestion-
ably the cause of chronic suffering was less of a calamity than natural
disasters or the coming war in Asia. Taken together, figures for the
numbers of Indian economic migrants traversing Southeast Asia in the
depression years, for the condition of textiles markets in Burma and
the Dutch East Indies and for peasant mortality rates in the early 1930s,
all point to a less precipitous decline in economic welfare than widely
presumed.105
Where do issues of colonial policing enter these debates? The answer
is threefold. First, central to Scott’s argument is that the coercive
resources of the colonial state were deployed both to collect the taxes
that helped trigger rebellion and to suppress the resultant disorder.106
Second, colonial police became targets of peasant and worker anger as
economic distress intensified.107 Finally, colonial police provided much
of the intelligence regarding workplace conditions, rural opinion and
sources of opposition.108 Colonial authorities depended on this infor-
mation to estimate the likelihood of violent dissent. Again, Ian Brown’s
work is essential. His re-examination of tax returns and remission rates
in the provinces of Lower Burma provides convincing evidence of three
linked phenomena. For one thing, colonial taxes were less uniformly
burdensome than might be imagined. For another, British adminis-
trators repeatedly lessened the tax burden, either reducing the sums
imposed or deferring collection in an effort to minimize popular hard-
ship. Finally, rural taxpayers sought to avoid or postpone payment
when confronted with insupportable tax demands. In Burma at least,
tenants faced more insistent financial demands from their landowner or
moneylender than from the colonial state.109
One other point implicit in these detailed analyses is that venturing
definitive conclusions may be unwise. Circumstantial evidence suggests
that colonial authorities in regions that were hard-hit by the depression
did not enforce their tax demands rigidly. Meanwhile, local populations
in places such as Lower Burma and Cochin-China developed strategies
to evade not only state exactions but those of landlords and moneylend-
ers as well. The fact that such actions could not be openly admitted
makes it near impossible to quantify them.110 It seems clear even so that
depicting the colonial state as unremittingly oppressive and, therefore,
unresponsive to the hardship consequent upon the 1930s economic cri-
sis is inadequate.111 Where does that leave us? Scott is surely right to
point out that the progressive extension of colonial authorities’ admin-
istrative reach – what Joanna Lewis, in the different regional context of
British Kenya, terms ‘the tentacular state’ – resulted in greater mon-
etary impositions on dependent populations, not least because it was
imperative to finance this growth of state-sponsored activity.112 On the
other hand, Brown’s findings reveal that Burma’s district administra-
tors were neither blind nor deaf to the sufferings of the colony’s rural
cultivators in what remained predominantly a rice crisis from 1930 to
1935.113 Depression-era reductions in land revenue and in the hated
capitation tax culminated in complete abolition of the latter in 1940–1.
As for the land revenue, annual reassessment of the rates to be charged
took into account crop production levels, market prices and consequent
living standards. Colonial tax collection, in other words, was not every-
where insensitive to the welfare of Burma’s peasant producers.114
If this suggests that Ian Brown’s reconsideration of Lower Burma’s
depression-era tax records backs the ‘minimalist impact’ arguments
of Michael Adas over the ‘maximalist impact’ views of James Scott,
Brown himself is careful to qualify his own conclusions. For one thing,
when Burma’s Saya San rebellion began in late December 1930, the
British authorities had yet to readjust their tax demands to reflect the
deepening economic crisis in the colony. Heavy taxes could thus have
‘detonated’ the uprising much as Scott contends. For another, despite
the progressive reduction of land revenue and capitation taxes over
subsequent years, fiscal impositions on peasant landowners actually
increased in real terms during the depression.115 Measuring the direct
effects of colonial taxes is a delicate business. The preceding examples
remind us that we need multiple case studies before any general conclu-
sions about the depression, economic marginalization and policing may
be advanced.
For many among the rural populations of Southeast Asia securing
enough food to eat dominated their daily lives as the economic crisis
crystallized into a rice crisis. The northern Vietnamese protectorates
of Tonkin and Annam in French Indochina suffered badly. A combin-
ation of increased production for export and unaffordable local mar-
ket prices threatened widespread famine.116 To meet the challenge, the
French authorities established an ‘Indochina rice office’ in April 1930,
pumping funds into agro-economics. Laboratories began work across

the Indochina federation, experimenting with higher yield grains.117 Any
long-term benefits from such investment were obscured by the short-
term damage done by a major revaluation of the piastre in June that
same year. Meanwhile, personal taxes on peasant cultivators continued
to rise.118 The colonial government in Tonkin, the hub of Vietnam’s rice
economy, even recorded a net budget surplus in 1934 thanks to more
stringent collection of head taxes. As significant for us, the personnel
costs for Tonkin’s garde indigène, its internal policing force, were the
biggest single item of budgetary expenditure for the Hanoi authorities
in that year.119
Far to the Southwest, for Malaya’s indentured Tamil labourers, in
Sunil Amrith’s words, the depression ‘began to tear at the intercon-
nected regional economy that had developed in the second half of
the nineteenth century, involving flows of people, goods, and capital
throughout the arc of coasts around the Bay of Bengal’.120 Malaya’s
1930 Aliens Ordinance solidified immigration controls designed to
extract unwanted Chinese and South Indian labourers from the planta-
tion economy. And the economic crisis sharpened ethnic, cultural and
socio-economic differences between Malays and non-Malays, as well as
between urban Tamils better integrated into colonial society than their
plantation-confined brethren of South India’s Diaspora community.121
The fate of Indians in Britain’s Asian empire also informs the work
of Sugata Bose, which begins from the observation that colonial eco-
nomic extraction before and after the First World War tied regional
agrarian economies into a capitalist world market. Colonial authorities
developed larger, more intrusive bureaucracies to facilitate revenue col-
lection, promote export output and guarantee the social order needed
to fulfil their economic objectives. In the countryside of East Bengal,
the focus of Bose’s research, the depression challenged all of this. As
Bose puts it, ‘The depth and length of the economic crisis of the 1930s
meant that unlike earlier ruptures the tears in social relations were not
repaired. During the 1930s and 1940s landlords who were reduced
to their rentier role and traders who remained as grain-dealers rather
than lenders were marked out as the targets of peasant resistance …
the usual modality of protest was for large crowds of peasant debtors to
surround the house of a moneylender and demand back the documents
that recorded their debts. If the moneylender did not oblige, his house
was looted and burnt.’122 The depression-era credit crisis had ‘snapped
the bonds’ between a Hindu rural elite, which clung on to its rentier
rights more tenaciously, and a class of smallholders, predominantly
Muslim farmers, confronted with insupportable debts. Despite these
communal divisions, the impetus behind the collective protests that fol-
lowed remained essentially economic, not religious.123 Once again, local
police were heavily implicated both in the process of revenue collection
and the clashes it provoked.
Another question arises in bringing these arguments together. Just
how significant was the depression for the future of empire? Did it sig-
nify the start of economic and political decoupling between metropol-
itan governments and their colonial territories? Did the colonies cease
being the moons that revolved around metropolitan financial centres,
or were the poles of economic attraction neither loosened nor reversed?
The limited impact of Britain’s introduction of imperial preference
tariffs following the Ottawa economic conference in July 1932 is sug-
gestive. Although the colonial moons remained in their British orbit,
the magnetism holding them in place was diminishing. Certainly, the
depression exposed the structural vulnerabilities of Britain’s economy.
Its old, staple industries – coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles – were in
terminal decline. Its currency was already overvalued, making it diffi-
cult for home and colonial exporters to stay competitive in international
markets. And British investment capital did not flow as freely over-
seas as it had done in the heady days of late Victorian and Edwardian
imperial expansion. But these were all long-term shifts. The Crash
accelerated, but did not cause them.124 In 1929 Britain also ran the
world’s largest visible trade deficit, importing 67 per cent more than it
exported. Yet this was a curate’s egg. A huge deficit spoke of weakening
export industries, but it could be a source of political strength because
so many other nations (and colonies) relied on access to the British mar-
ket to sustain their own balance of payments. Through it all, the City of
London remained the pre-eminent international money market.125
The two foremost components of Britain’s continuing economic
magnetism were not particularly beneficial from a colonial perspective.
First, colonial membership of the British-led trading bloc, the sterling
area, established after Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government
abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, tied colonial exports
to the fate of a free-floating pound.126 The financial future of dependen-
cies that conducted most of their trade in sterling, which held reserves
in sterling and which pegged their local currencies against the pound
was tied to British recovery.127 Like their French counterparts, Britain’s
colonial governments, let alone its colonial subjects, had little say in the
terms on which their foreign trade was conducted during the 1930s.128
Second was Britain’s abandonment of free trade in July 1932. Hugely
symbolic and the source of bitter resentment in the United States, Japan
and elsewhere, tariff protection did little to help colonies reeling from
the downward slide in raw materials’ prices. Benefits accrued from

preferential customs tariffs were wiped out by the declining real value
of exports.129 It could even be argued that the official focus on tariff
policy diverted government attention from the dreadful social conse-
quences of falling real wages in most colonial territories.130 Only when
these difficulties became impossible to ignore with widespread strikes,
rioting and other civil disturbances across the British Empire between
1934 and 1939 did political attention turn, belatedly, to the devastat-
ing long-term damage wrought by the depression on colonial peoples’
lives.131 Police forces were at the heart of these developments, whether
overseeing the introduction of increased taxes and monitoring work-
place activity in the early depression years or confronting the outbreaks
of disorder catalysed by the economic crisis.
Thinking about colonial order and repression

Depression-era events make the case for considering political economy
as an explanatory tool for colonial police action. It bears emphasis,
however, that levels of colonial collective violence in the early 1930s
remained low. Even revolts with lasting political fallout, such as
Tonkin’s 1930 Yen Bay mutiny and the accompanying rebellion in
northern Annam, counted overall deaths in the hundreds and not the
thousands. The same could be said of the other episodes of unrest
investigated in later chapters. Next to the political killings of Civil War
Spain, Stalinist purges, the rape of Nanking, or the horrors of Nazi
mass murder to come, the colonial empires of the 1930s rank lower as
sites of lethal state repression, at least until Italy’s murderous conquest
of Ethiopia between 1935 and 1940.132 What should we read into this
relative absence of violence and the appearance of order only fitfully
disturbed within colonies? Does this imply that popular grievances
were more limited or that effective state control stifled opposition?133
How, in other words, can we gauge the relationship between the
policing of colonial rule and the expression of violent dissent? The
editors of a recent work on order, conflict and violence explain the
d ialectic involved:
Clearly, order is necessary for managing violence as much as the threat of vio-
lence is crucial in cementing order … On the one hand, order requires the
taming of conflict. However, this is often impossible without an actual or
threatened recourse to violence … On the other hand, violent conflict entails
the successful contestation of existing order, and its collapse. Put otherwise,
violence is employed both by those who wish to upend an existing order and by
those who want to sustain it.134
Violent disorder or order sustained by threat of violence; do these

apparent opposites reveal a single constant: that violence – either actual
or potential – was a constant feature of colonial politics? Ann Stoler
is an excellent guide here. Her study of the fear of violence, and the
repression that such anxieties generated among the planters, officials
and policemen of the Deli region of Dutch Sumatra offers empirical
evidence to explain how non-violent worker protest could be construed
as something very threatening. By the 1920s, it seems that colonial
officials and Dutch estate managers of Deli’s rubber plantations were
obsessively nervous that the tables between rulers and ruled might be
turned. Fear of violence thereby underpinned employers’ behaviour
and Dutch colonial policy.
According to Stoler, in 1924 it was calculated that a European assist-
ant with fifteen years of service had a 3 per cent chance of being killed
by a worker and at least a 50 per cent probability of being physically
assaulted. Yet these official figures are contradictory, and only included
those for (more widespread) assaults on Asian overseers on rubber
estates from 1925 onwards. One colonial government source states that
thirteen Europeans were assaulted on Deli’s plantations in 1919; another
doubles that amount. In a sense, the precise numbers do not matter.
Stoler’s figures, necessarily approximate, indicate that actual violence
against those in charge bore little correlation to worsening dread of it.
Between 1914 and 1923 the numbers range from twenty-five and thirty-
five attacks annually at a time when the total labour force stood at about
200,000.135 How might this be explained? The key, according to Stoler,
is that official attention was gripped less by attacks on the estates than
by political activity and v iolent dissent outside them; in other words, by
higher levels of nationalist, communist and anti-colonial protest in the
1920s. Her findings are worth quoting at length:
The [Dutch East Indies] government’s refusal to distinguish political agitation
from criminal offense, or labor actions from political incitement, meant that
anyone actively participating in a work stoppage by verbally supporting it (for
example, by simply addressing the workers) was subject to criminal prosecu-
tion … This blurred administrative vision of what comprised political agitation,
economic grievance, and ergo criminal offense provided a base for government
repression of anticolonial resistance in Java. In regard to the issues that arose in
Deli [on Sumatra] during the mid- and late-1920s, it is important to keep this
legal and ideological justification in mind. It colored the tenor of labor relations
and the interpretations of imagined insurgence and real confrontation.136
Even by colonial standards, the rubber-producing region of Dutch

Sumatra was an exceptionally ‘tense society’. Officials, planters, overse-
ers and police were liable to treat any protest or worker unrest harshly.
Hence the mass arrests and other signs of disproportionate repression

that followed an abortive communist rebellion in West Sumatra in
November 1926 and another in Java two months later.137 There was
nothing unique to the Dutch colonies about this.138 Indeed, as we shall
see in later chapters, these Indonesian uprisings triggered similar alarm
and heightened security measures in neighbouring British Malaya and
French Indochina.
Telescoping forward, David Anderson and Sloane Mahone in their
work on Britain’s official responses to Mau Mau have highlighted that
the flow of ‘administrivia’ between government offices could be inter-
rupted by extraordinary flurries of government activity provoked by
concern over indigenous transgression of racial or sexual boundaries.
Then, as during the inter-war period, panic, moral or otherwise, lurked
beneath the calm exterior of colonial rule.139 And, as Patricia Lorcin
notes, ‘Of the many issues that preoccupied colonial minds, labor and
forms of violence were among the most enduring as each concerned
both economic prerogatives and racial relations. Labor issues, in par-
ticular, defined colonial societies.’140 Imagine, for a moment, an episode
common to several colonies between the wars: a strikers’ march that
descended into a violent confrontation in which protesters lost their
lives in clashes with the police. Thus did industrial protest become
identifiable with something profoundly menacing – an inter-ethnic
riot in which the forces of order were targeted because they personified
colonial authority and employer interest.
Several events of this kind figure in later chapters. So we should take
into account Donald Horowitz’s influential study of such inter-ethnic
riots, which starts from this proposition:
The outbreak of violence may inhibit the management of conflict in some cases,
facilitate it in others. One thing it will not do is to leave the conflict where it
was. After the killing, it is no longer possible to bury the ethnic problem by
denying its existence. The riot constitutes a statement of group intentions by
conduct – even the conduct of a relative few – and it exposes the malevolence
of those intentions, belying the former tranquillity inferred from the routine
interethnic contact of the marketplace or the government office.141
Horowitz’s reflections on the consequences of inter-ethnic riots amp-
lify a perhaps obvious point. The more people engaged in protest, the
harder the job of policing became and the greater weight attached to
police powers by governments feeling under pressure. Also important
in this context are the tactics employed by dissidents or oppositional
groups. In autocratic or otherwise repressive states there is greater like-
lihood of a swifter recourse to violent opposition when compared with
more open societies that provide outlets for free expression of dissent
without legal sanction. Another factor comes into play here. This is
the extent to which the perceived danger to authority replicates, evokes
or exceeds previous experience of threatening oppositional activity.
Measuring present dangers against past precedents may be a critical
determinant of the official response. Conversely, the manifestation of
a threat that went undetected or that was completely unexpected may
also elicit an especially powerful repressive act.142 The following chap-
ters contain numerous examples of protest policing and workplace
violence that reveal these abstract processes in action.
Conclusion
‘The colonial world is a world cut in two’, wrote Frantz Fanon, the
Martiniquan psychiatrist, in 1961. ‘The dividing line, the frontiers are
shown by barracks and police stations.’143 These dividing lines became
easier to discern after 1918 amidst rising official fears that popular hos-
tility to imperial rule might escalate into open defiance. Police were
expected to prevent or to contain any such outbreaks. In the event, few
uprisings occurred. Mass killing remained mercifully rare in the inter-
war empires, although lower-level abuses were both commonplace and
systemic. The social divisions in colonial societies reflected an institu-
tional racism that connected rigid class distinctions with racial differen-
tiation. Colonial rulers classified and valued various groups according
to precepts of ethnicity that were themselves defined in terms of white
conceptions of racial hierarchy and economic value. Casual violence was
widespread. It could be physical: the corporal punishment of workers
or sexual assaults on house servants or plantation employees. It could
also be psychological: repeated insult and humiliation, or the cultural
violence inherent to the denigration of indigenous societal practices.
Sometimes police could be found attempting to stop such violence; at
other times, they were its perpetrators. Whichever the case, non-lethal
violence was prevalent in colonial life and imperial policy-making.144
To understand why, the next two chapters dwell on the working lives
of colonial police forces and, in particular, their experience of protest
policing.
2 ‘What did you do in the colonial
police force, daddy?’ Policing inter-war
dissent
The single book of Colonial Office regulations issued in 1930 for the
selection of probationers and sub-inspectors to the police forces of
Ceylon, the Malayan States, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Trinidad and Guiana
made numerous stipulations: minimum ages (nineteen for Ceylon,
twenty-two for Malaya, Hong Kong and the British Caribbean), no
wife or other family dependants, good eyesight, ‘sound constitution
and good physical development’, above all, the requirement to be ‘a
natural born British subject’. There were literacy tests, assessments of
horsemanship (for the West Indies), three-month language courses (for
Malaya and Hong Kong) and basic legal instruction for all. Candidates
were expected to buy their own tropical uniform, but travelling expenses
were paid, including return passages home after periods in service.1
Part of the colonial civil service establishment, new recruits were junior
rankers in the British Empire’s governing apparatus. Yet the juridical
boundaries between police and their local auxiliaries were also blurred
and shifting. In practice, white police officers frequently found them-
selves isolated and exposed, unsure of how to obtain assistance further
up the chain of administrative command. Few forces were ‘modern’ in
Michel Foucault’s sense of thoroughly bureaucratized and extensively
regulated organizations.2
Historians of English policing in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century relate changes to the law and in police activity to targeting
of ‘outsiders’ – the vagrant or the deviant who failed to display the
requisite deference and good conscience of respectable society.3 These
processes of criminalization did not end at the border. The normative
standards of metropolitan government and the adoption of its legal
codes; a capitalist wage economy, labour discipline and European-
style property rights; cultural ‘elevation’ alongside improved public
health and medical provision – all of these things were cited, not just in
Colonial Office manuals but by imperialists more generally as justifica-
tion for empire.4 But colonial peoples often viewed such practices not
as benefits but as attacks on culture, social structure and established
42
Policing inter-war dissent 43
ways of life.5 Not surprisingly, notionally subjugated communities

sometimes responded by developing what James Scott has recently
dubbed ‘the art of not being governed’, evading the hand of central
government in remarkably diverse spheres of cultural life and socio-
economic activity.6 Myriad forms of resistance to the writ of imperial
administration gave the lie to the orderly routine of criminal investi-
gation, paperwork and housekeeping visits described by the Colonial
Office recruiters in 1930:
A junior Police Officer’s day may start with the giving of instruction to his
detachment in elementary law, police duties, physical training and simple
infantry drill, or the handling and carrying of arms … In the course of the day
he may be engaged in the investigation of a murder which has been reported
to him by telegraph, or of some other serious crime, or he may hold an enquiry
into a petition or may attend the Law Courts and conduct the prosecution in
an important case. He may at times be called upon to work out and carry into
practice schemes for the regulation and control of traffic at functions where
large crowds are expected to attend.
Once a month, or oftener if he has the time, he will tour round his District
and inspect his police stations to see they are kept clean and that the personnel
are up to date in their work.7
Addressing the gulf between written function and practical experience,

this chapter travels the colonial world providing snapshots of colonial
police lives, concerns, pressures and priorities between the wars.
The journey begins in Africa, where, beneath their European-
dominated upper echelons, police forces remained substantially in
private hands, sometimes working within the realm of local civil soci-
ety, sometimes at odds with it.8 Colonial West Africa was a case in
point. The role of customary courts, chiefly rulers and village head-
men in dealing with cultural transgressions is well known, but the
actions of other individuals and groups in regulating the actions of
their family members, their neighbours or their guilds less so.9 Official
prioritization of protest policing and labour control in the inter-war
years ensured that the internal regulation of civil society in places such
as Sierra Leone and Nigeria was delegated to traditional authorities
and local power-brokers. The jurisdictional parameters of colonial
policing expanded, even so. In part, this reflected the systemization of
indirect rule as the limits of chiefly authority in adjudicating cases of
petty crime, inheritance, land rights and ‘traditional’ practices such
as witchcraft and ‘fetishism’ were codified in Native Administrative
Ordinances.10 In part, it reflected the spread of capitalist enterprise
and the consequent need to protect the commercial operations, prop-
erty and personnel that came with it.11 Above all else, it mirrored the
resurgence of popular protest, much of it economically motivated, as

hardship increased in the depression years.12
Police development in Britain’s West African colonies followed the
pattern visible in early twentieth-century South Africa, albeit more
slowly and with fewer white gazetted officers.13 As Bill Nasson points
out, South Africa’s policing was becoming a ‘national professional
responsibility, centrist and state-oriented’.14 The industrialization that
propelled this process was less evident in Britain’s West African col-
onies. Still, police activity became disproportionately concentrated in
what pockets of intense industrial activity there were, especially those
of high population density.15 Parallels also emerge here with British
East Africa where policing, initially confined to the protection of trad-
ing company interests, mission stations and settler farms in Kenya,
extended inland as railway construction helped consolidate the Uganda
protectorate from the 1890s. From a political economy standpoint a
permanent police presence was a barometer of infrastructural develop-
ment and commercial penetration.16
The police deployed in Sierra Leone and Nigeria to guard mines,
plantation estates and transport networks were overwhelmingly black.
Unlike their South African or Kenyan equivalents, colonial forces in
West Africa had no pool of white settlers or Indian immigrant commu-
nities, poor or otherwise, from which to draw rank-and-file recruits.17
In Cape Town, for instance, additional employment of poor, white
working-class policemen during the first two decades of the twentieth
century transformed the city’s police. Like other South African city
forces, the Cape Town police was also a self-consciously aggressively
masculine institution, despite persistent efforts by white women’s civic
groups before and after the First World War to secure female admission
to its ranks.18 In Kenya, meanwhile, the Police Training School, opened
in Nairobi in 1911 for African rank-and-file recruits, did not affect the
predominance of Europeans and Indians respectively in the officer cad-
res and clerical branches of the inter-war force.19
India was different of course. Police training schools were dotted
around the country. And police forces in the Raj were networked into
distinct bureaucracies at district, provincial and national level with
longer institutional histories and larger staffs than those in most other
colonies.20 Socially as well as procedurally the Indian Police Service
(IPS) was ‘the buffer that helped preserve the physical and psycho-
logical insularity of the British ruling class in their cantonments, clubs,
and hill stations’.21 Snobbery also came into play: ‘in contrast to the
educated gentlemen of the ICS [Indian Civil Service], the IPS men
felt themselves to be more in contact with the gritty realities of crime
and punishment and the practical challenges of maintaining order and

British authority … Both their family backgrounds and their daily rou-
tines inclined IPS men to sympathize much more than did the ICS
with businessmen, planters, and other Anglo-Indians.’22 White police
officers were often pulled in opposite directions, particularly as the
coercion of labourers, so long a feature of planter society in Assam
and elsewhere, drew harsher government criticism from the 1890s
onwards.23
Another obvious point perhaps easily overlooked is that what the
police thought and did clearly mattered. As British India’s police chief
Sir Edmund Cox noted on the eve of the First World War, ‘The Police
Department in India is the very essence of our administration. There
is no other which so much concerns the life of the people.’24 And no
colonial territory fielded a police force on the scale of the IPS. The
Bengal police alone numbered over 24,000 full-time constables plus a
further 80,000 rural dafadar and chaukidar auxiliaries. Specialist div-
isional sections also appeared earlier in India than elsewhere. Bengal’s
Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was, for example, reconfig-
ured in the early twentieth century as a counter-intelligence bureau to
fight Bengali revolutionary terrorism.25 Low-level coercion, sometimes
authorized, sometimes not; preoccupation with colonial security and
public order; and day-to-day involvement with the operations of key
export industries: these were cardinal features of colonial police work
between the wars.
The preoccupations and compositional traits of British colonial police
forces were echoed elsewhere. Force structure and policing styles in
French Indochina varied markedly between urban centres and the rural
interior. In the uplands of northern Tonkin, close to Vietnam’s nebu-
lous, porous land frontier with China, the police presence was patchy
and paramilitary. Police work was roughly partitioned between a white
officered gendarmerie (the garde civile established in 1886), and a native
militia force (the linh-co), that conducted local policing, or ‘police intime’,
under the aegis of mandarins and village administrators.26 Tonkin’s
major cities of Hanoi and Haiphong acquired separate municipal police
forces meanwhile. Directly responsible to the civil government, both the
rural and urban police depended on colonial troops to pursue organ-
ized groups of bandits or ‘pirates’, whose predations in the twenty years
preceding 1914 assumed an increasingly anti-colonial, proto-nationalist
character.27 Clear-cut distinctions between differing types of police
accountability or function were less easily drawn than this picture
suggests.28 Administrative and judicial police forces, responsible for
tackling low-level crime, were established in Cochin-China in 1881 and
in Tonkin three years later, but their relationship with municipal police
forces remained unclear.
Between 1897 and 1902, during Paul Doumer’s five-year governor-
generalship, the responsibilities of police, security forces and various
tiers of colonial government were reassessed. An energetic reformer,
Doumer dreamed of an Indochina coherently ‘governed’ rather than
‘administered’ from a distance.29 But his rationalization of government
offices was not definitive. Indochina’s police were reorganized time and
again. So much so that by 1916 the colonial inspectorate counted nine
distinct forces at work in the Indochina federation, not to mention the
indigenous police retained at cantonal level. The lines separating civil
police from gendarmeries and paramilitary militias from regular army
units, let alone workplace security guards and armed overseers, were
often crossed. It took the arrival of another reformist Governor, Albert
Sarraut, and the efforts of a long-serving senior police officer, Louis
Marty, to disentangle these multiple hierarchies of public and private
security forces from 1916 onwards.30
Boundaries were similarly blurred further down the policing food
chain among the locally recruited gendarmes of the garde indigène.31
Closer to a rural civil defence force than organized regimental forma-
tions, the garde indigène was the natural successor to the garde civile. It
provided garrisons for blockhouses and remote sectors, supplements to
the colonial infantry and adjuncts to the police. At province level, indi-
vidual garde indigène units patrolled areas distinct from those monitored
by the colonial army – at least on paper. Liaison between the two was
nugatory. Individual garde indigène post commanders could spend weeks,
even months, without receiving precise instructions. Only after the Yen
Bay uprising of 1930 (discussed in Chapter 6) were these fundamen-
tal questions of purpose and jurisdiction addressed.32 After reviewing
garde indigène units in northern Tonkin in 1931, General Henri Claudel,
the Inspector-general of French colonial troops and a veteran of pacifi-
cation campaigns in West Africa, absolved the junior officers in charge
of blame. They received ‘no instructions, no direction, and no con-
trol’. ‘Their mission and their operational zone’, he went on, ‘are poorly
delineated, so they don’t know where to patrol.’ Most damning of all,
Claudel thought their work pointless: ‘They yield no intelligence of any
value, merely providing a weekly report devoid of any interest.’33
Things were very different in Saigon, capital of the southern
Vietnamese colony of Cochin-China. Immigrants from the French
Establishments in India figured large in the city’s police force, the prison
service and colonial army regiments based nearby. In 1907 fifty-seven
Indian agents already served in the Saigon police force. Locked in a
protracted dispute with the municipal council over their citizenship sta-
tus and the pay and privileges that went with it, numbers seemed set to
decline. Not so: in the following year fully half the agents in the Saigon
municipal force were Indian. A decade later, in 1917, there were nine
Indians among the seventeen ‘principal guards’ working on the prison
island of Poulo-Condore.34 ‘It would not have been unthinkable’, com-
ments Natasha Pairaudeau, ‘for a local Cochinchinese in trouble with
the law to have been arrested and tried by Indians, and imprisoned
under the watch of Indian guards. Even their food … may have been
supplied by an Indian contractor.’35 So prominent were Indian recruits
in the 11th Colonial Infantry Regiment (RIC) posted in Saigon that the
Franco-Tamil newspaper Saigon-Dimanche ran a regular column in the
early 1930s entitled ‘Gossip from the 11th R.I.C.’36
Policing, settlers and violence

Saigon’s police, like their equivalent in Singapore (as we shall see in
Chapter 7), offer examples of subaltern groups, typically from commu-
nities with supposed ‘martial race’ qualities, at the forefront of colo-
nial urban policing.37 But in colonies where European-run agricultural
enterprise predominated, the white presence in local police forces was
more pronounced, whether numerically or in ethos and approach.38
Distinctions between police repression and white racial violence were
hardest to make in colonies with influential populations of settler estate
owners and farmers. Weight of settler numbers could be decisive – in
British South Africa or French Algeria for example; but numbers were
not everything. Return for a moment to British Kenya and French
Vietnam. Both were exceptionally violent societies judged by the stand-
ards of neighbouring colonial territories. Yet these were territories in
which European permanent settlers – as opposed to officials, armed
forces personnel and commercial employees on short-term postings –
never exceeded 35,000 before 1940.39 Structural economic changes
in the inter-war period proved more critical. In French Vietnam the
rise of the rubber economy in the South and changing patterns of land
tenure in Tonkin and central Annam dramatically altered the form
and extent of colonial intervention in Vietnamese lives.40 In Kenya, as
John Lonsdale tellingly puts it, ‘the geopolitics of empire reinforced
the mathematics of race’.41 British regional interests met those of the
settlers insofar as both tried to confound the ethnic arithmetic: sub-
jugating Kenya’s African majority rather than bending to its will. And
as David Anderson, Daniel Branch and Chloe Campbell have shown,
fear of crime united settlers like nothing else during the inter-war years,
even more so as economic conditions worsened in the early 1930s and

the drift of unemployed young men to Kenya’s towns increased.42
The legal underpinnings to these social divisions were equally ugly.
From its inception, British-ruled Kenya had been governed by the
Indian Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes of 1882, which, despite
their Victorian disciplinary flavour, settlers criticized for investing too
much power in officials’ hands at the expense of the white man accused
of violence against the African. In 1910 two settler lobby groups, the
crop farmers’ Colonists’ Association and the Pastoralists’ Association
(consisting mainly of sheep farmers), merged to form the Convention of
Associations led by Lord Delamere, Kenya’s largest landholder. Their
political voice stronger than ever, in 1914 the settlers won revisions to
the Criminal Procedure Code under an ordinance stipulating that only
Europeans were qualified to serve as jurors and that all verdicts must be
unanimous. These changes reinforced white farmers’ control over their
labour force. At the same time, heightened white settlement after the
First World War augmented demand for African farm labour, stoking
conflict between settlers, the colonial administration and the police.43
As Colonial Secretary in 1921 Winston Churchill banned officials from
‘assisting’ private employers to find workers. But compulsory labour on
public works projects endured, thanks, in part, to the staunchly pro-
settler Leo Amery, Colonial Secretary between 1924 and 1929.44
For white landowners, changing economic pressures and persistent
anxiety about crime became entwined as local populations were refash-
ioned into waged workers, displaced from their home environments and
cut adrift from their cultural moorings.45 In Martin Wiener’s striking
phrase, ‘African land and African labour formed the basic currencies
of conflict’ – and of punishment as well.46 The majority of murder tri-
als in inter-war Kenya arose in the context of settler farmers punishing
livestock thieves, farm workers or house servants. Those accused of
killings insisted they were ‘policing’ their own farms through violent,
exemplary ‘labour discipline’. Settler vigilantism placed the police in
an impossible position. Either they became complicit in imposing arbi-
trary punishments on African workers – exposing them to accusations
of racial bias; or they faced ostracism by settlers claiming inadequate
police protection of their lives and property.47
The emergence of Kenya’s ‘labour problem’ worsened matters. As
Berman and Lonsdale suggest, the problem was of colonial making,
rooted in the need of settler estate producers for a mass of semi-servile migrant
and resident labourers and their inability to supply the requisite coercion with-
out generating African resistance and threatening the basic framework of colo-
nial domination. In consequence, a process of increasing state intervention
which began before 1914 culminated in the early 1920s in a massive application
of official coercion to ensure the recruitment of labour and sustain the neces-
sary relations of production in estate agriculture under the paternal authority
of the provincial administration.48
Alarmed by evidence of increasing crime and offender recidivism,
settlers in Kenya, as elsewhere, took a closer interest in criminal legisla-
tion, police powers and the colony’s prison system. Inter-racial crime –
violent and sexual assault especially – became the yardstick by which
any deterioration in the colony’s hierarchies of economic power, race
and gender was gauged. And settlers expected ‘their’ police to uphold
punitive regimes already considered woefully outdated in other, non-
settler colonies. Convinced that discriminatory laws and exemplary
punishments were the bedrock of social order, colonists derided weak-
kneed metropolitan reformism. Nothing should dilute their ability to
maintain physical and symbolic control over a black majority popula-
tion whose rapid growth threatened to swamp the white population.49
Exploiting their influence within the colony’s Legislative Council,
Kenya’s settlers endorsed a 1930 prison ordinance that paved the way
for an expansion of the colony’s prison and detention camp population
in the decade ahead.50
Was colonial Kenya typical? Fear of attack goes some way in explain-
ing the prevalence of institutionalized violence and the casual brutality
in evidence on the racial frontiers of colonial politics, in the colonial
workplace and within the domestic space of settler society. Very often,
it seemed, settlers expected colonial policemen to share, or at least to
uphold, the hierarchies of race, gender and social standing that made
settler society what it was.51 Robert Bickers’ studies of the British com-
munity of ‘Shanghailanders’ in China are especially illuminating.52 As
he notes, ‘Domestic class, nationality and gender tensions were exported
with settlers, administrators and missionaries; and these tensions found
new modes of expression, especially as they interacted with issues of
race, as they underpinned the improvised communities of empire.’53
Colonial police could easily get sucked into the defence of settler priv-
ilege, even though numerous police officers disparaged white society as
self-serving and reactionary.54
Yet, the fact that colonial police officers often worked hard to avoid
identification with settler interest suggests that we must look elsewhere
for answers to the problems of colonial state violence. A fuller explan-
ation must also take into account both the permissive legal frameworks
of colonial law and the methods of punishment created to lend force to
colonial authority. As Stacey Hynd observes in the context of capital tri-
als in another British farming colony, Nyasaland, judicial practice was
‘administrative and political, rather than professionally “legal”’. She

continues, ‘before the 1930s the accused was likely to have no defence
counsel; once at court, cases could be tried in a matter of hours; laws of
evidence and procedure were frequently misinterpreted or disregarded;
and multiple languages and world-views clashed to obscure trial narra-
tives and testimonies’.55
In light of these overlapping confusions, perhaps we should widen
the search for the day-to-day force of colonial authority. The panoply of
restrictions and punishments available to colonial policemen, whether
acting on their own initiative or through the mechanisms of European
or customary law, were pivotal to what Taylor Sherman has dubbed
‘the coercive network’ of the colonial state.56 As she puts it, ‘far from
being limited to a single institution, penal practices ranged from fir-
ing on crowds and bombing from the air, to dismissal from one’s place
of work or study, collective fines, confiscation of property, as well as
imprisonment, corporal and capital punishment’.57 Policemen were the
central nodes of these sometimes chaotic networks, enforcing the writ
of colonial authority, administering punishment and normalizing the
connections in people’s minds between the two.58
South Africa provides an extreme example of this phenomenon.
Copious flogging of black prisoners in the jails and police cells of colo-
nial Natal persisted well into the early twentieth century. It became
so commonplace that a 1905 prison reform commission lamented ‘the
cult of the cat’ among the province’s police and prison staff. The whip-
ping of black detainees by white policemen and prison guards was, by
then, integral to the negotiation of power, not only between white rulers
and African subjects but between settlers and colonial officials as well.
Corporal punishment was sometimes justified in Benthamite terms of
‘reforming’ bad character, but it remained unapologetically pre-mod-
ern in its ‘sanguinary’ dimension in which inflicting pain remained an
essential supplement to confinement.59 It was also racially determined,
almost exclusively applied to black men. Presumed to be inferior and,
therefore, judged only capable of understanding punishment as physical
reprimand, the black majority was, at the same time, feared by colonists
as an expanding mass that, literally, required whipping into line. The
more insistent that official calls became for less arbitrary use of the lash,
the more settlers defended it, reasserting their local autonomy and their
greater masculinity. Police officers in Natal were caught in the middle,
subject to official instruction but physically closer to a settler commu-
nity determined to retain the punitive powers that helped cement its
position as a racial over-class.60 The use of flogging would gradually
decline from the mid-1920s, much as it did in other parts of British
sub-Saharan Africa.61 Meanwhile, a racially ordered imperial immi-

gration policy, pioneered in late nineteenth-century Natal and further
tightened in the inter-war years, as elsewhere in Britain’s Dominions,
aligned the police more rigidly with discriminatory authority.62
The situation was not dissimilar in the Belgian Congo where flogging
with the infamous chicotte remained a customary punishment in the
colony’s prisons and its native courts well into the 1950s.63 Typically
administered by African prison warders, police constables or soldiers
of the Force Publique, the number of lashes incurred for petty misde-
meanours was reduced in 1933. But district officials rejected abolition,
defending the practice in the depression years as cheap and symbolic-
ally resonant among communities otherwise liable to question the colo-
nial government’s taxation and labour demands.64 In the federations
of French West and Equatorial Africa, by contrast, the chicotte’s once
widespread use was frowned upon by the early 1900s. Liberal qualms
played their part in this. But more influential were senior army offi
cers’ complaints that whipping of criminals or, almost as common, of
African troops for disciplinary infractions, was counter-productive,
storing up resentments that made administrative tasks harder.65 And
the pragmatists pointed to an 1898 mutiny at the French military post
at Bangui where miliciens, tired of their commander’s repeated lash-
ings almost lynched him on the spot.66
What does all of this tell us about the lived experience of European
colonial policing after the First World War? One thing that emerges is
that colonial policemen stood at the interface between what Europe’s
imperial governments considered ‘good’ and ‘bad’ about colonial rule.
The personification of colonial order, respect for western law and
administrative accountability, empire police sometimes acted in ways
that worsened disorder, sapped popular respect for legal process and
undermined government authority. More often there simply weren’t
enough police in the right place at the right time to do one thing or the
other. This raises another problem: quantifying colonial policemen’s
activity. Paper records offer guides to day-by-day deployments but give
fewer indicators of how individual policemen subdivided their time
between tasks. There are insufficient timesheets, daily diaries or per-
sonal logs to rectify this. We do, however, have retrospective summar-
ies of patrols, investigations, industrial stoppages and street protests,
accounts which help build a composite picture of colonial police activity
colony by colony, month by month.67
Two generic tasks, each associated with differing phases of the
consolidation of imperial rule, were common to all colonial police
forces – and not just their European cadres. One was that paramilitary
police, typically with local irregulars under their command, became

adjuncts of military pacification, assisting and sometimes supplanting
army units in fighting internal resistance to colonial incursion. From
the African scramble to the American occupation of the Philippines
in 1899 and Japan’s takeovers in Korea and, later, Manchuria, not
much separated regular troops from quasi-military police at the sharp
end of ‘pacification’.68 Following this initial occupation phase, police
officers were increasingly assigned to a second task, enforcing racial
segregation between European (or American or Japanese) quarters
and the ‘native areas’ of colonial cities and townships. The total-
ity of such segregation varied markedly, more so between individual
colonies and treaty ports, than between imperial powers.69 Health-
related issues, such as higher rates of infectious illness, incidences
of epidemics, or proximity of malarial swamps and urban waste typ-
ically gave rise to stricter enforcement of township ordinances and
other legal penalties designed to exclude Africans or Asians from
whites-only residential areas.70 Colonial powers, wary of adverse pol-
itical reaction, usually denied that such restrictions on freedom of
movement or residency were racially motivated, preferring, instead,
to cite public health concerns – control of cross-infection especially –
of notional benefit to all.71
Alongside these security and segregationist duties, policemen were
called upon to enforce a remarkably wide array of colonial legislation,
not just criminal, but civil, municipal and fiscal, often within multiple
legal systems in which an expanding arsenal of colonial laws rubbed
up against existent legal forms and competing jurisdictions, whether
customary, religious or communal.72 Such legal complexity presented
opportunities for colonial subjects to play the system, exploiting which-
ever laws, titles and rights served best. Such opportunities increased in
territories where imperial rule was further constrained by international
treaty obligations or extra-territorial rights. The protectorate regimes
of Morocco and Tunisia, the inter-war mandates subject to League of
Nations monitoring and city-states and international settlements such
as Hong Kong and Shanghai, were regulated by a myriad of sometimes
conflicting customs, colonial regulations and international law.73 What
David Lambert terms ‘the circumstantial elites’ of urban notables and
clan leaders from the Maghreb to the Levant proved especially adept
in this regard.74 Locally knowledgeable and well apprised of opposing
civil codes, religious laws and colonial requirements, they exploited
the administrative functions assigned to them to carve out political
space in which to pursue their interests, at times in conformity with
imperial authority, occasionally in opposition to it.75 Policing therefore
demanded remarkably wide expertise, or, at least, the ability to handle

these jurisdictional clashes.
Police and policy: two West African cases

Rarely did the working lives of colonial policemen arouse much interest
among government ministers in London, Paris and the other European
capitals of colonial empires. Entrants to the colonial police required
fewer qualifications, academic or linguistic, than members of the colo-
nial service. Their profession lacked the élan of the army or naval
officer corps in Britain and France. In both countries questions of colo-
nial police composition revolved around the ethnic mix of the over-
all force and different ‘models’ of colonial police practice rather than
the social status and career prospects of its officer class.76 The relative
merits of ethnic homogeneity versus greater heterogeneity, as well as
issues of rank-and-file advancement, were decided within the Colonial
Ministries. Officer training matters and transfers between police forces
brought in Home Office/Interior Ministry bureaucrats responsible for
domestic police personnel. On the occasions that senior government
figures did concern themselves with the colonial police, their interest
hinged on policemen’s actions, usually after the fact. Colonial disorder
could trigger such political engagement. Even then, ministers only
became involved in cases where police exposure to violence was serious
enough to provoke changes in policy or procedure. Wider domestic pol-
itical interest was, similarly, piqued by the more sensational instances of
police violence that culminated in government commissions of inquiry.
Whitehall officialdom had a particular fondness for these inquiry
commissions, and several were appointed in the inter-war years.
Commissions of inquiry were the clearest indicators of colonial
policing gone wrong, and were viewed as such by colonial administra-
tions and their local inspectors of police. That is not to say that the
absence of inquiry commissions amounted to a clean official bill of
health for individual forces. To illustrate the point, it is worth dwell-
ing on a couple of lesser cases, too small to register on the govern-
ment radar. The fate of two police officers in British West Africa, each
dismissed from the service, reveals something about the lives of colo-
nial policemen in the 1930s and the way they were viewed by colonial
officials in London. First, the case of sub-inspector J. Rabbitt. One of
only three white officers in the Sierra Leone Colony police, he was com-
pulsorily ‘retrenched’, or retired from the service in November 1934.
Rabbitt had provoked intermittent complaints from administrators and
fellow officers for several years. So frequent were these mutterings that
Rabbitt claimed he was victim of a ‘conspiracy’ that had caused his

fragile health to collapse. In fact, the Governor simply thought that
officers like Rabbitt were superfluous. Cheaper African recruits were
proving just as efficient as their British superiors. Depression-era cut-
backs, which saw the European officer ‘force’ reduced from six to three
men in 1932 had not adversely affected police performance. Rabbitt
was a pointless expense.77 It was a view echoed in the Colonial Office
where the head of the West Africa Department, Alex Fiddian, inad-
vertently voiced the pervasive ignorance about the substance of colo-
nial police work: ‘I should say myself that three Officers are probably
plenty. It would mean that in normal circumstances there would always
be two available, one at Headquarters and one going round inspecting,
at least, I expect that is how it is done.’78 As Rabbitt packed his bags in
Freetown, the truth about how things were sometimes done emerged
with shocking clarity in the Southern Nigerian province of Owerri –
our second case.
On 8 August 1934, an unnamed headman in Naidimo village was
struck on the head with a police rifle-butt. He died some days later from
pneumonia, his illness accelerated by the injury. The coroner’s report
recorded the case as ‘murder by some person or persons unknown’.
Police and local residents disputed the events surrounding the head-
man’s death. A detachment of police had, at the time, been mid-way
through a series of village inspections intended to ensure that the local
population paid their annual tax demand. The financial imperative for
such ‘tax raids’ lay in depression-era conditions, but it was the limited
coercive power of local native authorities that explained the recourse to
police units to get the dirty work done.79 Owerri was merely one stop
among many on their itinerary. It had seen violent anti-taxation pro-
tests before, a subject discussed in detail in Chapter 11. Suffice to say
that each assessment visit in 1934 occasioned police violence, usually
the public flogging of men-folk accused of non-payment.
The situation deteriorated further on 11 August when a tax clerk,
his retinue of local carriers and six Nigerian policemen left their tented
camp at Usaka Ukwu for the nearby village of Arriam Elu Elu. Their
plan was to collect £16 8s in outstanding taxes and provision them-
selves with food (goats and yams).80 The policemen claimed that they
were pelted with stones on arrival at Arriam Elu Elu. Residents, armed
with machetes, bows and spears, then attacked the police column. One
policeman, a carrier and the tax clerk were injured in the ensuing fracas.
The villagers saw things differently, insistent that they had to defend
themselves against the column’s looting and livestock thefts. The next
morning a larger police escort headed by Assistant Commissioner of
Police, Mr J. F. Faithfull, and accompanied by Assistant District Officer

(ADO) Thomas Elton-Miller, returned to the village. It was deserted.
They later apprehended a villager, named only as Ezeuku. Convinced
he was involved in the previous day’s violence, the police flogged him
so severely that his wounds remained open four months later. By their
own account, police administered ‘light beatings’ to several other
youths and arrested two others who denied them food. After the village
headman, chief Okpechi, rejected the tax collectors’ renewed demands
for payment and provisions, Assistant Commissioner Faithfull ordered
‘four or five houses’ in the chief’s compound to be burned down ‘as
an example’.81 The ADO, intimidated by the police officer and fearing
an ‘unseemly brawl’ with him in full sight of the African constables,
handed over the matches to start the blaze.82
Elton-Miller recalled that the police party was exasperated – and
hungry. In every village livestock and other taxable goods were con-
cealed, and food, water and firewood refused, despite the policemen’s
willingness to pay for it.83 It was, moreover, the widespread local tax
avoidance in 1932 and again in 1933 that drove Elton-Miller’s super-
ior, Acting District Officer C. J. Mayne, to authorize the use of armed
police to ensure that more revenue was collected in 1934.84 Elton-Miller
was inexperienced. His first participation in a police tax escort was also
his last. In a rare case of multiple dismissals, he and Faithfull were
removed from their posts once the case against them – of burning the
compound – was proven by the Lagos Government’s Executive Council.
Faithfull was fired, but Elton-Miller was allowed to resign. Neither man
faced any criminal charges, although the Executive Council recorded
four separate assaults on villagers by Faithfull. Unlike Elton-Miller, the
police officer was no greenhorn. He had joined the service twelve years
earlier in August 1923 as a police constable, third grade, in Kenya.85 A
seasoned policeman, Faithfull was also a poor one. In debt to a local
trading house, and twice reprimanded in 1932–3, once for drunken
rowdiness and once for going absent without leave, Faithfull’s police
record also recorded his reluctance to sit law examinations or to learn
vernacular languages. Just before Faithfull embarked on the fateful
police escort, Governor Sir Donald Cameron reported him as ‘an unre-
liable officer and therefore a burden to the “service”’. Faithfull’s annual
salary increment was withheld but his assignment to tax collection
approved.86
What should we make of this? A hard-drinking, cynical, deeply
unhappy man inured to casual violence; an ugly incident recorded in a
solitary Colonial Office file. Maybe so, but the evidence that police bru-
tality and summary punishment of recalcitrant Nigerians were routine
seems beyond doubt. So, too, does the manifest bias in the application
of the Colony’s criminal code when it came to prosecuting white offi
cers of the Crown.87
Nigeria’s northern and southern regional police commands worked
hand-in-glove with the offices of the Lieutenant Governor of the coun-
try’s northern and southern provinces, each of which reported to central
police HQ in Lagos colony. Provinces, in turn, had their own commis-
sioner of police who worked in conjunction with district officers. All
new appointees as commissioner (aged between twenty-two and thirty-
five) underwent four months’ preliminary training at the Royal Ulster
Constabulary depot before assignment to Nigeria; something that it
appears the lower-ranking Faithfull did not.88 High flyers in the Nigeria
police from the Inspector-general down to superintendent level were
exclusively European, but the bulk of constables and junior officers
up to sergeant-major and chief-inspector rank were African. Beneath
inspector-level appointees, white superintendents were selected by the
Crown Agents, ideally from applicants with experience in the British
police, the Fire Brigades or the Regular Army. African police officers,
meanwhile, were required to complete a six-month training course at
the Lagos Police depot plus three-year probation. Promotion from the
African rank and file was, in practice if not in law, restricted to the
level of ‘warrant officer’, equivalent to the army’s sergeant-major rank.
European and African officers were, in theory, subject to the same
disciplinary provisions of Nigeria’s police ordinances, and all enjoyed
pensionable rights. But disciplinary actions were commonest against
African rank and filers and white gazetted officers accrued more sal-
ary increments and promotion entitlements than their Nigerian subor-
dinates.89 These Nigerian junior officers investigated and prosecuted
most criminal cases that passed through the colony’s lower courts.
Their knowledge of local languages was better, and their European
officers were busier with political policing and the protection of com-
mercial property. While the Lagos special branch was relatively quiet
for much of the inter-war period, with minimal evidence of the left-
ist sedition that so preoccupied colonial police forces elsewhere, the
policing of economic protest preoccupied Nigeria’s senior policemen
from 1929 onwards.90 Officer Faithfull had been performing main-
stream Nigerian police activity.
Were police abuses really so common? To judge by official reactions in
London: apparently not. The arbitrary violence meted out by Faithfull
and his men occasioned separate inquiries by Nigeria’s chief justice and
by the Colony’s Executive Council, suggesting that it was considered
unusual and unacceptable. There was genuine shock in the Colonial
Office as the facts of the case emerged. The Secretary of State, Philip
Cunliffe-Lister (later Lord Swinton) captured the mood on 2 March
1935 in his closing remarks about the two dismissals: ‘There can be no
question that the decision should be confirmed in both cases. I can-
not imagine more disgraceful conduct than that of Mr Faithfull; and a
senior officer who connived at it is fortunate to be allowed to resign.’91
Yet closing things down in this way was the very point. Use of police
coercion to collect taxes – the process which gave rise to the various
assaults and burnings – was considered essential, not dissimilar to use
of the whip in Natal. Behind everything lay the bitter official memories
of the disastrous police handling of disorders in Southern Nigeria six
years earlier, which culminated in the fatal shootings of eighteen Igbo
women. The worst single loss of life at the hands of colonial policemen
in West Africa between the wars, the ‘Igbo women’s war’ is discussed
at length in Chapter 11.92
The shadow of these killings loomed over Colonial Office delibera-
tions of colonial policing in black Africa throughout the 1930s. Colonial
Office observers were torn between their heightened sensitivity to accu-
sations of random brutality and recognition that coercive policing was
an inescapable economic choice. This last unspoken assumption was
reinforced by the depression’s impact, which made tax collection more
difficult and silenced officials’ ethical qualms about seizing essen-
tial livestock or stores of food in lieu of monetary tax payments. The
underlying presumption of the official reviews conducted in Lagos and
London was that the police existed to enforce state demands rather
than protect the lives and property of the local population. Two bad
apples were thrown out, but the rottenness of the barrel was ignored.
Inside or outside the community?

Officer Faithfull’s dismissal sheds light on police operations and gov-
ernment monitoring, but what about his outlook? Faithfull viewed his
actions in normative terms, not as transgressions but as acceptable
police practice, a logical response to under-resourcing and inveterate
public hostility to state demands. This begs deeper questions. Were the
organizational cultures of colonial police forces unique or comparable?
Did colonial police tackle the problems they encountered in similar
ways? What became habitual? What, in other words, shaped their pat-
terns of cognition – the ways they processed the social environment?93
Underlying these questions is the issue of ideology, the system of beliefs
that, as historian Seth Jacobs notes, ‘provides the concepts, values, and
language that enable people to make sense of the world and act within
it’.94 A common ideological framework allowed police personnel to con-

nect the role of colonial government, imperial and national obligation
and their duties as lawmen.95
Simon Kitson’s analysis of the French police under Vichy uncov-
ers the ambiguities of policing within an authoritarian system towards
which much of the rank and file remained deeply ambivalent. Few serv-
ing policemen after France’s 1940 defeat bought into the reactionary
rhetoric of Vichy’s National Revolution. While some participated in the
worst excesses of collaboration with German occupiers, others forged
a rigorous moral economy that valued patriotic duty, anti-Nazi resist-
ance and individual rights – and policed accordingly. Kitson’s call for
better recognition of the subtleties of police work under Vichy makes
good sense, and is equally applicable to the French Empire before the
1940 defeat, where a heady interpretative cocktail of Frantz Fanon and
Michel Foucault might otherwise depict all colonial police as unremit-
tingly oppressive agents of modernizing, highly disciplined regimes.96
Even in a strictly hierarchical organization in which opportunities for
advancement were racially codified, distinctions between colonizer and
colonized,and between gazetted officer and ordinary constable, could
be fuzzy. As we saw with Saigon’s police and 11th RIC, in some ter-
ritories particular loyalist communities identified as suitably ‘martial’
served the imperial power through recruitment to the security forces.97
In other locations, the local police force was more heterogeneous and
less readily categorized along ethnic or regional lines. Any sugges-
tion that, after joining European-officered colonial police forces, the
Africans and Asians that dominated the rank and file replicated their
commanders’ cultural practices or shared their political priorities seems
ridiculously far-fetched. Even in those French colonies where assimila-
tion remained official dogma, the relationship between non-European
policemen and their white officers was more complex than is suggested
by Albert Memmi’s famous dictum that those who chose to assimilate
came to resemble the colonizer ‘to the point of disappearing in him’.98
Police forces were too internally divided to satisfy this concept of
mimicry. Problems of rapid turnover, low morale and high rates of
dismissal, although varying between individual forces, typified the dis-
contents, disappointed hopes and sometimes inappropriate behaviour
of policemen acclimatizing to working within organizations still in the
early phases of consolidation. Much like London’s Metropolitan Police
during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, large numbers of resig-
nations and dismissals gradually gave way to natural wastage as indi-
vidual forces achieved institutional stability and their recruits arrived
with a clearer understanding of the job.99
It may be hard to see colonial police as unwilling instruments of a

system beyond their control but other indicators point to high levels of
dissatisfaction and unhappiness among police personnel. If the inci-
dence of alcoholism and suicide are any guide, colonial policemen in
French North Africa were often overwhelmed by their daily grind. With
anti-malarial prophylactics in general circulation, psychological disor-
ders took a heavier toll on gendarmerie personnel than North Africa’s
mosquitoes after the First World War. Gendarmerie commanders often
linked transfer requests, unauthorized leaves of absence, alcohol abuse
and, in the most extreme cases, suicides among their men to ‘poor men-
tal attitude’, loneliness and ennui. Its tedious aspects notwithstand-
ing, policing in the inter-war Maghreb became increasingly sensitive
politically and prone to bureaucratic in-fighting. Three very different
examples, one from each of the three French North African territories
demonstrate these tendencies in action.
First, to Morocco where, in May 1924, prefectures of police in the
major northern towns were instructed by the Paris Interior Ministry
to authenticate the identity papers of immigrant workers heading for
France. Chasing an estimated five thousand Moroccans working in
mainland France without valid identity cards, hard-pressed metropol-
itan Sûreté officials were keen to shift the administrative workload onto
their counterparts in North Africa.100 But Morocco’s senior policemen
were also over-stretched by the bureaucratic demands arising from the
legal consolidation of the protectorate regime.101 Tighter police regu-
lation over the movement of migrant workers between metropolitan
and imperial territory was politically explosive because it restricted
Moroccans’ freedom of movement, not only outside Morocco but within
it. Police commanders insisted that monitoring economic migration
effectively meant identity checks on all workers moving outside their
home districts. Restrictions transgressed the juridical prerogatives of
the Sultan’s Makhzen administration to order the lives of Moroccan
citizens within the protectorate’s confines. Implemented nonetheless,
the practices decisively extended colonial police responsibility for the
regulation of Morocco’s workers and workplaces.
In Tunisia, another protectorate regime, labour policing was distinct-
ive in a different sense. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the emergence of a
cohesive Tunisian trade union movement in the mid-1920s shifted the
onus in the policing of workers from economic migration to industrial
disputes in the mining and transport sectors. Where the Tunisian police
led from 1924 onwards, their colleagues in Morocco and Algeria would
follow in the 1930s. Tunisia’s police were also in the vanguard of coun-
ter-espionage work, something that provides our second example, this
time of the increasing political sensitivities inherent in creeping police

powers. In May 1930 a political intelligence division (Service des rensei-
gnements généraux – SRG) was established at Tunis police headquarters.
Its remit was to monitor communist propaganda and Tunisian nation-
alism as well as to supervise frontier surveillance and counter-espionage
work. A divisional commissioner brought in from France selected the
SRG’s five French inspectors, two field agents and a secretary. The new
agency was modelled on its French equivalent where, from November
1926, 136 sector chiefs, named Commissaires spéciaux, reported any evi-
dence of spying to the local police – or Sûreté générale.102
The Tunisian SRG was soon overwhelmed by its caseload, most
of which it farmed out to police units. Its core problem was simple.
Civilian counter-espionage officers were, for the most part, designated
to pursue inquiries initiated by Tunisia’s army and naval commands.
With an annual budget of some 400,000 francs, the Tunis SRG assem-
bled 6,000 personnel dossiers and 12,000 files within two years of its
creation. It pursued over 800 requests from the naval command for
surveillance, searches, or arrests, as well as a further 300 in response to
advice from the army and other Sûreté branches.103 Results were mea-
gre. Service Ministry suspicions that the SRG was making little head-
way against sedition climaxed over the summer of 1932. On 12 July
an Italian cargo vessel unloading tomatoes on the Tunis dockside was
found to be smuggling weapons when a box of revolvers spilled from
a broken packing case. Three weeks later an Italian military seaplane
overflew Tunis and the nearby El-Aouina airbase, its engine splutter-
ing. The pilot made an emergency landing on a canal just outside the
capital and, working frantically, managed to restart the motor before
police officers could intercept him.104 His narrow escape typified the
SRG’s frustrations.
The third and final example – this time of the institutional violence
in North African policing – comes from the colony of Algeria. It would
at this point be easy to provide instances of police assaults against eth-
nic Algerians, which litter the colonial archive and which will feature
in Chapter 4. But, on this occasion, evidence, not of political or pro-
test policing, but of an ‘ordinary’ city beat in a European quartier of
Algiers is equally revealing. On a sweltering night in July 1933, police
were called to Le Perroquet dance club after an altercation between
two women and four visiting Spanish professional footballers from
Athletico Madrid. Insults escalated into a brawl. Additional officers
arrived, and marched the four young Spaniards off to the 4e arrondisse-
ment police station, less than 400 metres down the road. What hap-
pened en route became the subject of an inconclusive judicial inquiry.
The sole undisputed fact was that one of the footballers, Fernando
Vigueras Rodriguez, suffered fatal head injuries. Police at the scene
insisted that Rodriguez fell down steps on rue Dupuch after resisting
arrest. The Algiers prosecuting magistrate suspected a cover-up of a
police beating, but could not assemble enough evidence to prove it.
The footballer’s death was recorded as an unfortunate consequence
of Algiers nightlife’s wilder side.105 Missing from the official report
was any acknowledgement that the Algiers force was prone to violence.
The four officers – Lucien Bourgeon, Pierre Legrand, Alonzo Lozano
and Joachim Saint-André – accused of involvement in the Rodriguez
killing received a desultory one-month jail sentence from the Algiers
Criminal Court in December 1934 and were temporarily suspended
from the city force two months later.106
Conclusion
A suspicious death at the hands of a group of colonial policemen was
not a routine occurrence. But the Rodriguez killing reminds us that
colonial policing could be habitually brutal, and with minimal legal
consequences. Fear lay at the root of such violence – fear of cultural
practices that were poorly understood; fear of majority populations
still hostile to colonial regulation; fear of being outnumbered and over-
whelmed. Those such as Ann Laura Stoler, who have gauged colonial
anxieties most carefully, begin from the proposition that these cultures
of violence mirrored changes in local economic conditions, in the avail-
ability of land and labour, or in the working practices of nascent colo-
nial industries.107
Each of these transformations impacted on colonial police. What
might be described as a standard model of white gazetted police officers
commanding small detachments of indigenous rank-and-file constables
was complicated by several factors. Some were unique to a particular
colony, their ethnic, religious and linguistic composition for example.
Others reflected the histories of localities and towns whose demography,
economic stratification and cultural reflexes could be vastly different
from other settlements nearby. The regional contrasts in Nigeria, north,
south, east and west; the multiple languages and ethnicities within the
Belgian Congo; or the incomparability of Peninsular Malaya next to
urban Singapore spring to mind as obvious examples here. Police per-
sonnel could be posted from one place to another within territories
governed under a single overarching administration. And that is to say
nothing about the countless transfers of colonial police officers further
afield, between colonies and continents.
Colonial police ‘expertise’, it seemed, was thought to be generic:

less a matter of acquiring intimate local knowledge than of learn-
ing the rules of a colonial game which, although played in different
ways and with different equipment in various places, was essentially
the same. In the British Empire, as in the French and the Belgian, it
remained an unspoken assumption that field experience in one colony
somehow equipped one for service in another.108 Much of this univer-
sal quality derived from the similarities in training practised within
individual empires. In the British Empire especially, we can take the
sporting metaphor a step further. A flagship institution here was the
new Ceylon colonial police training school set up by Inspector-general
Herbert Dowbiggin at Bambalapitiya in 1925. The 619 cadets to pass
through Bambalapitiya’s doors in 1927 received classroom education
in basic criminal law, evidence gathering and ‘problems of policing’.
Classroom studies were complemented outdoors by drill instruction,
weapons training and a large dose of team sports and boxing tourna-
ments. Dowbiggin’s aim was to inculcate the discipline, respect for trad-
ition and camaraderie of a public school environment with its cricket
pitches, sports days and prefects, plus a passing-out parade. Ceylonese
cadets were unlikely to leave their home island, but their officer train-
ers, Dowbiggin averred, could work the same magic anywhere in the
empire if the necessary facilities were made available.109
The success of the Bambalapitiya regime came under scrutiny when
serious rioting erupted following transport strikes in Ceylon’s cap-
ital, Colombo, in 1929 and again in 1930. On the first occasion, the
Colonial Office spurned Dowbiggin’s preferred solution of an outright
strike ban and compulsory labour arbitration in all industrial disputes.
Senior officials did acknowledge, however, that the police – vilified by
the strikers as defenders of a chronically low wage economy – behaved
well under intense provocation.110 Such had not always been the case.
As we’ll see in the next chapter, earlier failures of riot control in Ceylon
precipitated fundamental revisions to ‘minimum force’ methods whose
repercussions were felt for years afterwards.
Dowbiggin’s influence was evident elsewhere, before he made his
mark in the early 1930s by reorganizing intelligence gathering in the
Palestine Police.111 While still in Ceylon he supported Leo Amery’s
pressure on colonial administrations to send senior colonial police offi
cers to advanced training courses at New Scotland Yard.112 Dowbiggin
was also behind the idea, put forward in March 1927, to publish a Police
Journal to bridge the professional and cultural gaps between home
constabularies and their colonial equivalents.113 With articles on new
detection methods and topical items mixed with historical accounts of
famous investigations, the journal, much like Scotland Yard’s specialist

training curriculum, posited that British precepts of policing held uni-
versal validity.114
Some territories, admittedly, were considered more alike than others,
a fact mirrored in the larger flows of police personnel between them.
French policemen and gendarmes in the North African territories
rarely moved south of the Sahara, but several made the voyage east-
wards to the mandates of Syria and Lebanon.115 Personnel transfers
between the two largest French colonial federations – in West Africa
and Indochina – were more common, principally because the Ministry
of Colonies administered both places, not because of any deliberate
strategy of knowledge transfer between them. On the British side, the
Indian Police Service, a giant next to its British colonial counterparts,
remained a creature apart, although connections with related police
services in South Asia and Malaya remained strong (and, in Burma’s
case, subordinate until 1937). Within British black Africa, police offi
cers were more likely to transfer east or west, rather than north and
south. It is, in short, difficult and perhaps misleading to attempt any
definition of the ‘typical’ colonial policeman, their career trajectory,
or even their working day. This leaves the safer ground of long-term
trends, of observable patterns in police priorities and activity. The fol-
lowing chapters examine these processes in action, beginning with
changes in the policing of protest between the wars.
3 ‘Paying the butcher’s bill?’: Policing
British colonial protest after 1918
Inside the Colonial Office, its colonnaded facade soaked by London

drizzle on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Secretary of State for
the Colonies Walter Long signed off a letter circulated to the gover-
nors and high commissioners in the generally warmer climes of the
British Empire. Long’s despatch was about civil disorder, and how colo-
nial police forces might cope with it. It addressed the worst-case sce-
narios of colonial policing that were, it seemed, becoming alarmingly
commonplace.1 The Minister’s principal concern was not that colonial
administrations would respond with too much violence but, rather, that
they would dither, and apply too little, too late:
It is, I am sure, unnecessary that I should urge caution in having recourse to
the use of military force for the maintenance of civil order or urge forbearance
in dealing with riotous crowds by those in command of the forces so employed.
The natural reluctance of responsible persons to employ weapons of precision
against civilians may be relied upon to delay the adoption of military methods
of repression until the need is urgent. I believe it is rather in the opposite dir-
ection that a Governor may be inclined on occasion to err. I therefore think it
desirable to remind you that hesitation in invoking military aid when the need
for it is apparent, or in making due use of it when obtained, may in the end lead
to greater loss of life than would otherwise have occurred.2
As the guns fell silent in Europe, the scope for arbitrary arrest, col-
lective fines, detention without trial, or state-sanctioned violence
against even small gatherings of people in Europe’s empires was very
wide indeed.3 For their Colonial and War Office draughtsmen, how-
ever, two prerequisites – deterrence and economy – underpinned the
architecture of repressive legal powers that emerged over the win-
ter of 1918–19. The certainties facing colonial governments con-
fronted with disorder were these: there would be neither enough
locally available police or troops to go round, nor the money to pay
for more.4 In the British Empire especially, suppression of civil pro-
test reflected a prevailing ‘make do’ administrative culture steeped in
a Victorian ethos of self-reliant, self-financing colonial government,
64
‘Paying the butcher’s bill?’ 65
and reinforced by the swingeing expenditure cuts of the immediate

post-war years.5
Set against this prevailing concern for economy, two further points
bear emphasis. First was the broad agreement among security force
officers about the merits of coercion as pre-emption, a variant of the
minimum force ideal. Few questioned the calculation that coercive cap-
acity rapidly deployed, sustained colonial authority cheaply and effi-
ciently. Policemen, soldiers and, increasingly, military aircraft were the
key instruments in this strategy.6
This ‘repressive consensus’ rarely broke down in the British Empire
between the wars. Spectacular instances of such breakdown – as, for
example, over the Amritsar massacre in 1919 or quarrels over the
recruitment of Jewish police auxiliaries during the Arab rebellion in
Palestine after 1936 – were exceptions, not the rule. The second point
is that the expansion of colonial police powers should not be mistaken
for a consolidation of imperial rule. Protracted rebellions may have
remained rare, but numerous colonies in the early twentieth century
remained tense societies in which European hegemony was strongly
contested. Put simply, repressive policing was usually born of weakness,
not strength, and greater use of violence pointed to a crisis of authority
rather than its ultimate incontestability.
A new repressive consensus after the First World War?

During the war just ending, Britain’s empire, like its French counter-
part, had been convulsed by numerous rural uprisings, urban riots,
workplace protests and other forms of civil disobedience. Often, these
culminated in violent clashes with police and troops, what, in Charles
Tilly’s terms, would be described as ‘contentious action’.7 Some war-
time disturbances were even more serious. A mutiny by Indian infan-
trymen in Singapore on 15 February 1915 left fourteen Britons and
five Chinese and Malays dead, causing panic within the colony’s set-
tler community.8 The killing of three European planters in Nyasaland
during an uprising led by the preacher John Chilembwe in 1915 pro-
voked a fearsome reaction by security forces and settler vigilantes.
Scores of Chilembwe’s followers died in these first clashes before any
sort of judicial process began. As a result of this, a further thirty-six
men were executed, among them, their alleged ringleaders who were
publicly hanged.9 Among French colonies badly affected, Algeria and
much of French West Africa stood out. Reactions there were sharpest
to the recruitment drives of 1915 to 1917. At the height of the West
African disturbances from December 1915 to July 1916 French soldiers
and police destroyed over 200 villages along the Niger River valley in
punishment for dissent.10
With the obvious exception of Ireland’s Easter Rising, the worst dis-
order in the British Empire occurred on the island of Ceylon. During
May and June 1915 the colonial government in Colombo resorted to
martial law. It had lost political control in several provinces during an
effusion of inter-communal violence sparked by clashes between the
Sinhalese majority and Indian Muslim immigrant traders, known as
coastal Moors, during Buddhist religious processions whose routes
crossed local ethnic fault-lines.11 Troops were called out in the cen-
tral highlands and in the island’s south-western quadrant. Loyalist
irregulars were also recruited to help contain widespread unrest, the
socio-economic, religious and communal origins of which the author-
ities found impossible to disentangle.12 Ceylon’s political violence
was viewed paradoxically both at the time and by its early histori-
ans as a spontaneous anti-Muslim pogrom and a sign of emergent
anti-colonial sentiment. Recent interpretations point to the promin-
ent role played in the disturbances by Sinhalese-Buddhist national-
ists, who worked through sympathetic local agitators to orchestrate
the violence.13 Whatever the case, the bald statistics made grim read-
ing. At least forty Moors were killed and the numbers arrested ran
close to 9,000.14 The clampdown’s severity and its lack of selectivity
compounded the humiliation felt by British administrators in Ceylon,
India and Whitehall.15
The subsequent Colonial Office inquiry recognized that, in this
instance, using troops ‘in aid of the civil power’ went badly wrong.
Reference was made to the so-called Featherstone ‘massacre’ of
September 1893 in which two striking miners in the West Yorkshire
town of Featherstone were shot dead after the army was called in to
help police a protracted pithead lock-out.16 British governmental reluc-
tance to deploy troops alongside policemen during industrial disputes
and major public disturbances was also evident during the resurgence
of industrial unrest in Britain between 1909 and 1912.17 Soldiers were
brought onto the streets even so. Army units were called out against
striking miners in the Rhondda Valley coalfield in November 1910 and
the local chief constable was compelled to cede authority to the military
officer in charge.18 The presence of troops did not prevent pithead lock-
outs from deteriorating into rioting.19 More clashes followed during
further mineworkers’ and dockyard strikes in South Wales and London
during 1911. Soldiers escorting police vans carrying rioters arrested
during Liverpool’s bitter transport strike shot men dead during the
city’s largest mass demonstration on 13 August 1911.20
In the wake of this ‘great unrest’ the British government adopted

clearer standards and legal regulations regarding the containment of
violent civil protest.21 The question confronting Colonial Office offi-
cials a few years later was whether the Ceylon riots should serve as
pretext for a similar transformation in the British Empire. The answer
was yes. Sandwiched between violent worker protest in British India
before the war and the reappearance of urban food riots immediately
after it, the Ceylon disturbances left a lasting administrative legacy
in changes made at Walter Long’s behest to the policing of colonial
demonstrations.22
It fell to the Government of India and the India Office in London to
resolve the internal security dilemmas of the British Raj. But Ceylon
was a Colonial Office responsibility. Taking its cue from British India’s
longer, more varied experience of mass protest the Colonial Office strove
to ‘catch up’ with its sister imperial bureaucracy.23 The 1915 Defence of
India Act, justified at the time as a wartime expedient, arrogated emer-
gency powers to imperial security forces, including its armed police-
men. Sweeping legislative powers to suppress Indian political violence,
especially prevalent in Bengal and the Punjab, were further entrenched
by the Anarchical and Military Crimes Act of 1919. This legislation was
itself the product of a judicial review of peacetime emergency powers
conducted on the Government of India’s behalf by a committee headed
by British judge, S. A. T. Rowlatt.24 If India spurred some empire-wide
changes, others were prompted by the frictions in government arising
from the breakdown in Ireland, whose political violence sent shock-
waves reverberating through the British Isles.25
Charles Townshend brings out the fundamental clash of civil–mili-
tary cultures between politicians and generals in Britain and the empire
by focusing on the arguments and anomalies of martial law legisla-
tion as imposed in Ireland following the Easter Rising of April 1916.26
Where army officers wanted clarity regarding their right to use force
during a civil emergency, ministers in the Lloyd George coalition pre-
ferred ambiguity.27 Both positions were understandable. Soldiers feared
courts martial or worse if they transgressed the perilously imprecise
line between legitimate use of lethal force against sedition and the
murder of civilians. Decisions to fire on violent crowds, strikers or gun-
men might be pardoned by a retrospective Act of Indemnity, but, then
again, they might not. Army commanders faced cross-examination,
damage to reputation, even dismissal and imprisonment if suspected
of employing excessive violence. For their part, Westminster politi-
cians across the political spectrum valued the threat implicit in martial
law over its application. Enacting martial law signified the failure of
politics. To impose it was to acknowledge the incapacity of the state,

the police and the judiciary to function as before.28 Unwilling to admit
that the ‘normal resources of the civil administration’ were exhausted,
as Townshend records: ‘the government wished to keep the army in its
traditional, low-profile role of supplying aid to the civil power’.29
It was a forlorn hope. Governmental determination to conserve the
appearance of normality became untenable as Ireland’s political vio-
lence intensified.30 Senior politicians, army officers and trained civil
servants were soon wrestling with the difficulties of policing Ireland in
the short term while preparing for partition and withdrawal.31 In these
fast-moving and increasingly chaotic circumstances, rare were the offi-
cials who grasped the theoretical and practical differences between the
key legislative instruments designed to prevent sedition or violent pro-
test. Few were certain about the lines separating martial law as applied
in war-torn Ireland from the Defence of the Realm Act passed on the
outbreak of war in August 1914. Most referred to another precedent
entirely – the procedures of the long-established Riot Act with its more
limited recourse to troop call-outs to combat civil or industrial strife.32
Only in January 1934 did the Army Council issue regular army offic-
ers stationed in imperial territory with a digestible fifty-page booklet
definitively explaining their distinct responsibilities to assist police
in ‘normal circumstances’, under martial law, and ‘in aid to the civil
power’.33 In the same year, the Colonial Office commissioned a simi-
lar, pocket-sized instruction book, The Powers, Training and Handling of
Civil Police in Times of Internal Disorder, designed to be carried by colo-
nial police officers on duty. But when the booklet was finally completed
two years later in July 1936, it lived up to its cumbersome title and
was immediately rejected. Seasoned police officers complained that it
was too big, too complicated and substantially irrelevant.34 A specially
appointed inter-departmental committee was sent back to the draw-
ing board in an effort to translate complex legal procedure into simple,
sequential instructions on how to cope with public disorder.35
As if these abstract considerations were not taxing enough, anxiety
in Whitehall about the behaviour of the large numbers of ex-service-
men being recruited to colonial police forces was intensified by the
prominent part played by former soldiers in race riots, political dem-
onstrations and street violence in mainland Britain in the first two
years after the Armistice.36 The brutality of British paramilitary aux-
iliaries in Ireland underlined the political damage that could be done
locally and internationally by such groups.37 At the opposing end of the
political spectrum, thousands of demobilized service personnel joined
the fast expanding ranks of Britain’s trade unions, whose membership
peaked at 8,348,000 in 1920, double the 1914 figure. There seemed to

be nightmarish potential for political violence and industrial strife in
the decade ahead to eclipse their pre-war antecedents in scale, breadth
and revolutionary intent.38
A brutalized generation of young men inured to lethal violence and
alienated from civilian life by their dreadful war experiences might
destabilize imperial Britain.39 For some commentators, it was only a
matter of time.40 In these circumstances, sharp divergences between
the views of soldiers, politicians and bureaucrats were readily com-
prehensible. But the gulf between them caused lasting confusion and
hastened the erosion of civil liberties during the Anglo-Irish War of
1919–21.41 Charles Townshend’s verdict is damning:
What became clear in the end was that a modern liberal-democratic state
required an emergency mechanism more sophisticated than martial law to
cope with domestic crises. A workable system required formal codification of
emergency powers; to go from the ordinary law to the arbitrary ‘will of the gen-
eral,’ shielded retrospectively by an Act of Indemnity, was a move too jarring
to be feasible. In practice, a civil-military power struggle developed, reducing
the soldiers to bafflement and anger and preventing the pursuit of any coherent
‘governing’ policy … To the last, the civil authorities showed no sign of being
able to find a modus operandi or modus vivendi with the military.42
Institutional learning? Force composition

and past precedents
The previous chapter pointed to continuing debate over the ‘Irishness’
or otherwise of Britain’s colonial police cultures, and the point is worth
dwelling on in light of the Anglo-Irish War experience.43 Sir Charles
Tegart was one of several Irishmen to ascend the ranks of British gov-
ernment service in the empire. He was the quintessential model of a
colonial police innovator having spearheaded the Indian government’s
suppression of Bengali revolutionary violence in the aftermath of the
territory’s 1905 partition. Tegart would enjoy an illustrious inter-war
career capped by his reorganization of the Palestine police during the
Arab Revolt on the eve of the Second World War. And his actions and
ideas pepper the history of British colonial policing between the wars.44
Albeit an exceptional figure, Tegart’s experience exemplified a wider
phenomenon. Much as the Indian Civil Service and Indian Army cad-
res contained disproportionately high numbers of Irish personnel, so,
too, did the Indian police and Britain’s imperial police forces more
generally.45 London’s metropolitan police was another organization
with strong Irish ties.46 General Sir Cecil Freedrick (Nevil) Macready,
appointed ‘Met’ commissioner in 1918, arrived in London with a

wealth of African colonial military experience and a pre-war posting as
General Officer Commanding in Belfast at the height of Ulster loyalist
gun-r unning.47 Unlike Tegart, however, Macready opted to return to
Ireland as Britain’s last military commander.48 The Anglo-Irish War and
the consequent need to reassign hundreds of Royal Irish Constabulary
officers left compromised and under threat because of their actions in
the conflict ensured that the Irish flavour to British colonial policing
would be strongest in the inter-war period.49 Here again Macready
personified the shift, overseeing the withdrawal of RIC units from the
twenty-six counties during the spring of 1922.50
Yet one should not take the image of doughty British pragmatism,
Irish-tinged and informed by precedent rather than theoretical insight,
too far. The emergence in late nineteenth-century France of several
related disciplines in social science rippled across the English Channel
precisely because the ideas that informed them appeared generically
applicable to industrial societies. These new approaches had a bearing
on how protest was conceptualized throughout Europe in the century
ahead. Criminal anthropology, Durkheimian sociology and perhaps the
most widely read about at the time, crowd psychology, stirred vigorous
debate after the 1895 publication of Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des
foules, a book soon translated into English as The Crowd.51
In France the popularity of crowd psychology among bureaucrats,
policemen and politicians of the right reflected a widely held belief that
the greatest menace to propertied society was the irrational, irrepressible
proletarian mob, which allegedly coalesced during industrial disputes
and strike actions.52 Crowd theory meanwhile acquired its academic
veneer thanks to the writings of social scientists such as Scipio Sighele,
Henry Fournial, Gabriel Tarde and, above all, Le Bon himself.53 Their
associations between criminality and crowd behaviour, between col-
lective psychology and urban disorder, would influence lawmakers and
law-enforcers for decades to come. Scipio Sighele’s most famous work,
The Criminal Crowd, published in 1891, made these linkages explicit,
but it was Gabriel Tarde, in his Études pénales et sociales of 1892 that
singled out striking industrial workers and ideologically driven mem-
bers of political groups or religious sects as the most dangerous of pro-
testers.54 Refracting the work of these crowd theorists, Louis Lépine,
Prefect of Police in turn-of-the-century Paris, paid close attention to
collective assemblies – whether spontaneous or pre-planned – as the
foremost internal threat to state security and law-abiding bourgeois
society. Lépine returned to this theme in his memoirs, published on the
eve of the Great Depression in 1929. Again reflecting the crowd theory
first popularized in the feverish political atmosphere of the 1890s, he

dwelt on the terrifying spectre of the enraged proletarian mass hell-bent
on social revolution.55
It is impossible to say how many colonial police officers, French or
British, had heard of Scipio Sighele or Gabriel Tarde, still less how
many had read their work. But it seems a reasonable supposition that
most politicians with security responsibilities in Paris and London had
some acquaintance with Gustave Le Bon’s ideas, as well as more than
a passing interest in Louis Lépine. Even those who had never encoun-
tered their writings directly were bound to do so indirectly when read-
ing the police manuals and colonial government instructions that dealt
with police responses to protest and crowd violence. British experts in
colonial policing may never have read up on crowd theory in the manner
that, almost forty years later, French psychological warfare officers in
the Algerian War consumed Serge Chakhotine’s ideas on mass persua-
sion and propaganda.56 What is certain is that British officials between
the wars were increasingly preoccupied by violent industrial protest and
the dangers of uncontrolled crowds at home and in the empire.57 Thus
we return to Walter Long.
Using the dry phraseology of his legal adviser, the Colonial Secretary
explained the problem,
Experience in many parts of the Empire has proved that it is difficult, if not
impossible, for the responsible authorities at a time of crisis to draw up, on
the spur of the moment, instructions to those engaged in repressing disorder
which shall be precise, adequate, and clear enough to guide persons without
legal training and perhaps without practice in the exercise of public authority.
The questions involved are difficult, and there is no time to study them, or to
consider and provide against all the possibilities of misunderstanding inherent
in conveying legal principles to those who must necessarily, in the majority of
cases, be unprepared by previous training to grasp them. Uncertainty as to
their powers and duties may lead such persons either to take refuge in inaction
or, from excess of zeal, to adopt measures which cannot be justified. Either
course may have deplorable results.58
Simply put, neither colonial governments nor their policemen knew

what to do when confronted with mass protest. Some reacted too
slowly, others too quickly; some with insufficient shows of strength,
others with excessive brutality. But what was ‘proportionate’ state vio-
lence and when should it be used? Here, again, answers turned on what
constituted a crowd or, more exactly, a threatening one. It was this that
Long wanted his subordinate governors to clarify.59
The Minister’s invitation to individual colonial governments to
explain the circumstances in which police or military units were
authorized to fire on groups of unarmed protesters masked the fact

that Colonial Office officials, along with their War Office colleagues,
had already drawn up revised guidelines on using lethal force against
demonstrators as part of the official inquiry into the Ceylon disorders.60
These were now to be rolled out across the empire, within Long’s con-
sultation process, his stock-taking of colonial policing in the immedi-
ate post-war months. The exercise was certainly timely. Many of the
empire’s key political spaces were especially unruly.61 Ireland, India,
Egypt and Iraq, to name only the most obvious examples, manifested
everything across the spectrum of internal disorder from civil war to
army massacre, urban revolution to ethno-religious uprising.62 Police
struggled to cope with inter-communal violence in other new domains.
Two days of blood-letting between Arabs and Jews rocked Jerusalem’s
old city in April 1920 before Britain’s mandate over Palestine was even
confirmed.63 More extensive clashes in Jaffa and Ramleh in May 1921
left forty-eight Arabs and forty-seven Jews dead.64 More shocking still,
South Africa would see state suppression of industrial unrest trans-
formed into government-endorsed race killing by settler vigilantes
during the Rand miners’ strikes of 1922.65
But in November 1918 and for the next twenty years, the Colonial
Office’s principal concern in matters of empire policing was more mun-
dane: how to maintain the apparatus of colonial authority without call-
ing on military power to uphold it. As this problem implied, the answer
hinged on colonial police forces, their composition and training, their
deployment and actions. Behind this challenge lurked fundamental
questions of state legitimacy, or the ‘right to rule’ of imperial nations
that would soon be tested in new ways by the League of Nations and
its mandate system. If, as the European imperial powers insisted, their
colonial authority conferred a monopoly on the use of force to uphold
internal order, then the forms and scale of such violence required
tighter regulation in an era when domestic threats to empire and inter-
national scrutiny of imperial security measures was set to increase.66
Consistency was vital if, as was likely, colonial authorities killed dem-
onstrators in the name of good government.
Viewed in a certain light, writing new rules for the containment of
political violence by the use of lethal firepower (itself, state-sanctioned
political violence) was even a progressive step. So was engaging on-the-
spot officials, if not colonial peoples, in the process. The Colonial Office
certainly thought so. Regulations about police riot control, about troop
call-outs ‘in aid of the civil’ administration, and about when and if to
declare martial law had been similarly codified in Britain during the
nineteenth century.67 It was time that colonial governments followed
suit. Their replies to Walter Long’s circular highlighted alarming

disparities in practice between territories. Some colonial governments
cited dubious precedents – the Duke of Wellington’s reflections on cav-
alry sabre charges in Britain’s industrial cities or the bloody suppres-
sion of Jamaica’s Morant Bay rebellion in 1865 – to justify sanguinary
crowd control.68 And Long himself consulted the 1866 inquiry report
into the Morant Bay uprising, which condemned the Kingston author-
ities for throwing away ‘the advantage of the terror which the very name
of martial law is calculated to create in a population such as that which
exists in this Island’.69
Talk of terror, of cutting down protesters with bullets and bayonets,
jarred with the emergent post-war mantra of ‘minimum force’ policing.
Ever since a 1907 inquiry into the use of buckshot to break up prison
riots in Trinidad, the Governors of the West Indies remained divided
over the permissible extent of police ‘free firing’ without prior author-
ization.70 Where volleys were clearly ordered by superior officers and
targeted at identified ‘ringleaders’ use of firearms was commended.
Such was the case, for example, during rioting in Jamaica’s port of
Montego Bay on 5 April 1902 in which the city Court House came
under attack. Inspector H. T. Thomas, the police officer in charge,
deployed a party of constables who fired twenty-five shots at the pro-
test leaders. He was later praised for his decisive action in the official
investigation of the day’s events.71 Elsewhere, the Governors conceded,
more random police shootings remained a recurrent feature of civil dis-
order in the British-ruled Caribbean, something they ascribed to the
natural excitability of ‘Negro policemen’ and the excessive generosity
of white officers in supplying their men with ammunition.72 The crass
dismissal of random killing as a form of local exuberance, albeit dat-
ing from ten years earlier, showed that Long’s vision of orderly protest
policing demanded basic attitudinal change among some colonial offi-
cials matched by different police practices in the empire’s city streets,
prison yards and cane fields.
In the absence of freedoms of association or of assembly, let alone of
democratic representation, Africans, Asians and West Indians living
under the British flag were liable to be treated as seditious whenever
they gathered in even small groups (smaller than a football team or a
wedding party, for example). They were considered threatening if they
reacted too slowly to official instructions to disperse. If they ignored
those instructions entirely, consequences were commensurately worse.
Take the so-called ‘Hosein riots’ of 1884, the gravest incident of police
violence against Indian indentured labourers in British-ruled Trinidad
before the First World War. In this case, the labourers’ fateful decision
to defy an official ban on public processions led to clashes with police

during the Shiite religious festival of Muhurrum, or Hosein. The out-
come was the killing of twenty-two labourers and the wounding of hun-
dreds more.73
Trinidad’s Hosein riots raise another issue: the role of employers. Their
claims that the actions of ‘rioters’, strikers or, as in this case, festival cel-
ebrants, were prejudicial to productivity, a menace to crops, livestock or
commercial property, increased the probability of police intervention.
Local authorities usually instructed police to treat such demonstrations
as the equivalent of political disorder, particularly if those employers hap-
pened to be European. For instance, the Indian Tea Association, which
represented British planters, worked in conjunction with police repre-
sentatives in the Assam and Bengal Legislative Assemblies to ensure a
common approach to any labour unrest on their garden estates.74 As we
shall see in later chapters, French rubber producers in Indochina, Dutch
planters in Sumatra, and Belgian timber producers in the Congo
lobbied in similar fashion, although not always with success.
British India, in the early twentieth century still the largest colonial
agglomeration of them all, exposed the hollowness of minimum force
precepts. As Prashant Kidambi notes in his study of policing in pre-
First World War Bombay, studies of the colonial police in India stress its
relative weakness as an instrument of social control, highlighting fund-
ing shortages, limited social reach and de facto reliance on local elites
and compliant auxiliaries to supervise the rural poor and the emer-
ging urban working class.75 Ranajit Guha, for instance, suggests that
British reliance on force to subjugate an Indian population denied pol-
itical opportunity to express its demands undermined Britain’s claims
to hegemony.76 Purnima Bose goes further in her analysis of British par-
liamentary censure of General Reginald Dyer for ordering Gurkha and
Baluchi troops to gun down hundreds of civilian protesters at Amritsar
on 13 April 1919. According to Bose, it was the absence of hegemonic
security force control that inclined ‘rogue’ officers to extreme acts of
exemplary violence of which the Amritsar massacre was just the most
egregious inter-war example.77 Framed differently, heightened colonial
coercion derived from a lack of authority, not from the capacity of a
powerful state to act without restraint.78 General Dyer conceived his
mission in Amritsar not as the restoration of civil authority but as a
wartime operation against a hostile population. For Dyer, ‘Amritsar
was enemy territory.’79 After the massacre his supporters maintained
that Dyer’s actions had literally turned back a rising tide of aggressive
Indian humanity. The image of a torrent of undifferentiated, innately
violent colonial subjects only dissuaded from rebellion by death or the
fear of it recurred time and again in the turbulent years after 1918.80
The bitter irony was that the appalling events at Amritsar’s Jallianwalla
Bagh galvanized Gandhi’s adoption of non-violent resistance, evidence
of a uniquely Indian strategy of anti-colonial protest that would ultim-
ately bring down the Raj.81
Coercive policing, then, was a powerful indicator of the colonial
state’s limited reach. Interpretations equating state violence with state
weakness have enhanced our understanding of the colonial police in
India, not as a powerful monolith, but as a complex and dynamic social
organization whose local networks of influence enabled it to function
in increasingly testing circumstances. By extension, the absence or col-
lapse of these circuits could lead to a rapid loss of control, often with
appalling consequences. Yet, as Kidambi concedes, some revisionist
accounts go too far, overstating the weaknesses of the colonial police
and the extent to which it became ‘imprisoned’ within urban networks
of power.82 Perhaps the most salient point to emerge in his study relates
to the intimate working relationships between the major employers in
Bombay’s textile industry and local police commanders. Strikes and
other workplace disputes over pay and conditions in the textile sector,
as well as police efforts to regulate the casual ‘economy of the street’ in
which numerous poor economic migrants scratched out a living, trig-
gered more sustained working-class protest in the city’s poorest quarters
than the better known outbreaks of plague and inter-communal clashes
between Hindu and Muslim. These last events occasioned greater col-
lective violence and notorious instances of lethal police intervention to
curb urban rioting. But they were not the stuff of everyday policing.
Put differently, while historians have been drawn to outbreaks of
urban disorder in Bombay that required high-profile police interven-
tion, notably in 1893 and 1898, the more workaday activity of Bombay’s
police centred on the workplace, whether it concerned the informal
economy of street-trading or the expanding numbers of rural labour-
ers that migrated to work in the city’s textile mills. It was here that
co-operation between police, employers and local auxiliaries was most
apparent. Heightened police interventionism, typified by the additional
patrolling enshrined in the 1902 City Police Act, maintained public
order through closer surveillance of Bombay’s highly mobile, densely
packed labour force, whether at the factory gates or on the streets.83
Policing public space: ‘paying the butcher’s bill’

Returning to Walter Long’s 1919 inquiry, what did the Colonial Office
recommend police officers should do when confronted with dangerous
protest? First, that once due warnings were given, it was preferable to
make early, accurate use of lethal force to disperse a crowd. Delaying
the order to fire or shooting ineffectually either over protesters’ heads
or at their legs (as occurred in the 1915 Ceylon disturbances) antago-
nized demonstrators without terrorizing them. This risked greater loss
of life at a later stage. Second, that this shoot to kill instruction should
target ‘ringleaders’ wherever feasible.84 Finally, that shooting as exe-
cution (presumably after capture), as opposed to shooting to prevent
the escalation of unrest, remained illegal and, therefore, impermis-
sible.85 Whatever the practical difficulties of discerning and maintain-
ing such distinctions, colonial administrators presumed that this could
be done.
So did colonial employers. With the professionalization of colonial
forces tied to more effective protest policing, we should not be surprised
at the apparent ease with which some colonial forces served the needs
of business between the wars. Colonies’ Legislative Councils contained
strong business and settler representation. And workplaces, industrial
or agricultural, were the commonest locations for collective protests,
whether spontaneous stoppages, longer-term strikes or other demon-
strations. As we saw in the case of Assam’s influential tea planters, some
police forces had worked hand-in-glove with business communities for
years.86 International settlements in colonial, or quasi-colonial, port
cities were another discrete location where the demands of commerce
and policing intersected. As in the case of British India, Colonial Office
staff took an interest in the peculiarities of policing in Shanghai even
though, as an international settlement run by a municipal council, the
city lay outside Colonial Office jurisdiction. From its inception in 1854
the Shanghai Municipal Police force (SMP) defended the privileges of
the treaty port’s British residents, upholding the barriers – political,
commercial, racial and social – between British ‘Shanghailanders’ and
their ‘foreign’ neighbours, whether European or Chinese. So vociferous
and, on occasion, so violent was their policing of these exclusions and
the protests they provoked that the ramifications could be global.87 The
SMP’s suppression of riots in Shanghai on 13 May 1925, which left
eleven Chinese dead, even marked a watershed in the development of
the Chinese nationalist movement.88
Few lessons were learned, despite these massive adverse conse-
quences. Ambassador Sir Miles Lampson in Peking pressed for a recon-
sideration of policing in Shanghai’s international settlements but the
city’s colonial police culture survived.89 Indeed, the SMP’s treatment
of anti-imperialist demonstrations, not just as illegal gatherings, but as
a form of urban crime was replicated by other British colonial police
units deployed to contain civil unrest.90 Witness the worst clashes of the
1920s between the Straits Settlements police and Chinese demonstra-
tors in Singapore. These occurred on 12 March 1927 during a march
commemorating the second anniversary of the death of Kuomintang-
founder and nationalist patriot, Sun Yat Sen. The previous year’s com-
memorations had passed off peacefully, so the police scaled back the
number of officers deployed twelve months later. Yet the authorities’
intolerance of open support for the Kuomintang (KMT) had hardened
in between times. This was largely because of the Chinese national-
ist party’s adoption of a strident pro-leftist position after the Shanghai
riots in May 1925 in which the municipal police played so pivotal a
role.91 The tenor of relations between the Straits Settlements police and
Singapore’s Chinese community also changed decisively once word
spread about the events in Shanghai.92 Police raids on KMT offices,
Chinese night schools and meeting houses increased in frequency, and
young members of the Chinese Hailam community (with ties to Hainan
Island, China’s southern-most province) were targeted as a troublesome
source of seditious, anti-western propaganda.93
Singapore’s 1927 march turned ugly after marchers surrounded a
police station at South Bridge Road in Kreta Ayer. This was a pre-
dominantly Chinese district of the city, known for relatively high levels
of Triad-related crime. Kreta Ayer’s local constables, like those of the
entire Straits Settlements force, were a mixture of Malays, Sikhs and
Punjabi Pashtuns. As Singapore’s Attorney-General noted with stud-
ied under-statement during the inquest into what followed, ‘unlike the
police at home, the local police are not the friends of the people, from
the Chinese point of view’.94 Architecture proved almost as important
as ethnicity. The Kreta Ayer police building had multiple entrances,
making it susceptible to being ‘rushed’ by a hostile crowd. Fearing this
eventuality, the station’s British police commander, Chief Officer Dale,
went outside in a bid to mollify those gathering outside. Moments later
he was kicked to the ground. Barely conscious, he left his men without
instruction once they dragged him back inside. Four Malay constables
received similar beatings soon afterwards. Shooting began when pro-
testers tried to storm the station.95 The police fired twenty-nine rounds,
killing five Hailam demonstrators and two passers-by, one Indian, the
other Chinese.96
Was this a replay of the events in Shanghai two years earlier?
Singapore’s senior police officers and legal officials thought not. Their
reasoning was simple. Violence of the sort witnessed at Kreta Ayer was
a foreign import, uncharacteristic of the city’s well-established and law-
abiding Chinese commercial community. Those responsible were more
recent immigrants, mainly casual labourers and Hailam students. The

Hailam especially were singled out as irredeemably alien; young hot-
heads who brought the contagion of China’s anarchy and communist
anti-colonialism with them. Armed by the city’s criminal gangs, these
revolutionary agitators, though small in number and peripheral to
‘true’ Malayan politics, were a menace to colonial security. Vulnerable
and exposed, Kreta Ayer’s policemen were simply in the wrong place
at the wrong time.97 Singapore’s newly-arrived Governor Sir Hugh
Clifford praised the besieged constables for their restraint, not least as
their commander and several colleagues already lay wounded before
shots were fired.98 There was less certainty about the Singapore clashes
back in London. Labour Party calls for a full inquiry compelled the
Colonial Office to conduct yet another review of police crowd-control
measures. Unlike Sir Hugh, some dissentient voices did criticize the
police; not, though, for firing too much; rather, for not using volley fire
immediately. The shooting forced the marchers to pull back from the
station, so the policemen’s only error was to fire ineffective warning
shots beforehand.99 One unnamed official didn’t mince words: ‘firing
in the air is mistaken leniency. In the end it increases the “butcher’s
bill”’.100
New decade, same priorities? Protest policing

in the 1930s
As the scope of public order policing widened to include everything
from suppression of dissent and workplace protest to tax collection
and the enforcement of public health codes, the potential for collective
antagonism to police intervention grew. Results could be spectacular.
In October 1931 police in Nicosia were overwhelmed by Cypriot
protesters demanding union with Greece. Once the police lines were
broken, the crowd vented its anger against British rule by burning
down the Governor’s residence.101 Rioting continued in Cypriot towns
for several more days until troops flown in from Egypt, their heavy
equipment brought by sea, restored order. Security force difficulties
were compounded by Cypriot outrage at the arrest of five ‘ringleaders’,
including two former members of the island’s Legislative Council and
the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Kitium.102 Targeting protest organizers
was consistent with evolving police practice, but there were red faces in
the Colonial Office when the five were deported for inciting violence
under the terms of a ‘Defence Order in Council’ hastily invoked by
Governor Sir Ronald Storrs. This chimed with other arbitrary deci-
sions by the homeless Governor, including abolition of the island’s
bothersome Legislative Council, whose Greek members persisted in

calling for Enosis.103 Police inability to contain a riot had turned into a
major political emergency.104 The rapid escalation of the Cyprus crisis
after the police first lost control had repercussions for British colonial
policing far beyond the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Nicosia disorders in October 1931 made plain that colonial gov-
ernments needed better legislative instruments to assist their police
commanders.105 Simple things mattered. It was crucial that police be
authorized to requisition vehicles to help them deploy quickly. Officers
also needed to know that a blanket ban on public protest could be
imposed without delay.106 The resultant ‘Peace and Good Order Bill’
promulgated in Cyprus might have become a model for colonies else-
where had its provisions not been superseded by the more Draconian
legislation introduced soon afterwards in Palestine to contend with the
developing Arab revolt.107
Meanwhile, on 7 February 1936, the very day that the Cyprus legis-
lation proposals reached the Colonial Office, an assistant district offi-
cer (ADI) and an Indian police inspector died in confrontations with
Manga Arabs in the Malindi quarter of Zanzibar. Trouble started at the
offices of the city’s agricultural department where a group of merchants
accused food inspectors of discrimination in their random checks for
sub-standard copra, a staple crop traded by Zanzibar’s Manga commu-
nity. The inspection regime had been introduced two years earlier. It
was enforced with police assistance, partly because it adversely affected
those copra sellers, like the Manga, who relied on newly purchased local
produce to sell at market. Richer plantation owners and copra shippers
could afford to leave their produce to ripen in commercial drying sheds,
escaping the inspectors’ gaze. To the Manga, whose relations with beat
policemen were already strained by accusations of unlicensed trading,
the agricultural department and the police had a hidden agenda: to
drive them out of business and out of Malindi. These arguments were
rehearsed during angry exchanges in a produce inspector’s office as
sellers began gathering on the morning of 7 February. Punches were
thrown. Distinctive curved Arabian daggers appeared from beneath
traders’ robes. Scuffling spilled outside where the ADI was fatally
stabbed. His assailants then attacked the nearby police station at
Darajani. It was here that the police inspector died, mobbed by furious
traders and knifed. At this point the remaining policemen fired into the
crowd, killing four. An exemplary police riposte: no warning shots, and
instant dispersal of the crowd. The subsequent inquiry report praised
Zanzibar’s police for learning the lessons of efficient – and lethal – riot
control.108 The fact remained that two colonial officials had lost their
lives trying to pacify demonstrators. Why? Because of a specific eco-

nomic grievance against the administration and the police.
It was a long road from communism to copra. Shanghai, 1925;
Singapore, 1927; Cyprus, 1931; and Zanzibar, 1936: each incident had
specific local catalysts and distinct patterns of escalation. But their
obvious common feature was the targeting of policemen by protest-
ers.109 Faced with such diverse threats, colonial police forces found some
unlikely champions in imperial government. One such occasion was in
early December 1935, at the height of Italy’s war in Ethiopia, when the
newly appointed Colonial Secretary, Jimmy Thomas, pleaded on behalf
of Britain’s colonial policemen to his Cabinet colleagues. A former leader
of the National Union of Railwaymen, Thomas was, at first glance, no
friend of police interests. But, by 1935, as a National Labourite and
former Dominions Secretary, he was a strong proponent of Britain’s
imperial connections. Colonial police forces, he insisted, needed sup-
plies of tear gas. Taking his cue from the Palestine High Commission,
which, two years earlier, successfully persuaded Ramsay MacDonald’s
government to permit the use of tear gas to disperse illegal assemblies,
Thomas pointed to other colonies where launching canisters might
have saved lives.110 He cited civil disturbances in Ceylon, Northern
Rhodesia and, above all, Jamaica, as instances in which colonial police
were compelled to fire on rioters for want of any other means to scatter
a crowd. Tear gas, he assured them, was successfully used in Palestine
to deal with ‘banditry’ (quite how was left to ministers’ imagination)
and to arrest dangerous suspects hiding in buildings. Since November
1934 French gendarmes were also authorized to use tear gas as well as
converted fire engines that sprayed high-pressure water jets to break up
demonstrations in France and North Africa. Tear gas offered a modern,
humanitarian alternative to policemen’s bullets.111
Thomas’ concerns brought other problems to light. For one thing,
it was clear that Cabinet members had no sense of the frequency with
which colonial police forces killed people during riots, strikes and prison
disturbances. For another, while tear gas might lessen the requirement
to fire live rounds at protesters, there was no question of curbing the
powers of colonial police to use rifle fire when necessary. The min-
isterial discussion also threw into sharper relief something of which
only Whitehall officials and colonial administrators were previously
aware: the question of how colonial police should respond to public
disorder. The subject of endless discussion in the inter-war years, it was
the main Colonial Office concern in relation to police affairs after the
First World War. The beginning of a Palestinian general strike in April
1936, followed by the outbreak of rebellion over the summer, lent still
greater urgency to familiar arguments about police militarization, the

reliability of locally raised cadres, insufficient police intelligence and
the imposition of martial law.112
Policing prisoners
The availability of tear gas, already used by British security forces in
Palestine, but uncommon elsewhere, pointed to the exceptional diffi-
culties of policing the mandate.113 The departure from ‘minimum force’
solutions that resulted was evident in the scale of political violence,
including reprisal killings and high levels of security force brutality.114
But the village round-ups and mass arrests of Palestinian suspects after
1936 pointed to another, more generic phenomenon: colonial prisoners
were part of the business of protest policing.115 Discrete political econ-
omies of colonial prisons are also discernible, whether one looks within
the prison walls or outside to the surrounding community. And doc-
trines of segregation, difference and selective punishment were clearest
of all in colonial prison systems.116 Inside the prison, inmates might be
treated differently according to their ethnic or religious background,
their social status or simple ability to pay off local warders. These hier-
archies were complicated by the presence in colonial jails of what would
now be categorized as ‘political prisoners’: those imprisoned for anti-
governmental acts or statements or, more broadly, because the author-
ities identified them as a threat.117
Both highly politicized – and politicizing – colonial prisons were
unique sites for particular forms of protest. Many acquired reputations
less as places of rigid disciplinary control than as hot-house training
grounds for opponents of European rule.118 Few colonies maintained
separate facilities for political opponents or insurgents, meaning that
those detained for anti-colonial activity were often held within the same
jails as ‘regular’ criminals. In French Indochina, home to more polit-
ical prisoners than any other French colonial territory in the 1930s,
the authorities found the administrative implications of locking up
thousands of political opponents impossible to manage. With prison
spending curtailed as part of the budgetary cuts enacted in the early
depression years, basic improvements in living conditions, hygiene and
dietary provision took second place to administrative efforts to segre-
gate political prisoners from their fellow inmates.119 Efforts to choke
off the low-level political violence characteristic of the immediate pre-
war years focused on sentencing rank-and-file activists to short prison
terms for membership of illegal groups or participation in banned pol-
itical activity while gagging more senior political figures on grounds of
national security. By 1939 the list of colonial politicians and senior cler-
ics confined to house arrest, exiled to remote colonial territory or forced
into foreign exile was both extensive and cosmopolitan.120 As David
Marr puts it, referring to inter-war Vietnam’s political prisoners:
No experience more defined the nature of Vietnamese revolutionary leadership

than prolonged detention in colonial prisons. Jails were to the Vietnamese what
the Long March was to the Chinese. They were seen both as microcosms of
colonial society and universities of revolutionary theory and practice. It was as
if the French had purposefully designed laboratories to test their Vietnamese
enemies’ will to struggle.121
Prison abuses, prison costs and prisoner politicization: these were the
catalysts to changes in police involvement in the operation of colonial
prisons between the wars. The pace of change accelerated as the imperial
powers emerged from the depression. Interest in the reformatory aspects
of incarceration, even its ‘civilizing potential’ as a point of sustained
contact between indigenous recidivist and European mentor, ebbed and
flowed in conformity with more prosaic considerations of available fund-
ing. Most colonial governments faced pressure to reduce prison costs
whether through personnel cuts or administrative ‘rationalization’. The
latter term connoted one of two things: the amalgamation of existing
prison facilities or an end to duplication between those prisons directly
run by colonial government and those by native administrations.
Addressing the supply side of the equation by reducing sentences,
using fines or community punishments and looking to offender rehabili-
tation, came into vogue in the British and French empires during the
1930s. But it did little to bring down colonial prison populations. The
criminalization of political activity was, if anything, extended, rather
than reduced meanwhile. In British-ruled Burma, where rates of incar-
ceration were exceptionally high, the prison population increased from
around 12,500 in 1900 to 18,000 in 1940. The colony’s two central
jails at Rangoon and Insein each held over 2,000 inmates, many of
them imprisoned for minor theft or vagrancy.122 Three features of the
policing of colonial prisons are thus immediately striking: the func-
tional connection between available funds and the extent of material
change; the widespread recognition that colonial prisons were failing
as reformatory institutions; and the countervailing truth that prison
populations kept expanding.
Individual administrations were not deaf to the problems in their
prisons. Yet few rectified them. Sometimes it took an alarmed letter
from the Colonial Office to remind imperial administrators how shock-
ingly outmoded their prison regimes had become. Scrutinizing the Gold
Coast prison service annual report for 1931, West Africa Department
officials discovered that warders still used ‘shot drill’ to discipline recal-
citrant prisoners. Inmates were made to carry cannonballs back and
forth across a prison yard, a form of punishment labour abolished in
Britain in the 1860s.123 Aspects of prison culture that seemed outra-
geous to Whitehall observers passed unnoticed to the seasoned men on
the spot. Preoccupied by prison running costs and the need to silence
dangerous opponents, few colonial governments devoted much time
to the devastating social consequences of incarcerating people whose
‘crimes’ were trivial or subjective.
Police officers had a unique perspective on the shortcomings of colo-
nial legal regimes. It was the declared policy of the Colonial Office to
encourage a formal separation between colonial police forces and the
local prison service but implementation was left to individual govern-
ments. In smaller territories, such as the islands of the British West
Indies, separation never occurred before 1940. In December 1936 the
Colonial Office recommended tighter scrutiny of annual perform-
ance to encourage professionalization in prison services.124 But mater-
ial changes were slow in coming.125 Demarcating police officers who
detected, arrested and helped convict criminals from prison person-
nel who guarded, monitored and retrained prisoners made sense on
paper. In practice, however, police often worked as guards, not least
because, in remote postings, police cells doubled up as de facto pris-
ons.126 Moreover, as will become apparent in later chapters, in some
prisons support for rehabilitation was non-existent.
In Nigeria, for instance, wholesale reform of the prison system was
first mooted in 1926 alongside proposals – later rejected – to com-
bine provincial police forces. Cost, not reform, was the main driver
but, despite damning findings from the UK Inspector-general of
Prisons, ten years passed before radical changes were floated once
more. This time the reforms were endorsed by Nigeria’s chiefly rul-
ers, including Yoruba chiefs, whose support the new Governor, Sir
Bernard Bourdillon, wanted to cultivate.127 Here, again, the foremost
objective was to save money by eradicating duplication between small
native administration lock-ups and the larger colonial penitentiar-
ies of Nigeria’s townships. Tellingly, while Bourdillon and Nigeria’s
Director of Prisons acknowledged that only the colony’s larger, more
modern prisons could be classed as reformatories, reducing wage costs
remained a stronger priority. Prison staff were reduced in number but
paid better.128 Meanwhile, dedicated workshops to retrain long-term
inmates were confined to the larger prisons at Enugu, Lagos, Port
Harcourt, Calabar and Abeokuta. Chronically overcrowded lock-up
facilities remained in service elsewhere. Bourdillon instructed magis-

trates to impose fines rather than prison sentences whenever possible
and broadcast his enthusiasm for native courts, whose greater famil-
iarity with trying petty offences produced more lenient sentencing.129
If direct police involvement in prison management was also curtailed,
the supply of prisoners to jail remained disproportionately high even by
colonial standards. In 1935, for example, the Southern and Northern
Provinces’ prison population of 6,937 inmates was more than 300
per cent greater than the total number of prisoners in Singapore and the
Federated Malay States. Nigeria was, of course, a more densely popu-
lated colony than Malaya but this makes the following statistic even
more striking: the 121 dedicated European prison staff of the Federated
Malay States was ten times larger than the eleven Britons assigned to
manage Nigeria’s entire prison system.130
The colonial prison was also a site in which the gender dynamics of
policing and punishment became cruelly apparent. In smaller colonies,
the generally low numbers of female prisoners made it uneconomic to
construct separate women’s prisons, or even discrete facilities. Britain’s
Chief Commissioner of Prisons Alexander Paterson observed the
resulting abuses – physical, sexual and psychological – to which a lack
of dedicated prison provision gave rise during a West Indies inspection
tour in early 1937:131 Concluding that most women in West Indian jails
should not have been there at all, he wrote:
In each Colony there is to be found, attached to the men’s prison, a micro-
scopic imitation called a women’s prison … Compared with the male prisoner,
who is away from the prison all day and can work at the weekend and walk or
sit in the prison garden, [the female inmate] has a far harder time. Normally
she spends 23 out of the 24 hours in her cell, and this may continue for some
years … One day a woman prisoner will be found dead in her cell, when the
male officers arrive, and the repercussions will be justifiably profound. The
matter is urgent and brooks no delay. The treatment of these women is intoler-
able, its continuance indefensible. It is out of place in the British Empire, out
of date in 1937.132
Appalling prison conditions were not unique to the British Empire.
The penal colonies or bagnes – of the French Empire deserved their
fearsome reputation. ‘Ordinary’ prisons within other French colonies
could be just as bleak, outbreaks of illness related to malnutrition or
poor hygiene – beriberi, dysentery, TB – much the same.133 Violence
against women and men in French Indochina’s police stations was
habitual. So much so that reports of beatings, some serious enough to
lead to the hospitalization, even the death, of suspects, became the sub-
ject of a discrete inquiry conducted during 1932–3 under the auspices
of a wider Ministry of Colonies investigation into Indochina’s colonial

administration in the aftermath of the widespread political violence
that followed the Yen Bay mutiny of February 1930.134 As a result, in
April 1932 two Sûreté officers, one of them a deputy brigadier of police,
were finally investigated over the death of a suspect, who died of the
wounds he received during interrogation in connection with the crack-
down against the Vietnam Nationalist Party in October 1929.135
Paramilitary gendarmes and local army garrisons also entered the
frame as policemen, interrogators or guards, particularly in periods of
civil strife when, during curfews and protest bans, restrictions on free-
dom of movement became more severe. In French territories, colonial
gendarmerie typically conducted prisoner transfers. And in numerous
colonies, gendarmes and other army personnel assisted prison staff if
cellblock disorders broke out or were anticipated. Whenever numbers
of political prisoners in colonial jails rose as, for instance, in French
Indochina between 1930 and 1936 or during the Palestine revolt imme-
diately afterwards, distinctions between domestic police work and
‘imperial policing’ collapsed.
Conclusion
The diversity of day-to-day tasks faced by colonial police personnel
should remind us that apprehending and locking up political oppo-
nents was only one aspect of police work among many. As the extent of
police involvement in the running of prisons suggests, colonial police
work is hard to pigeonhole, but official preoccupation with protest
policing, its practical problems and legal complexities, was constant.
How to respond to public disorder and, more basically, how to define
it, provoked anxious discussion from Whitehall corridors to outly-
ing police stations remote from centres of administrative power. The
British experience suggests that these fundamental issues were unre-
solved twenty years after Walter Long first aired them with his colonial
subordinates in 1918.
The Indian, Ceylonese and Irish experiences clearly impressed
Britain’s imperial rulers with the need for sharper legislative instru-
ments and muscular police powers to uphold colonial control in the
volatile conditions after the First World War.136 But the conviction
that prompt, decisive intervention was necessary to crush rebellion
was neither new, nor especially British. In Australia, for example, out-
spoken support for Sinn Fein among a highly vocal minority, when
combined with official fears of Bolshevik-style worker dissent, were
enough to provoke fundamental changes in police and security service
organization between 1917 and 1919.137 And targeted violence against

crowds to demonstrate the physical power and moral authority of the
state was supposedly axiomatic to French policing of industrial pro-
test.138 Long after lethal violence became a rarity in British public order
policing, the administrators, police and military officers responsible
for the British Empire’s security remained attached to this notion of
decisive intervention.139 But what was it? What, indeed, was a crowd,
and how did one know when such a gathering assumed dangerous pro-
portions? By 1939 Britain’s colonial police forces were still struggling to
cope with public protest. From Palestine to Singapore, dependence on
army reinforcement had increased. The precise meaning of minimum
force, the ‘right’ time to use lethal violence, and the legal parameters of
protest policing were still issues obscured by a fog of conflicting advice.
As always, events confounded carefully laid plans, especially in circum-
stances where police and soldiers confronted strikers or other civilian
demonstrators.
Why was this so? So wide-ranging were the definitions of public dis-
order embedded in colonial legislation that individual police forces
inevitably confronted a herculean task. They were expected to react
vigorously to gatherings that, in France or Britain, would not have
been judged a menace to social peace. Yet, enforcing stability through
repression of protest was self-defeating because the stability in question
was superficial. Precisely because it served the colonial interest rather
than the needs of the majority, it had to be forcibly imposed. At its root,
protest policing was a matter of resisting change, suppressing oppos-
ition and maintaining labour discipline. It was cyclical, with demon-
strations and their suppression bound to repeat themselves so long as
the grievances that brought people onto the streets went unaddressed.
Colonial policemen were, in a very real sense, caught in the middle.
These aspects of their work are examined in individual colonies in the
following chapters. The next one focuses on the paramilitary gendarm-
erie in Algeria and Morocco, exploring the nature of such repressive
policing in greater detail.
Part II
Colonial case studies:

French, British and Belgian
4 Gendarmes: Work and policing in
French North Africa after 1918
On 22 May 1922, Colonel Vasticar, commander of the French gendarm-

erie in the Moroccan protectorate, received a stern rebuke from his new
boss, General Gandon, head of the Marseilles sector force and overall
chief of the gendarmerie companies in the French North African terri-
tories of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Vasticar had not paid Gandon
the courtesy of a visit while passing through Marseilles en route back
to his Moroccan command. Why did this so irritate the General? A
‘question de politesse’ certainly, a missed chance for a convivial pastis
perhaps, but, above all, rare opportunities for face-to-face discussion
between far-flung senior gendarmerie officers should not be spurned.
At issue was the need to keep the administrative centre abreast of local
colonial conditions. New to his post, Vasticar had not appreciated that
the essence of a senior gendarme’s work in the Maghreb was to gather
information and relay it efficiently to those who counted.1
Gandon’s reprimand begs two questions that this chapter tries to
answer. What, if anything constituted definitively colonial policing? And
why were interruptions to the flow of political and economic informa-
tion about social life and labour conditions so critical to the forms and
scale of collective violence in colonial societies? This chapter addresses
these issues by focusing on a cadre central to the maintenance of empire
security, but one at the margins of imperial policy-making. This was
the gendarmerie in inter-war French North Africa, the French Empire’s
largest paramilitary police force. The sections that follow consider the
composition, working conditions, linguistic limitations and operational
priorities of the gendarmerie squadrons in Algeria, Morocco and, to a
lesser extent, Tunisia. Taken together, this gendarmerie service, like
its counterparts across francophone black Africa, the Levant mandates
and the Indochina federation was predominantly rural and small-
town in its operational orbit. It never developed a dedicated political
policing unit, akin to its civilian partners in the French North African
police spéciale. Nor were even the most senior gendarme commanders
ever admitted to the inner reaches of colonial government, let alone
89
the upper echelons of strategic policy-making in Paris. For all that, my

suggestion is that the Algeria gendarmerie epitomized colonial police
work and the violence it generated in the early twentieth century. My
reasoning rests on five tenets:
• Gendarmes were the face of the colonial state in much of the
Maghreb’s interior space, gathering and filtering the political infor-
mation derived from it. That is to say, the gendarmerie was chiefly
responsible for monitoring social communication, official and unoffi-
cial, about government activity;
• The gendarmerie were the colonial authorities’ first resort in the
repression of the commonest form of organized dissent, namely rural
and workplace protests arising from labour disputes, foodstuff short-
ages, or other adverse economic conditions;
• Despite their unequivocal status as members of the French army, gen-
darmes occupied a shifting middle ground between criminal police,
paramilitary occupiers and riot control specialists. Their ‘success’,
as they saw it, in these multiple roles rested primarily on the speed
with which intelligence could be exploited to pre-empt or suppress
disorder;
• Gendarmerie operations across French North Africa depended
overwhelmingly on information provided, relayed or translated by
indigenous intermediaries, whether police auxiliaries, informants or
reliable local interlocutors;2
• Diminishing intelligence capacity made gendarmes vulnerable to
their domestic opponents, who singled them out during worker pro-
tests and outbreaks of political violence that culminated in the Sétif
uprising in eastern Algeria in May 1945.
Gendarmerie units, then, depended on their local contacts, on indigen-
ous intermediaries, whether police auxiliaries, informants or elite clients
to keep them apprised of the politics of the street.3 The form and extent
of their interventions were thus contingent on information supply or,
alternatively, its breakdown. Armed with good intelligence, less violent
pre-emption was possible. Conversely, threat perceptions could run out
of control if information was lacking to confirm or deny them, triggering
security force violence in general and gendarmerie coercion in particular.
Intelligence and gendarmerie violence were symbiotically linked.
Perspectives on colonial gendarmeries

With the critical exceptions of the Royal Irish Constabulary and
Mandate Palestine, the connections between information collection
Gendarmes 91
and policing have not figured large in existing work on European gen-
darmeries and their variants in the Near East.4 Historical perspectives
on the various types of paramilitary police force that emerged across
continental Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth cen-
tury have focused on three related issues. Social historians have been
drawn to the inter-action between uniformed police forces and the
poorest in society, whether to illustrate the coercive facets of capital-
ist modernization or to shine a spotlight on an otherwise neglected
underclass by means of police records and court reports. Others have
studied armed police in their own right as members of a quasi-military
organization dedicated to social control rather than the suppression of
criminal activity. The conundrum to resolve here is whether gendarmes
were made by the institutional values to which they became bound or
whether those who joined the service arrived with their social conser-
vatism fully formed. Linked to this second issue is the third: the role
of police agencies as a vanguard of new forms of social discipline and
community regulation in ethnically heterogeneous societies.5 The pre-
dominant themes to emerge in such research relate to changing social
identities, the effects of industrial concentration and the widening pow-
ers of modern states to control their ‘dangerous classes’.6 Less directly
addressed is the relationship between information collection about
sources of internal dissent, particularly in the workplace, and resultant
police coercion.7
Does the French-ruled Maghreb of the 1920s and 1930s fit the
model described above in the context of nineteenth-century Europe
of a largely pre-industrial but rapidly changing society in which
police forces played a pivotal role as the state’s ‘domestic missionar-
ies’?8 Arguably, North Africa’s colonial gendarmes bore closer resem-
blance to the imperial forces that policed the rural interior of the
late Ottoman Empire: ethnically endogenous, poorly resourced and
over-stretched, yet still the face of governmental administration to the
poorest in society.9 In Republican Turkey some heavy industries, coal-
mining in particular, were still concentrated in rural areas.10 So, too,
in French North Africa the policing of industrial workplaces enmeshed
gendarmeries in the politics of village communities that supplied the
labour force of key industries. Another characteristic shared with the
policing of Turkey’s outlands was the porousness of contiguous fron-
tiers between territories. Government in French North Africa’s three
constituent territories rested on different legal footings: constitutional
assimilation to France in Algeria’s case, and, in neighbouring Morocco
and Tunisia, the retention of a protectorate system that conflated pre-
existent legal forms and citizenship rights with de facto French political
and legal supremacy.11 A one-size-fits-all formula for policing the three

countries would not work. Yet, in each case, gendarmes were left to
determine how to proceed. From tax collection, the policing of internal
economic migration and the enforcement of colonial law, to the moni-
toring of vagrancy, religious observance and organized labour, imper-
ial gendarmes around the southern Mediterranean’s Arabic-speaking
rim were the eyes and ears of distant, foreign authority.12
Shared characteristics? French North African

gendarmeries after the First World War
An overwhelmingly French force with comparatively few Maghrebi
recruits next to the civilian police, North Africa’s inter-war gendar-
meries were, nevertheless, different in form and function to their
metropolitan equivalent. To cite one example, in Algeria, Morocco
and Tunisia gendarme brigade commanders not only registered for-
eign travellers, apprehended suspects and gathered evidence, they
also acted as legal assistants to the Justice of the Peace in local courts,
replacing police commissioners in this function when no senior police
officers were locally available.13 Seen in this light, the gendarmeries’
colonial uniqueness derived from the breadth of their responsibilities
and not from the cultural heterogeneity one might expect in an organ-
ization that, while French-officered, relied on local personnel to make
policing across ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural divides viable.
Algeria’s gendarmes, often living in barracks and institutionally tied
to their metropolitan parent force, differed fundamentally from other,
more hybridized colonial police forces. They were quite unlike their
equivalents in Southeast Asia where longer service terms, inter-racial
relationships and gradual adoption of local customs in matters of dress,
diet and leisure, were commonplace.14 Throughout the inter-war period
Algeria’s gendarmes, young section commanders especially, were more
likely to have affairs with colleagues’ wives or to exploit local prosti-
tutes than to take a North African mistress, risking opprobrium on
both sides of Algeria’s communal and religious divides.15
Also significant were the constraints imposed on the gendarmerie’s
work by its shortages of personnel and their limited social reach. A
quick glance at the numbers of active gendarmerie personnel in France
and North Africa in 1917 (Table 4.1 overleaf), the first year in which a
special war service allowance was paid, indicates that gendarmes could
be thin on the ground.
In 1920 the full complement strength of the Gendarmerie Nationale’s
19ème Légion – its Algerian colonial force – was 1,273 officers.16 The
Gendarmes 93
Table 4.1 Gendarmerie personnel, May 1917
Gendarmerie location Effectives (active army members)
Metropolitan France/Corsica 20,066

19ème Légion [Algeria] 1,145
Tunisia 134
Garde républicaine [France and North Africa] 2,566
Source: MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, War Ministry, 6ème Direction,
Intendance militaire, Sous-secrétaire d’état to Foreign Ministry, 22 May 1917.
largest gendarmerie command anywhere in the overseas empire, it was

still a small force when viewed next to the colony’s imposing geography –
evident in Map 4.1 – and the complexity of policing a dependent popula-
tion nearing six million averse to French intrusion.17 The task was further
complicated by two factors. First, the Great War utterly disorganized
Algeria’s gendarmerie, exacting a heavy toll on personnel who, although
older than the recruits called up in 1914, remained professional soldiers
liable for reintegration into frontline regiments.18 Many were duly recalled
to France, predominantly to infantry regiments and often as junior offic-
ers and NCOs, among whom mortality rates were highest.19 The com-
bination of deaths and injuries on the Western Front, retirements and
rotations between postings in France and North Africa led to the intro-
duction of 1,050 new recruits to Algeria between 1920 and 1924. By the
mid-1920s the bulk of the post-war force had spent under three years in
situ. In January 1924 only twenty-eight commissioned officers remained.
One wonders whether Captain Louët, sector commander in Blida, a sen-
sitive location south-west of Algiers, was typical. A long-serving former
Garde républicaine, Louët was nearing retirement. Severely injured in the
war, according to his superiors, ‘he neither understands nor implements
the instructions he receives’, longing to serve out his days in a quiet, rural
posting in France.20 Louët’s hopes were certainly widely shared. In 1923,
for instance, 104 gendarmes, almost 10 per cent of the Algerian force’s
total strength, requested transfers northward across the Mediterranean.
Another sixty-five had retired during the year. Twenty-six more were
dismissed, and at least one a month had died in service, their deaths
enigmatically ascribed to ‘service fatigue and the rigours of the climate’.21
Lacking status and, it appears, self-esteem, this was not a healthy force
physiologically or psychologically.
The 19ème Légion’s shortage of local experience, of collective insti-
tutional memory, of the esprit de corps, or sense of purpose, essential
PORTUGAL S P A I N
M E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A
Bône Bizerta
Philippeville (Annaba)
Algiers
Tunis
Tizi-
Blida Ouzou Constantine
Tangier
Tetouan Oran DEPARTMENT Sétif DEPARTMENT TUNISIA
AT L A N T I C (Protectorate, 1881)
RIF OF ALGIERS OF CONSTANTINE
Sidi-bel-Abbès
OCEAN Ouezzane OPERATIONS DEPARTMENT Biskra
1925 Sfax
Oujda Tlemcen OF ORAN
Rabat Taza
Fez Gabès
Casablanca Meknès
MOROCCO TERRITORIES OF THE SOUTH

(Protectorate, 1912)
Marrakesh A L G E R I A
(Colony, 1830)
Agadir
International frontiers
L I B YA
Provincial boundaries
Spanish Morocco
0 100 200 300 400 500 km
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 miles
Map 4.1 French North African colonial territories

Gendarmes 95
to the distinct tasks of colonial policing, underpinned its failing mor-

ale. Unlike the officers of Syria’s newly created military intelligence
service, the army’s Contrôleurs civils in Tunisia, its Officiers des affaires
indigènes in Morocco and the bureaux arabes in Algeria itself, the col-
ony’s rural gendarmes do not fit the model of a close-knit, military-
administrative corps immersed in indigenous culture and sustained
by a belief in their centrality to the French colonial project.22 Rather,
French North Africa’s gendarmes, like their counterparts in Mandate
Lebanon placed under French control on 1 September 1920, stood
lower down the rungs of colonial administration. Their limitations
were most apparent when it came to language. A decree of 30 June 1921
introduced new incentives – enhanced pay and promotion prospects –
for gendarmes who could demonstrate Arab-language competency by
examination.23 Few responded. Anticipating rotation back to France,
some refused to invest the time and effort required; but the majority
saw no need, getting by with phrasebook Arabic or Tamazight. Such
complacency pointed to fundamental defects in the most basic require-
ment of any police force – an ability to communicate with the sur-
rounding population. Rural brigades relied instead on one or more
local auxiliaries to serve as interlocutor and translator with notables
and informers.24
Dependence on reliable intermediaries and informant-supplied
intelligence, unremarkable in a colonial context, was critical none the
less.25 For, in terms of function, if not status, the Algerian gendarmerie
bore less comparison with metropolitan brigades than with the polit-
ical policing elements of the civilian police in France, the police spéciale
(from 1937, Renseignements généraux (RG)) of the Sûreté générale and the
Direction des renseignements généraux of the Paris police prefecture. So,
too, in terms of composition – a significant proportion of French civil-
ian policemen had military backgrounds. Finally, the Third Republic’s
political police shared the colonial gendarmeries’ preoccupation with
political surveillance.26 Widening our temporal gaze also helps distin-
guish the North African gendarmeries’ distinct characteristics. To focus
for a moment on Algeria, the colony’s gendarmes were a focal point of the
colonial administrative presence throughout what remained a predom-
inantly rural society. They were criminal investigators, tax collectors
and crowd controllers. In their own eyes, however, Algeria’s gendarmes
were peace-keepers. They kept order in the face of perennially difficult
internal economic conditions, which, during bad harvests, agricultural
recession and chronic under-employment, could erupt into protest. As
a result, this colonial force resembled, not its contemporary French
counterparts, but its nineteenth-century antecedents, the ‘dependable
army of the interior’ who policed the French countryside through peri-
ods of social unrest.27 Patrolling wide areas, intervening in communal
disputes arising from limited resources and land hunger and dissemin-
ating French cultural practices and legal norms, theirs was an integra-
tive role inextricably tied to the implantation of colonialism. To adapt
Eugen Weber’s arguments about nation-building in rural France, while
the Algeria gendarmerie had no ambition to turn the colony’s peasants
into Frenchmen, they worked to fashion Algeria’s rural population into
compliant colonial subjects.28
Funds voted in July 1921, and subsequently increased in May 1922,
were meant to equip Algeria’s mobile gendarmerie units (pelotons mobiles
de gendarmerie) with motorized transport to facilitate more widespread
radial patrolling from brigade headquarters in provincial towns. In the
short term, however, gendarmes were more likely to be seen on horse-
back or on bicycles than in specially equipped vehicles. (Ten years later,
in January 1931 the entire Algeria force possessed only twenty-seven
automobiles and fourteen motorcycles; their colleagues in Morocco
fared even worse, with only ten cars between them.29) The designation
of a specialist riot control squad, the Garde républicaine mobile (GRM),
established by decree on 10 September 1926, heralded a second organ-
izational change to the Gendarmerie nationale in the 1920s. Paradoxically,
in Algeria the assignment of public order policing to motorized sections
of GRM, which, from 1927, were structured into discrete companies,
squadrons and brigades, retarded the re-equipment of ordinary gen-
darmerie units deep in the rural interior.30 The recruit freshly arrived
from France at a typical 19ème Légion brigade in the Algerian heartland
stepped back fifty years.
To make matters worse, gendarmerie accommodation was rudimen-
tary. Cramped, unsanitary garrison blocks, freezing in winter and bak-
ing in summer, contributed to tuberculosis and alcoholism as the two
principal causes of long-term illness among Algeria’s gendarmes in the
1920s.31 By 1925 associated problems of inadequate field experience,
dreadful accommodation, variable disciplinary standards and poor mor-
ale were equally acute among Morocco’s gendarmerie, designated the
protectorate’s ‘Force publique’. The Force was already mired in scandal
over petty corruption, repeated failures to follow up reported crime and
routine mistreatment of prisoners. Abuses included cell-block beatings,
chronic overcrowding, inadequate food and exercise and no access to
latrines. So appalling were the conditions encountered that the com-
manders of four of northern Morocco’s largest gendarmerie brigades, in
Casablanca, Fez, Meknès and Taza, were either disciplined or dismissed
following an inspection tour by their French section commander in
Gendarmes 97
June of that year.32 Most critical from an intelligence perspective, there

was no uniformity of practice in the relay of information to Contrôleurs
civils or other military authorities, whether about seditious activity,
levels of crime or economic conditions. Sometimes Force publique bri-
gade reports were merely passed on orally; at other times peremptory
memoranda were dispatched, their contents so anaemic that no conclu-
sions whatsoever could be drawn from them.33
Accused of sloppy procedures, spending too much time in cafés34
and ‘a tendency to let things slide’ (‘tendance à se laisser aller’), the
strongest excuse for Force publique laxity was the demeaning standards
of accommodation in which its members lived. There were, as yet, no
dedicated gendarmerie barracks anywhere in French Morocco. Serving
gendarmes, many of them married, family men had to take lodgings in
town or beg room space within an army garrison. In Salé, a tempor-
ary gendarmerie accommodation block was declared unsanitary by the
Hygiene Commission, forcing gendarme families to take lodgings in
town. In Mogador, the gendarmes’ accommodation in a maison arabe
was repeatedly condemned as unfit by the Hygiene Commission from
1923 onward. In total, four such accommodation blocks were declared
unfit for human habitation.35 For the most part, Algeria and Morocco’s
gendarmes seem to have lived in significantly worse conditions than
their colleagues in Tunisia who were typically housed not in barracks,
blocks or in rural shacks, but in dedicated houses or in more salubri-
ous lodgings, often renting rooms in a family home.36 Not surprisingly,
whereas personnel transfers between Algeria and Tunisia were com-
monplace, from 1923–5 only one Algeria gendarme accepted a posting
with Morocco’s Force publique.37
The experiential differences of service in the three North African
gendarmeries make it difficult to conceive of much overarching unity
of practice between them. Contrasts between the gendarmeries were
accentuated by the contrasting political and juridical contexts in which
they operated. These ranged from the settler-dominated society of
Algeria to the still nebulous rights attached to French ‘protectorate’
status in Tunisia and the de facto division between French-occupied
‘useful Morocco’ and swathes of the territory’s highland interior still
resistant to colonial intrusion.38 Yet, in other respects, all three gen-
darmeries confronted analogous challenges. The first was presented by
long interior frontiers whose human and commercial traffic was never
entirely regulated. The second was the volatility of local economies
whose buoyancy depended not just on volumes of international trade
and consequent export earnings but on the primordial impact of aridity,
soil erosion, over-grazing and harvest failure.39
Shared working practices?

Squalid gendarmerie accommodation was matched by tough work-
ing conditions. Data for 1923 indicates that Algeria’s gendarmes, with
extensive territories to patrol, averaged between sixteen and seventy
kilometres on foot or on horseback per day often over difficult terrain.
Most relied on local caïds or farmers to offer rudimentary hospitality,
although gendarmes often chose to sleep outside to avoid fetid con-
ditions, vermin and typhus infection.40 The administrative burden
that even low-ranking gendarmes faced was also exceptionally large.
Algeria’s gendarmerie brigades submitted an average of 1,000 to 1,500
procès-verbaux each year. Officers typically compiled these summary
reports of recent activity immediately after their return from rural tours
of duty. One sector commander visiting brigade outposts across eastern
Algeria in January 1924 noted that two gendarmes from the 4th GN
Company, based at Sétif, came back from a five-day inspection tour
with thirty-five such reports to complete.41 What was the work they
described? – a combination of gruelling travel, routine visits, policing
markets and hunts for army deserters and minor criminals.42
The job, it seemed, was strenuous, tedious and often fruitless. Little
wonder that insalubrious accommodation and a bureaucratic paper-
trail, as monotonous as it was relentless, dominated rank-and-file com-
plaints to senior officers about conditions of service in the inter-war
years.43 There was the rub. By turns loathed and resented by those
who compiled them, gendarmerie procès-verbaux, or ‘pvs’ as they were
dismissively known, were the cornerstone of rural intelligence ana-
lysis, the only constant stream of up-to-the-minute information from
vast swathes of the North African interior. Whether, individually, as
reports on village conditions, local grievances and inter-communal
rivalries or, cumulatively, as indicators of changing regional condi-
tions and shifting opinion, gendarmerie reports amounted to the most
comprehensive archive of rural political intelligence available to the
Algerian colonial state.
The irony was that commanders and seasoned brigade officers knew
that the stuff of these reports – accounts of rural theft and other crimes
against property, details of work stoppages, as well as incidents of assault
and, more rarely, capital crimes or collective violence – depended less
on the police presence than on prevailing conditions in the local agri-
cultural economy. The assumption that ample, cheap foodstuffs were
the optimum guarantee of social discipline was embedded in the tag-line
with which numerous procès-verbaux concluded: namely, that harvest
prospects were either good or bad.
Gendarmes 99
Senior gendarmerie commanders, faced with an influx of new recruits

after the First World War, implored brigade officers to enforce more
rigorous standards of intelligence gathering. Precise economic informa-
tion interested central gendarmerie commands in Algiers, Rabat and
Tunis the most. Its usefulness rested on the extent to which current
data about market prices, fuel costs, foodstuff availability and harvest
prospects could be compared with equivalent information from earlier
periods and nearby locations. Only then could estimates be made about
agricultural lay-offs, internal economic migration, relative levels of pov-
erty and infant mortality and other demographic indicators regarded as
weathervanes of criminal activity, labour militancy and political dis-
sent. Commander Bonnemaison, interim head of Tunisia’s gendarm-
erie, was a particularly zealous statistician of economic intelligence. In
October 1920 he instructed sector commanders throughout Tunisia
to return for correction any reports that contained ‘mere generalities
and cliché’.44 Tunisia’s gendarmerie brigade reports, he insisted, should
meet the minimum standards of factual and statistical accuracy that
he had stipulated nine months earlier. Accurate economic data was the
linchpin of rural intelligence work – and gendarmerie peace-keeping –
in North Africa.
What else set the Maghreb’s gendarmerie apart from their metropol-
itan colleagues? If one paints with a broader historical brush, superfi-
cially it would seem that the answer is nothing at all. Parallels could,
for instance, be drawn with nineteenth-century gendarmes’ preoccu-
pation with foodstuff prices, bread riots and other rural protest over
material conditions in provincial France.45 And if one compared North
Africa’s inter-war gendarmerie, not with their French cousins but with
the mainland political police and, in particular, police spéciale monitor-
ing of colonial immigrants, communists, trade unionists and the fascis-
tic leagues that mushroomed between the wars, then the high priority
attached to likely sources of social unrest seems familiar.46 All gen-
darmes, colonial or not, were from December 1926, subject to security
screening. Recruits had to provide referees willing to attest that they had
never ‘professed subversive views or frequented Communist haunts’.47
Moreover, just like the police spéciale and RG in France, gendarmes in
the Maghreb depended on human intelligence sources. Translators’
advice, informants’ accounts, discussions with village headmen and
caïds, interrogations and overheard conversations formed their living
archive of public opinion.48
Yet, an important distinction remains, grounded in the colonial
nature of the 19ème Légion’s work. Much as the civilian police and
the North African gendarmerie viewed the containment of extremist
threats as their utmost priority, they constructed ‘extremism’ in light

of the à priori exclusion of subject populations from the republican
Cité, from the rights, benefits and shared interests of French citizens.
Economically marginalized and denied basic freedoms, Algeria’s indi-
genous majority were inherently suspect because their preference was
for the overthrow of the entire colonial order. Levels of support for
proto-nationalist groups such as Messali Hadj’s Etoile Nord-Africaine
or Algeria’s pre-eminent Muslim cultural organization, the Association
of reformist ‘ulama were indicators of opinion certainly, but the sullen
hostility of the silent majority was always presumed. Viewed this way,
the North African gendarmeries exemplified the dissonance between
a relatively liberal metropolitan regime and routine repression in the
colonial territories it governed.
Colonial policing was trapped by this dilemma: distrustful of the
majority population yet committed to upholding the racial and socio-
economic hierarchies of colonialism that fed people’s antagonism. Far
from diminishing the animus against them, the actions of colonial
gendarmes nourished it. Again, using Algeria as the example, some
rural populations, in the mountainous interior of Kabylia surrounding
Tizi-Ouzou and the Aurès-Nemenchtas range in the colony’s south-
east, were never subjugated. Gendarmerie garrison reports from such
regions described the very space they occupied, inaccessible, difficult
terrain, as harsh and unforgiving. To read situation reports from the
most isolated gendarme outposts is to enter a locale in which not just
the people but the very land itself were conjoined in their unremitting
enmity to French encroachment.49 The sheer immensity of Algeria’s
gendarmerie districts set them apart. In the early 1920s, eighteen of
Algeria’s gendarmerie brigades, the smallest level of autonomous unit,
patrolled districts averaging between 700,000 and one million hectares
in extent.50 The largest brigade command, at Trézel in the south, cov-
ered just over 1.2 million hectares. Their colleagues posted along the
coastal belt were luckier, travelling metalled roads and the mainline rail-
way that connected Oujda in eastern Morocco with Algiers and Tunis.
Branch lines running south into the colony’s agricultural hinterland
were also open, but notoriously slow. A 464 kilometre eastward journey
from Algiers to Constantine was timetabled at over twelve hours, while
a 422 kilometre westward trip from the capital to Oran took a min-
imum of ten. The reason was that these lines ran at the average speed
of freight traffic: 25 kilometres per hour. Seven other branch lines were
still under construction, part of a post-First World War spate of colo-
nial railway building by Algeria’s state railway company, the Chemins
de fer algériens d’état, and its private sector rival, the Compagnie P-L-M
Gendarmes 101
(Paris-Lyon-Marseille) that halted abruptly with the onset of depression

conditions in 1930.51
Problems of getting around left coastal brigades frustrated, but their
colleagues in the rural interior faced more existential challenges. It was
not until 1925 that all gendarmerie brigades had access to telephone
communication, and lines were frequently down – or sabotaged.52 A
sympathetic, if xenophobic sector chief described the challenges facing
a district commander in the Aurès:
There we have it, a lieutenant in an under-developed region with the harshest
of climates heading a [gendarmerie] service that covers an area the size of two
to three typical French départements. And this with a population of 217,000
inhabitants, whose colonial subjects [indigènes] are among the least hard-
working and most dishonest of the Berbers, and among whom less than three
per cent of the total population are French.53
Self-consciously occupiers of an alien society in which the demographic
odds were stacked against them, brigade commanders in the Algerian
interior were reckoned to have the toughest assignment of any mem-
bers of the Gendarmerie nationale.54 The combination of isolation and
vast territorial responsibility brought still further burdens. Once violent
crimes were detected, brigade commanders typically began the evidence
collection normally undertaken by a prosecuting magistrate. Expecting
retributive justice, victims of crime sometimes sought redress directly
from the local gendarmerie rather than reporting incidents either to the
nearest justice of the peace or their local caïd. Gendarmes who han-
dled these interventions badly found themselves immersed in family
disputes or clan feuds that, on occasion, escalated into tit-for-tat kill-
ings, as in the Aïn–Sultan commune mixte where clan rivalries provoked
a riot in November 1924.55 The face of the state and its laws, gendarmes
were prime targets for retributive violence as attested by the wholesale
destruction of gendarmerie buildings in the Sétif and Guelma uprisings
of May 1945.56 A ‘model’ Algeria gendarme was one capable of recog-
nizing such flashpoints.57
Structural changes and relations

with the police, 1925–33
Algeria’s gendarmerie structure changed fundamentally from the mid-
1920s after which the concentration of personnel in dedicated command
centres gathered momentum. Formerly a rural force without adminis-
trative support, the gendarmerie increasingly gathered junior officers
and ordinary rankers together in purpose-built stations with backroom
office staff in the colony’s major towns. Brigades radiated out from these
into the surrounding countryside. By November 1927, for instance, the

gendarmerie’s command headquarters in Algiers had risen to thirty
serving officers, plus a secretarial staff of fifteen. Even Constantine,
a modest provincial headquarters, boasted a staff of thirty-one, eight
more than the Tunis gendarmerie command across the eastern frontier.
In consequence, the gendarmerie was, for the first time, well placed to
analyse the incoming political intelligence it received before collating
it for the Algiers government, the War Ministry and the Ministry of
Justice in Paris. Relevant case files, crime statistics and political intelli-
gence reports were also passed to local Sûreté générale stations.58
Yet relations between the 19ème Légion and Algeria’s civilian police-
men were never close. Reflecting on the gendarmerie’s administrative
contacts, in 1929 Colonel Huot, Marseilles sector commander in over-
all charge of all the North African gendarmerie companies, discerned
profound differences in the manner in which various government and
police agencies responded to information supplied by his brigades.
In Morocco, where gendarmes still lacked dedicated barrack accom-
modation and so were housed among the community they policed,
intimate working partnerships with urban Sûreté inspectors were com-
monplace. Liaison between police stations and gendarmerie brigade
posts was routine, not least as barely half of Morocco’s gendarmerie
brigades had telephone access of their own. As for Tunisia, at 162,000
square kilometres by far the smallest of the three Maghreb territories,
but still the one where gendarmerie personnel were least numerous
per head of population, joint policing operations had scarcely been
attempted. No formal mechanisms for intelligence sharing existed. But
it was in Algeria that relations between the gendarmerie and the Sûreté
were truly glacial.59
Why? At one extreme, those at the sharp end of colonial law enforce-
ment, the prosecuting magistrates that tried cases brought as a result of
police or gendarmerie arrests, relied on the latter to ensure that trial pro-
cedure was observed. Brigade commanders were better acquainted with
Algeria’s legal process than the junior court clerks typically assigned to
Algeria’s rural criminal courts as a first career posting. Most gendarme
commanders also had working knowledge of the caïdal and shar’ia court
systems that adjudicated cases involving Muslim colonial subjects alone.
Civilian local government, too, relied on gendarmerie input. Indeed,
the greater the trust placed by prefects and sub-prefects in the quality
of gendarmerie support, the larger the administrative demands placed
upon individual brigades, with little thought for the enormous paper-
work involved. In the eastern département of Constantine, for instance,
one sub-prefect requested the submission of all hunting licences issued
Gendarmes 103
throughout the region in 1929, a vast job with little obvious pay-off.60 If
this was minor office politics, at the other extreme, the dismal relations
between the 19ème Légion and the Algiers Sûreté caused profound dis-
ruption. Thanks to a combination of ingrained prejudice, jurisdictional
squabbling and political rivalry within the web of internal security
agencies, as the new decade began gendarme commanders and senior
police officers were hardly working together at all. Colonel Huot’s self-
righteous disdain for the ‘glamour’ of police detective work next to the
hard slog of low-level policing emerged in his description of these rivalries
in 1929:
As in France, the [Algiers] Sûreté, likes to celebrate its successes in the papers
and doesn’t recoil from claiming results secured by gendarmerie investigations
as its own … Even so, the gendarmerie tries to do its work in close liaison with
this police force, but there is no reciprocity; the Sûreté never – or virtually
never – advises me of its ongoing investigations. Rather, after having secured
the desired intelligence from gendarmerie sources, [Sûreté officers] leave, never
to be seen again … None of this is new; indeed, observations like these were
the subject of a [Gendarmerie nationale] circular issued on 19 January 1922. But
the aspect of particular relevance to the 19ème Légion is that the Director of
the Algiers Sûreté générale has tried to control the Légion via the Government-
general. The head of the Légion has successfully resisted this manoeuvring.
Furthermore, what one has to remember, especially in the case of the 19ème
Légion, is that the gendarmerie does not have to take a back seat to the police
service, which is not better equipped than it is; quite the contrary thanks to the
brigade network. The gendarmerie officer appearing for the prosecution as an
officer of the judicial police need not step aside during an inquiry initiated by
a prosecuting magistrate or a Juge d’instruction, and he may even take charge of
an inquiry opened by a lower ranked auxiliary officer.61
For all its prickly assertiveness, Huot’s defence of the gendarmerie’s
wide jurisdiction was undermined by its continued failure to collate
political intelligence systematically and by the changing nature of the
force’s workload. The quality and quantity of procès-verbaux were as
variable as ever, and some administrative staff did not grasp the signifi-
cance of compiling detailed political and economic intelligence at regu-
lar intervals. The mounting pressure of other tasks in the early years
of the depression offered some excuse for this. Workloads increased in
two areas especially. One was in tracking down army deserters, princi-
pally members of the Foreign Legion from which high rates of absence
were a perennial problem. But numbers of wanted criminal suspects
also exploded in the late 1920s. By November 1929 the Constantine
gendarmerie company was conducting ongoing searches for 307 desert-
ers and 10,894 suspects and escapees, more a reflection of the breadth
of legislative restriction in inter-war Algeria than of any incipient
crime-wave in the east of the colony.62 This brings to light the second
area of increased workload: the policing of wildcat strikes, factory
protests and other industrial disputes. Indeed, many of the suspects
being sought were, in fact, unemployed protesters and striking work-
ers accused of involvement in illegal demonstrations and unauthorized
work stoppages. Striking dockyard workers from Philippeville and
protesting miners who downed tools in Bougie certainly figured among
the 30,185 arrests made by the 19ème Légion over the course of 1929.63
Force composition and changing threat

assessments in the 1930s
The Algeria gendarmerie’s growth in the depression years did not
herald the creation of an ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous
force. A 1930 recruitment campaign generated 314 new recruits and
re-engagements, all but a handful Europeans.64 Force increases in the
1930s were more a reflection of the greater speed with which recruits
were inducted following the introduction of a three-month training
course at a dedicated teaching centre in Oran. Algerian candidates with
Muslim subject status performed notably well on these courses. Even
so, by January 1930 there were only eight Algerian Muslim auxiliar-
ies and four naturalized Algerian citizens among the 19ème Légion’s
full-timers. Admission rates for Algerian colonial subjects did increase
as the economic slowdown hit harder in 1930–2, but senior officers
remained inveterately hostile to any Algerianization of the gendarm-
erie. Most concealed their own prejudices behind that of the wider
community, force commander Colonel Huot among them:
Some company commanders reckon that Algerian colonial subjects could not
wield the authority expected of a gendarme among the European population.
I think so too, especially given their particular outlook [leur mentalité spéciale]
which it will take a generation to transform. But they can provide useful ser-
vice within native milieus, provided that they are kept on the straight and
narrow.65
Racist cultural stereotypes kept the numbers of Algerian Muslim recruits

chronically low. Not so for Italian and Spanish-speaking European set-
tlers, whose applications were previously rejected on the grounds of
unfamiliarity with French policing practices and legal norms. During
the 1930s their language skills acquired greater value as official worries
grew about the political loyalties of the Spanish and Italian settler com-
munities in Algiers, Oran and elsewhere.66 As the decade progressed
some of these recruits would be steered towards counter-espionage
Gendarmes 105
work either within the gendarmerie or within the army’s Algiers military
intelligence bureau.67
Greater preoccupation with counter-espionage and the surveil-
lance of nationalist and communist subversion among colonial army
garrisons compounded existing doubts over whether to employ North
African recruits to address the urgent need for more frontline person-
nel. Algeria’s gendarmerie strength stood at 1,203 personnel as the
colony entered the trough of the depression in 1932. Commanders
noted that their men were always on the lookout for transfers back to
France or for better-paid civilian employment locally, despite intro-
duction of additional allowances to boost take-home pay. Gendarmes
with money worries were especially prone to corruption as evinced by
recurrent investigations of bribery and extortion in certain gendarm-
erie companies.68
Similar concerns were apparent in the expansion and operational
reconfiguration of the Moroccan and Tunisian gendarmeries in the
early 1930s.69 Like their Algerian counterpart, both forces became
more assiduous in monitoring suspects on the notorious Carnet B
lists of French citizens suspected of subversive activity.70 In 1913 the
Interior Ministry advised the Rabat Residency to adopt the Carnet sys-
tem, thus extending it to cover the newest of France’s North African
territories. By May 1914 Resident General Lyautey’s staff had put the
necessary Carnet bureaucracy in place, concentrating initially on sur-
veillance of those suspects on the Carnet lists who had moved across the
Mediterranean from France. By the inter-war period, the governments
in each of the Maghreb territories were well versed in the Carnet system
as were gendarmes who transferred in from mainland France.71 But the
mounting burden of political surveillance lent weight to the insistent
pleading from senior officers for more men.
Morocco’s gendarmerie was predicted to climb above 1,000 serving
gendarmes by the mid-1930s, the commander of the Meknès region
leading fellow brigade commanders in demanding a doubling of num-
bers to cope with the protectorate’s rising population, settler immi-
gration and rapid urban growth. In August 1928 the Moroccan Force
publique was finally integrated into the French Gendarmerie nationale.
The rebranding aside, it remained an anomaly. For one thing, Morocco’s
gendarmes were still engaged in ‘pacification’ operations in the Atlas
region, in other words, in military repression of communal dissent
alongside regular troops. Elsewhere, the security of brigade posts was
judged too precarious to permit gendarmes to patrol at night.72 Doubts
over the loyalty of indigenous Moroccans and claims that few were
acculturated to French standards of governance, language and legal
process were cited by the Moroccan force commander, Lieutenant-

Colonel Gay to justify his refusal to admit Moroccan recruits into
his brigades.73 Fear of violence moulded the very composition of the
force.
Gay’s existing cadres were hardly exemplary. Few could converse
in Arabic or Tamazight; fewer still were prepared to learn how to
do so. A practical French–Arabic manual for gendarmes serving in
North Africa, written by two long-serving officers, Captain Cadeo
and Lieutenant Morin, was habitually recommended by senior com-
manders in Marseilles, Algiers and Rabat as a means to reverse the
chronic lack of vernacular language skills. But no one suggested that
greater reliance on Maghrebi personnel or the socialization of French
gendarmes to North Africa’s linguistic cultures might improve their
policing performance.74 This was particularly ironic as Morocco’s pro-
tectorate administration professed increasing interest in the policing of
language. Throughout the inter-war years senior officials worked from
the presumption that the spread of Arabic, particularly among Berber
populations, was instrumental in their Islamicization and consequent
loss to France.75 It was a message that did not seem to register among
gendarmerie forces. Much as before, serving personnel, in large part,
lived ‘freely’ in town lodgings rather than barracks. Most preferred to
frequent French-speaking milieus, a reflection of the increasing de facto
segregation of housing, retail and leisure activities in towns such as
Casablanca and Rabat.76 Living and socializing among fellow settlers,
drills and other obvious trappings of military discipline were nuga-
tory, and cases of bribe-taking, maltreatment of detainees (mislead-
ingly described as ‘minor assaults’ – violences légères) and other abuses
of power were significantly higher among Morocco’s gendarmes than in
the other Maghreb territories.77
Seven complaints of gendarmerie brutality were lodged against the
Moroccan force in 1929 alone. Their cursory handling – with only three
punishments issued, and no dismissals or criminal proceedings against
the offending gendarmes – suggests that physical assault of detainees
was habitual, and habitually tolerated, much as in other paramilitary
colonial police forces at the time.78 Brutality, and the brutalization of
its perpetrators and victims, was as endemic as it was pointless. Most
assaults took place during or after arrest. They were not coordinated;
nor were they usually linked to attempts to extract information. Beatings
were simply a part of the gendarmeries’ procedural landscape, so rou-
tine – especially in Morocco – that those in authority issued neither
comment nor reprimand. In stark contrast, the increasing obsession
with communist subversion led to seventy-four distinct gendarmerie
Gendarmes 107
enquiries in the twelve months from October 1930, only one of which
produced enough material evidence to justify a prosecution.79
Accusations of casual security force brutality spiked in the depres-
sion years. It is not hard to see why. Those gendarmes, including the
bulk of the Moroccan force, that still lived in rented accommodation
found their incomes severely eroded by falling real wage rates that
failed to keep pace with rental charges. The Rabat government had
tried to improve matters. It signed off on six new gendarmerie barracks
in 1927–8, and funded construction of a further eleven in the 1928
budget. But the accommodation programme fell victim to the down-
turn and was cut back within a rescheduled five-year building scheme
that ran from 1 April 1932 to 31 March 1937. Three of Morocco’s lar-
gest gendarmerie sections, in Rabat, Taza and Agadir, lacked dedicated
housing until the eve of the Second World War.80 As Secretary-general
of the protectorate government throughout the early 1930s Urbain
Blanc held administrative responsibility for Morocco’s internal security.
He authorized gendarmerie, police and prison service budgets. On 15
January 1934 General Baert, then overall commander of French North
Africa’s gendarmerie forces, complained that gendarmes in thirty-four
of Morocco’s fifty-nine brigade posts lived in conditions poor enough
to endanger their long-term health. Blanc replied that treasury coffers
were empty. In addition to a gendarmerie force of over a thousand,
the protectorate budget had to support Morocco’s forty-three police
commissioners and 1,041 full-time police officers and agents. The
prison service put another 306 employees on the state payroll. Blanc
was meanwhile required to find cuts totalling eighty million francs to
offset the collapse in export revenue. Prices of two Moroccan staples –
cereals and phosphates – had fallen over 60 per cent from their late
1920s peaks.81
Housing provision was better in Algeria and Tunisia but in these
locations, too, problems persisted. By the start of 1934 Algeria’s 19ème
Légion still registered a 7.3 per cent personnel shortfall – 111 troops in
a total authorized complement of 1,511 – attributable to lack of accom-
modation for any additional recruits.82 In Tunisia those gendarmes
assigned to barracks rented by the state from private owners lived in
squalor, viewed by their commanders as the major threat to otherwise
good brigade morale.83 The protracted slump in French North Africa’s
agricultural and industrial sectors also pushed gendarmerie person-
nel to the limit. By 1934 forces were stretched by nationalist protests,
industrial disputes and food riots. Acts of sabotage, cutting telephone
wires and felling telegraph poles seemed to be everywhere. These sym-
bolic acts of political vandalism united nationalist activists across the
Maghreb territories, proof of their power to orchestrate protest and vis-

ible demonstration of the vulnerability of isolated settler communities,
farms and outlying settlements.84 A wave of arms seizures, principally
old military rifles held by former servicemen, and a crackdown against
illicit sales of dynamite stolen from mining premises (largely it seems
for use in fishing rather than bomb-making), confirmed the growing
nervousness among gendarmerie commands about the likelihood of
increased political violence.85 What became clearer as the decade wore
on was that the gendarmeries of French North Africa, the 19ème Légion
first among them, had conflated their roles as overseers of the colonial
economy and political police. This unfortunate duality paved the way
for their dystopian future as targets of nationalist violence and perpe-
trators of state killing in the independence struggles that lay ahead.86
Conclusion
‘Political police and security services … do not have a good record in
preventing empires from collapsing.’ So concluded Mark Mazower in
his survey of the policing of twentieth-century politics.87 If such is the
case, then the links between inadequate information collection and
escalating political violence were surely crucial to gendarmerie failure
in French North Africa between the wars. As frontline security forces,
responsible both for monitoring opinion and for social control, the
region’s gendarmes had become part of the problem inherent to colo-
nial intelligence gathering: how to use a distrusted, alien police force to
discover what a hostile subject population intended.
Much as in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, so a
generation later on the eve of 1939, the gendarmeries of French North
Africa were over-extended, under-resourced and poorly integrated into
the societies they monitored. Heightened European settlement in the
1920s, the further marginalization of indigenous smallholders, tenants
and sharecroppers from viable agricultural land, and the chronic hard-
ship of the depression years made the requirement for reliable rural
intelligence about the sources and likelihood of popular dissent more
crucial than ever.88 Yet the quality of such information declined. Thus
a paradox: as European colonial penetration of North Africa increased,
so the capacity of state agencies to gather intelligence from a resent-
ful subject population diminished. Quite mundane factors, persistent
budgetary cuts above all, caused lasting fallout. Denied the funds to
build additional barracks and brigade posts, all three gendarmeries fell
short of their authorized troop complements throughout the depression
years of 1930–6. The practical consequences for patrolling, intelligence
Gendarmes 109
gathering and workplace policing were critical. The 19ème Légion, for
example, failed to establish an effective department-wide gendarm-
erie network in eastern Algeria because seven additional posts in the
Constantinois were planned but never completed before 1939.89
More serious was the turn towards riot control and the suppression of
industrial protest as the economic crisis intensified in the early 1930s.
As the Appendix below indicates, Algeria’s gendarmerie was reorgan-
ized in January 1937, becoming more overtly paramilitary thanks to
the expansion of its motorized riot control squads. With the limited
public funds available channelled into the creation of dedicated GRM
units in all three North African territories (a subject discussed in the
next chapter), policing of rural communities and surveillance of the
agricultural economy atrophied. Indeed, the sharper focus on con-
trolling major public disorder – strikes, urban protests and nationalist
demonstrations – commensurately narrowed the focus of gendarmerie
intelligence collection and analysis. By 1939 the North African gen-
darmeries knew more about trade union organizations, political parties
and other oppositional groups in the Maghreb’s major towns. But they
knew far less about what really drove mass protest, in the countryside
particularly: foodstuff availability, economic prospects, rural markets
and labour conditions. Having refused, in Algeria and Morocco espe-
cially, to integrate North Africans into gendarmerie ranks, these forces
remained remote, unrepresentative, habitually racist and ineffective at
monitoring indigenous opinion.90
These shortcomings explain the gendarmerie’s failure to meet the
challenges of rising nationalist militancy, Islamist opposition and popu-
lar economic protest as the 1930s progressed. Relations between gen-
darmerie and police in Algeria remained poor, and by 1936 intelligence
exchanges between them had all but collapsed. Unable to plan, operate
and deploy on the basis of predictive intelligence warnings, the North
African gendarmeries were becoming political fire-fighters, sent to
contain unrest after it had escalated and not before. By the late 1930s
former gendarme intelligence gatherers were becoming intelligence
targets, their activities and intentions regularly divulged by erstwhile
informants and other local auxiliaries to nationalist party activists. So
dangerous did the situation appear by 1936 to the North Africa gen-
darmerie commander General Baert that he predicted that settlers in
isolated communities might well take the law into their own hands,
arming themselves and preparing to work as vigilantes should inter-
communal violence erupt.91 It was a prescient warning, the dreadful
reality of which would become apparent with the reprisal killings that
followed the Sétif and Guelma uprisings in May 1945.92 After 1954 the
Algerian War of Independence would strengthen the bonds between

settlers, gendarmes, police and other local government officials, mak-
ing them more identifiable to their Algerian nationalist opponents as a
single category of legitimate targets – all, in their various ways, symbols
of colonial dispossession.93 Moving our focus to inter-war Tunisia we
find another instance of tables beginning to turn.
Appendix
Order of battle of the 19e Corps d’Armée gendarmerie and Garde
Républicaine Mobile (GRM) of Algeria, as reorganized by decree on
12 January 1937.94
Compagnie de Gendarmerie d’Alger
Section d’Alger
Section de Tizi-Ouzou
Section de Bouïra
Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Blida
Section de Blida
Section d’Orléansville
Section d’Affreville
Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Constantine
Section de Constantine
Section de Bône
Section de Philippeville
Section de Guelma
Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Sétif
Section de Sétif
Section de Bougie
Section de Batna
Compagnie de Gendarmerie d’Oran
Section d’Oran
Section de Tlemcen
Section de Sidi-Bel-Abbès
Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Mascara
Section de Mascara
Section de Mostaganem
Section de Relizene
Section de Tiaret
Groupe de Garde Républicaine Mobile à Alger
1e GRM Cie Alger (3 pelotons: all 3 in Algiers)
Gendarmes 111
2e GRM Cie Maison Carrée (3 pelotons: 1 at Maison Carrée,

1 at Blida, 1 at Tizi-Ouzou)
3e GRM Cie Oran (3 pelotons: all 3 in Oran)
4e GRM Cie Oran (3 pelotons: 1 in Oran, 1 in Tlemcen, 1 in
Mostaganem)
5e GRM Cie Constantine (3 pelotons: 2 in Constantine, 1 in
Bône)
6e GRM Cie Constantine (3 pelotons: 1 in Constantine, 1 in
Sétif, 1 in Bougie).
5 Policing Tunisia: Mineworkers, fellahs
and nationalist protest
This chapter is a partner to its predecessor. Once again, the focus

is French North Africa and its security forces: this time, Tunisia’s
gendarmerie brigade and its newly established motorized riot control
units, the Garde républicaine mobile (GRM). My purpose in focusing on
the preparation and use of these forces is twofold. First, the gendarm-
erie’s changing priorities exemplify the issues raised in Chapters 2
and 3, namely, that police forces ostensibly designed to guarantee
socio-political order were actually deployed most frequently to break
strikes and coerce colonial workers. The protectorate authorities’
decision to establish a police reserve dedicated to containing polit-
ical unrest and industrial protest was, therefore, significant. Second,
Tunisia’s gendarmes and the specialist gardes mobiles typified a wider
colonial trend. Their capacity to serve as strike-breakers and coercive
instruments was tested by the severity of industrial and rural protest
in the depression years of the 1930s.1
Tunisia’s depression was a long one. High unemployment, real-terms
falls in wage rates and recurrent food shortages were still in evidence
in 1937.2 The militarization of Tunisian colonial policing accelerated
meanwhile. Troops and paramilitaries superseded specialist police
units as the strong arm of the colonial state deployed against political
protesters, striking workers and peasant cultivators. The point will be
illustrated in this chapter by detailed consideration of changing forms
of policing in Tunisia’s mining sector and in the provincial towns of
the Sahel where support for integral nationalism was strongest. The
mining settlements and market centres in Tunisia’s rural hinterland,
cornerstones of the protectorate economy, were chronically affected by
depression-era falls in commodity prices. Protest policing became more
prevalent in consequence.
International treaties and conventional histories tell us that Morocco
became the third and final territory added to form the troika of
French North African territories after the Act of Algeciras and the two
Moroccan ‘crises’ of 1905 and 1911 (see Map 5.1).3 But is this sequence
112
Map 5.1 French colonial map of Northern and Central Africa, c. 1925
really incontrovertible? The colonial takeover in Algeria that succeeded

the occupation of Algiers in 1830 was long and bloody, and the impos-
ition of French suzerainty in Tunisia, dating from the 1881 Treaty of
Bardo, rather a consolation prize after the disappointments of losing
out to Britain over Egypt and the Suez Canal.4 But each assuredly
occurred before France pressed its claims on Morocco. Without turning
the chronology upside down, one point gives pause for thought. The
finality of conquest implied by these neat textbook dates is misleading.
Only in Tunisia could French authorities suggest that, by 1918, their
territory was pacified.
Tunisia was, of course, far smaller than its western neighbours.
Predominantly Arab, it was more ethnically homogeneous, too.5 Land
seizures occasioned fewer violent clashes. Unlike the settler land grab
facilitated by Algeria’s 1873 Warnier Law, Tunisia’s imperial admin-
istration trod more warily. Legislation introduced in 1885 placed
Muslim-owned property under French legal ‘protection’, but did not
deny the legitimacy of pre-existing property rights. Customary forms
of land tenure, inheritance and transfer survived the growing influx
of settlers.6 Tunisia’s dual sovereignty between the Bey’s monarchical
regime and the protectorate, between customary Muslim practice and
French civil and criminal law, was more than a facade. Perhaps this was
one reason why political violence was rarer in Tunisia than in Algeria
or Morocco before 1918. Assuredly welcome, in French eyes Tunisia’s
greater social peace was not cost-free.7 Tunisians denied the benefits
of republican citizenship proved adept at exploiting the legal loopholes
and overlapping jurisdictions of the country’s protectorate status to
achieve their commercial, familial or political objectives.8
In Algeria and, still more so, in Morocco, the inter-war picture was
very different. In both places inter-communal frictions were readily vis-
ible, occasionally erupting into sickening episodes of race killing. Jewish
urban dwellers, settler farmers and the marginalized Muslim poor, all
were, at various points, victimized because of ethnicity or faith, profes-
sion or politics.9 Police inadequacies and sectarian allegiances within
individual units were sometimes exposed as a result.10 The pattern of
collective violence, security breakdown and police bias was evident dur-
ing rioting in northern Moroccan towns in the summer of 1930. The
disorders stemmed from introduction of the so-called Berber dahir, a
legislative instrument thought by many to challenge the supreme author-
ity of shari’a law within the Muslim community.11 And in Algeria, too,
police discipline broke down during urban disorders. On 12 December
1934 Governor Jules Carde responded with decree legislation assigning
garrison troops to assist gendarmerie in the policing of protest.12
Policing Tunisia 115
Security force sectarianism had been laid bare during clashes

between Muslims and Jews in the eastern Algerian city of Constantine
in August 1934. Judicial investigation of the riots shone a rare light
on the anti-Semitism of the Muslim rank and file as well as the anti-
Muslim prejudice of more senior gendarmerie and police officers.13
An enduring problem for both the Algerian and the Moroccan forces
was that imperial authority in their more remote command post-
ings remained nominal. In such interior spaces, colonial policing
between the wars was about conquest, less in the sense of last-ditch
confrontations with die-hard dissenters – although, as the Rif War
indicated, this did occur – but more in terms of basic administra-
tive implantation. By this is meant the mundane, yet fundamental
process by which colonial legislation, taxes, military obligation and,
above all, the presence of a colonial monetary economy were made
real to dependent populations. Recognizing that these tasks were
incomplete makes sense of the regulations regarding army support
for policing operations in the North African territories. In Algeria,
for example, the inter-war ordinances governing army call-out in
support of the civil authorities dated from August 1907. Prefects
and their deputies in Algeria’s three regional departments of Oran,
Algiers and Constantine could request military assistance either to
suppress disorder or to prevent its occurrence when violence was
anticipated, such as during taxation rounds or industrial disputes.
Regular troops were also available to assist police and gendarmerie in
the ‘occupation’ of dissentient territory, a term applied, in the main,
to rural, often mountainous ‘mixed communes’ where the colonial
administrative presence was nugatory.14
In May 1919 we find three infantry companies of the Armée d’Afrique,
assisted by a platoon of West African riflemen and a spahi cavalry squad-
ron working alongside police and gendarmerie from Tizi-Ouzou, heart
of the Berber Kabylia region. Their mission was to round up bandit
gangs from the surrounding highlands.15 The Algiers Prefect had called
in the troops while his subordinates in Tizo-Ouzou ordered caïds in the
affected communes to accompany police units, lending the seal of local
approval to the operations and helping identify those apprehended.
These so-called bandit gangs, often based on extended family groups,
traversed a line between quasi-nomadic raiding and political dissent.
Their activities were traditional, criminal and anti-colonial at the same
time. Most critical from the colonial perspective, they frightened off
European settlers and impeded tax collection by attacking collectors
and, of course, paying nothing themselves.16 All this in an area sup-
posedly integrated into Algeria’s colonial polity decades earlier. Here
was conquest, criminal policing and fiscal rationalization rolled into

one, the militarization of policing taking place as part of the adminis-
trative implantation mentioned above.
What does this suggest? Certainly that the security presence in inter-
war French North Africa was, in some ways, contradictory: activities
resonant of first-stage colonial rule persisted alongside the policing of
workplaces more redolent of a modern industrial state. Only gradually
did the latter predominate, nowhere more so than in Tunisia, where a
strongly paramilitary policing style emerged between the wars. There
were three triggers to this. One was the consolidation in 1924 of an
indigenous trade union movement, the Confédération générale des tra-
vailleurs tunisiens (CGTT), aimed at Tunisian (i.e. non-settler) workers
in key strategic industries: phosphate mining, transportation and ship-
ping. Another was the emergence some years later of an integral nation-
alist movement, the Neo-Destour. Its activist backbone was comprised
of educated bourgeois professionals frustrated by discrimination and
the limited opportunities open to them under the protectorate.17 They
made common cause with CGTT supporters, notably in towns with a
strong union presence, such as the ports of Bizerta and Sfax, as well as
the mining settlements in the south.18 Third was the catalysing effect of
the depression on labour protest and nationalist militancy throughout
the country.19 By 1935 prime ministerial advisers at the Hôtel Matignon
were being advised by the Tunisian administration that peasant fellahs,
industrial labourers and the urban bourgeoisie had joined forces, con-
vinced that France had neither the will nor the wherewithal to protect
the interests of ordinary Tunisians. The country’s adverse commercial
trade balance remained stubbornly negative; smallholders and share-
croppers faced mounting debts; and mining sector wages were low.20
Trouble was brewing.
Meeting the challenge? Gendarmerie reorganization

Anticipating future problems, on the eve of the depression Tunisia’s
gendarmerie commanders were preoccupied by the reorganization and
reinforcement of the limited forces at their disposal. Costs of maintain-
ing the force were borne by the beylical authorities in Tunis, a burden
that increased steadily in the inter-war period. In the immediate post-
war years, for instance, the annual budgetary charge on the Tunisian
government rose from 890,753 francs in 1919 to 1,190,708 francs in
1922.21 For all that, gendarmerie numbers remained much as they had
been in the 1880s, failing to match Tunisia’s demographic and eco-
nomic growth in the intervening years.
The protectorate also stood apart in its local arrangements for mili-
tary service, adjustments to which might have added extra gendarmerie
recruits. Uniquely among the French protectorates and Middle East
mandates, Tunisia enforced a recruitment law that imposed compul-
sory military service on Muslim men. Drawn up in the first years of
the protectorate, after the First World War this legislation was adapted
to provide an annual contingent of 8,000 troops. The army of occupa-
tion could thus maintain a standing complement of 24,000. The law
also contained important exemptions. Registered inhabitants of Tunis
as well as Jewish families were excused the obligation to serve. Taking
population figures from January 1922, the result was that a resident
population of 1,686,533 Muslims outside the capital furnished more
soldiers per head than Algeria, Morocco or even metropolitan France.
As Lucien Saint, recently arrived as Resident-general, commented,
why draw attention to the exceptional weight of military obligations in
Tunisia by pushing harder for additional recruits whether to infantry
units or the gendarmerie?22
Another Tunisian anomaly was that the gendarmerie’s judicial reach
did not span the entire country. This caused confusion amongst offi-
cials, serving officers and their counterparts in the civilian police.
Misunderstandings were compounded by the fact that gendarmes were
responsible for military policing in civil police sectors. The problems
that could arise were nicely illustrated in November 1921 when the
Maritime Prefect of Bizerta warned the French naval staff that sur-
veillance of workers in the port’s Sidi-Abdullah arsenal was woefully
lax. Dockyard labourers and sailors, he claimed, could smuggle and
plot without fear of discovery. Most of the communist literature seized
in police spéciale raids arrived via Tunisia’s docksides.23 Worker subver-
sion and the possibility of naval indiscipline touched a raw nerve in
the Ministry of Marine where the 1919 mutinies aboard the battleships
France and Paris were still prominent in official minds.24 The handful
of gendarmes and agents indigènes who kept watch at the Bizerta base
was clearly insufficient either to monitor the workforce or to break any
strikes that occurred. Backed by the admirals in Paris, the Maritime
Prefect therefore asked the Interior Ministry to assign a special police
commissioner to oversee more rigorous policing at the base. The
Residency was unconvinced. Two police commissioners were already
assigned to Bizerta and Ferryville as part of Tunisia’s ordinary Sûreté
générale. They could keep tabs on industrial conditions and frater-
nization between sailors and dockyard workers. More important, the
Tunis administration was not prepared to see its authority over internal
policing diluted by undue interference from Paris.25
Deliberately or otherwise, the Maritime Prefect gave ammunition

to those who argued that Tunisia’s police provision was inadequate.
As the decade wore on, the protectorate’s gendarmerie commanders,
squadron chiefs Bonnemaison and Gay, took up the charge. Both men
insisted repeatedly that the gendarmerie was too small and widely dis-
persed to discharge its responsibility to police industrial strikes. They
recommended a doubling of gendarmerie numbers to provide a stand-
ing force adequate to cope with workplace unrest. Only a larger gen-
darmerie force, they insisted, would enable Contrôleurs civils and other
local administrators to call upon civil police from interior postings to
reinforce urban police units during periods of disorder.26
In November 1928 Lucien Saint, by then only six weeks from the end
of his term as Resident-general, finally caved in to the officers’ plead-
ing to make the gendarmerie a truly nationwide force. Saint proposed
that the protectorate’s gendarmerie company be reorganized into five
sections in tune with Tunisia’s existing administrative subdivision into
five economic regions. The 2.5 million francs to cover extra gendarm-
erie personnel fell, as ever, on the Tunisian budget, a burden consistent
with the liabilities of ‘protectorate’ status.27 A popular move with gen-
darmerie and police alike, this reform bucked the trend across French
North Africa by shifting larger numbers of Tunisia’s gendarmes into
rural policing under the auspices of the provincial Contrôleurs civils.
It was these Contrôleurs, army officers themselves, who administered
much of the country’s interior.28 Sending gendarmes deeper into the
countryside left the coastal cities to be covered by Sûreté personnel and
GRM units in case of civil protest. Crucially, the establishment of five
regional sections for the first time enabled the gendarmerie to collate
political and economic intelligence drawn from the entire country. The
force would also be increased with the recruitment of thirty-four add-
itional officers and NCOs, eighty-six gendarmes and thirty-one aux-
iliaires indigènes.29
Greater openness towards local Arabic-speaking personnel in gen-
darmerie ranks, although welcome, revealed the most critical shortcom-
ing still endemic across all three North African forces: lack of linguistic
expertise, whether written or vernacular. Despite incentive schemes to
promote the study of Arabic, by November 1929 only one of Tunisia’s
current complement of 121 gendarmes and gradés (sergeants and NCOs)
could claim the extra pay offered. Largely unable to converse in Arabic
or Tamazight, French North Africa’s gendarmes were still foreigners in
occupied territory.30 Fanning out to a series of new brigade postings in
the Tunisian interior where spoken French was rarer, it was no coinci-
dence that the majority of new recruits either admitted or readmitted
to the gendarmerie between January and September 1930 – some forty

out of fifty-four – were native-born, Arab-speaking Tunisians, making
the Tunisia force the only North African gendarmerie with a genuine
claim to ethnic heterogeneity in the 1930s.31
The point requires qualification. Only a year prior to the 1928
restructuring, Residency officials had concurred that ‘unlimited
admission’ of naturalized indigènes into the protectorate gendarmerie
would cause ‘inconvenience’. Three Muslim auxiliary gendarmes who
demonstrated the requisite good conduct, ‘morality’ and ‘Frenchness’
( francisation) were admitted to unfilled positions in Tunis, Sousse and
Sidi-Abdullah.32 And, as we have seen, numbers of Tunisians admitted
increased sharply in 1928. But the stronger flow of Muslim personnel
into Tunisia’s gendarmerie was restricted to auxiliary positions, none
of which promised the full gendarme status that entitled a recipient
to wear the coveted képi helmet. Rigid distinctions between European
officers, NCOs and Muslim ancillaries confined to junior posts were
echoed in the ranks of the Sûreté. Police personnel in Tunis were simi-
larly classified into cadre A, open solely to French citizens, and cadre B,
which admitted Tunisian Muslims who served as auxiliary constables.
Unlike the gendarmerie, a decree of 19 July 1930 permitted police per-
sonnel in cadre B to secure promotion to cadre A by passing a written
examination. This was a preferable alternative for many to naturaliza-
tion as citizens and the loss of Muslim status that came with it.33
If the police was becoming more enlightened, gendarmerie attitudes
remained in stasis. In July 1937 the War Ministry warned Resident
General Armand Guillon, a Popular Front appointee and keen sup-
porter of more equitable admission, that long-serving French gen-
darmes might refuse to take orders from a Tunisian junior officer. The
presence of naturalized Tunisians – technically Muslim apostates –
in gendarmerie ranks at a time of worsening industrial unrest would
infuriate strikers.34 The official argument, counter-intuitive certainly,
was that multi-ethnic composition would increase, not diminish popu-
lar hostility to gendarmerie units.
During 1930 and 1931 the force’s squadron commander repeatedly
complained about adverse press reportage from all sides of the polit-
ical spectrum. Settler newspapers, typified by the Depêche Tunisienne,
insinuated that the gendarmerie was overwhelmed by fast-rising lev-
els of theft from settler-owned property as the depression took hold
within Tunisia’s rural economy.35 Nationalist newspapers such as
the Destourian L’Action Tunisienne exaggerated the incidence of gen-
darmerie brutality during demonstrations and strikes.36 Finally, the
Arab-language press singled out instances of cultural insensitivity and
disrespect for Muslim custom exemplified by gendarmes peering into

vehicles carrying Arab women or lifting women’s veils when conduct-
ing spot checks.37 Coming from opposing perspectives, these criticisms
pointed only one way: to the increased politicization, both of the gen-
darmerie’s repressive policing and of its routine street-level surveillance
in the early depression years.
Instructions issued to the newly established brigade command at
Pont-du-Fahs, near Zaghouan, in March 1932 underlined the point.
Presented with a series of maps identifying all known settler proper-
ties in the district, the brigade commander was told to open files on
all European residents. Records were to be kept of family dependants,
their occupation, military service records and travel outside the area. In
a sense, this was merely a supplement to information routinely collected
by gendarmes on behalf of Contrôleurs civils and bureaux arabes officers
during the census exercises conducted throughout French North Africa
every five years.38 Moreover, the intrusiveness involved in monitoring
French-born settlers was doubly deceptive because the gendarmerie’s
first concern was the surveillance of seditious intent among Tunisians
and, to a lesser extent, settlers of Italian descent.39 Yet the new record-
keeping procedures signified a departure of sorts: gendarmerie brigades
were expected to provide their local Contrôleur civil and the Tunis gen-
darmerie command with bimonthly reports that linked recorded crime
to changes in public opinion and political affiliation. It was here that
more detailed evidence about French settlers was needed. For these
families, whose files resided in gendarmerie headquarters, were to be
consulted systematically about any suspicious statements or other evi-
dence of dissent in their neighbourhood. Effectively invited to inform
on their neighbours, colleagues, workers and housemaids, French set-
tlers were annexed to the apparatus of the gendarmerie’s information
collection about the surrounding population.40
Policing protest in the depression years

In line with the Algerian and Moroccan gendarmerie forces, additional
brigade posts were created in Tunisia during the depression years –
twelve new posts were planned for 1932–5 – in spite of the lack of hous-
ing for the personnel involved. Ironically, the driving force behind
this expansion programme was the depression itself; specifically, the
increasing incidence of violent dissent among mineworkers, many of
them Libyan immigrants, in the ore and phosphate mining compounds
in the Tunisian interior. In common with their Maghreb colleagues,
Tunisia’s gendarmes were becoming workplace overseers, policing
work attendance and the consequences of wage cuts, declining work-

ing conditions and heightened unemployment as the economic crisis
intensified.41
General Baert, overall commander of North African gendarm-
erie forces, and Colonel Mourot,42 the head of Tunisia’s gendarmerie
squadron, warned in 1933 that their officers faced greater risk of lethal
attack from poverty-stricken fellah cultivators, rural day-labourers and
unemployed or under-employed industrial workers. Prices for soft
wheat, a staple export crop, had fallen by 55 per cent over the preced-
ing three years.43 The Residency, meanwhile, did nothing to maintain
olive oil prices, which also fell by 39 per cent between 1930 and 1933,
even though at least a third of Tunisia’s Muslim population supported
itself through olive cultivation.44 Contrôleurs civils in the Tunisian coun-
tryside witnessed the consequences. Many were struck by the slump’s
unprecedented duration, noting that it sapped what residual faith the
rural poor retained in French rule to ameliorate their living conditions.
By 1933 several Contrôleurs discerned a muted popular fury as cultiva-
tors’ debts mounted and agricultural incomes shrank.45
Like the Contrôleurs, Baert and Mourot saw rural poverty first-hand.
Each conducted regular inspection tours of interior brigade posts, so
they were better apprised of these harsh economic indicators than most
Residency officials. Certain that social breakdown was coming the two
officers predicted that their units might struggle to contain a nation-
wide protest movement. The two officers favoured a pre-emptive secur-
ity lockdown, founded on state of siege legislation that would outlaw the
most assertive nationalist groups and trade unions. Whereas Tunisian
nationalism in the early 1920s was an elitist affair dominated by Arab
notables and prominent clerics, by the time the depression hit home
political alignments among the majority subject population were domi-
nated by worker loyalty to the CGTT and growing public support for
Neo-Destour’s nationalist message. Neither organization was in any
way co-opted to the beylical state and each despised it.46
The CGTT, persecuted from its inception, militantly anti-colonial
and bitterly opposed by its settler-dominated Confédération Générale
du Travail (CGT) rival, was always capable of mobilizing mass
opposition.47 CGTT resilience was ingrained by Lucien Saint’s vigorous
reaction to the 1924 strikes in Tunis, Bizerta and Sfax around which the
new trade unionism coalesced. The confederation’s leader, Mohamed
Ali was expelled from the country and, on 29 January 1926, two restrict-
ive decrees were promulgated. The first aimed to strangle the pro-union
press. The second counted unauthorized strike action a political crime,
making those involved liable for arrest as seditionists.48 Neither measure
succeeded. Tunisian trade unionism subsisted, despite the expulsion of

its inspirational leader and the threat of legal sanction against his sup-
porters. Indeed, repressive legislation nurtured the CGTT’s organiza-
tional coherence and distinct political culture of its activist rank and
file. United in adversity, the CGTT’s solidity counter-balanced the fac-
tionalism of the nationalist parties, whose mutual hostility deepened
as Residency staff redoubled their efforts to co-opt Destour notables.
During the early 1930s this inter-party rivalry crystallized into an inter-
generational battle for the soul of Tunisian nationalism between the
ebullient ‘Neo’-Destour and its older, traditionalist namesake.49
In the event, a new Resident-general, Marcel Peyrouton, tackled the
problem at what his officials insisted was its source: the radical leader-
ship of Neo-Destour. Peyrouton was a hardliner who honed his skills
in government in Algeria and Morocco before moving to Tunis in July
1933.50 His prior North African experience sharpened his instinct for
decisive repression, but the path had been cleared by his predecessor
François Manceron. His outgoing administration followed gendarm-
erie advice, beginning legal proceedings after Neo-Destour sponsored
a massive and unruly public campaign against the burial in Muslim
cemeteries of Tunisians ‘naturalized’ as French citizens. Opting for
French citizenship meant repudiation – or, at least, sublimation – of
one’s personal status as a Muslim bound by Koranic law and could thus
be construed as an act of apostasy.51 All very well, but it was no coin-
cidence that the majority of such ‘apostates’, alive or dead, heralded
from a notable elite that provided the hardcore of Old-Destour support.
Neo-Destour’s discovery of Islamic traditionalism was transparently
self-serving and, by the time that Peyrouton arrived in Tunis in July,
the party was banned. Its leaders faced incarceration if found guilty of
spreading their nationalist message and three pro-party newspapers,
L’Action Tunisienne, La Voix du Tunisie and the Voix du Peuple, were also
shut down.
Ostensibly, then, Peyrouton had merely to finesse the repressive
measures instituted in the recent past. But, in doing so, he devised a
new addition to the armoury of judicial powers available to the Resi
dency. Peyrouton fretted that Manceron’s legal initiatives, enshrined in
extended decree powers introduced in April and May 1933, could be
contested in the courts.52 To the delight of the security forces, the new
Resident favoured a simpler catch-all measure that could be summar-
ily applied. His answer was a variant on internment: house arrest for a
determined period, renewable without recourse to the judiciary if the
Residency deemed the individual concerned a danger to national secur-
ity. Peyrouton’s expedient was put in place at the start of September
1934. Within forty-eight hours fourteen Neo-Destour organizers

were dispatched to ‘enforced residence’ in Tunisia’s southern military
territory.53
With Neo-Destour’s executive gagged, the CGTT became the sur-
rogate for party political nationalism. Transport strikes and boycotts
of European products in Tunis and other large coastal towns sustained
the rhythm of public protest against the new wave of repression, but
in Tunisia’s rural settlements Contrôleurs civils encountered less organ-
ized dissent.54 Peyrouton’s efforts to improve peasant cultivators’ access
to credit helped in this. So did an upturn in foodstuff prices during
1934.55 But security force analysts saw little underlying improvement.
Most anticipated that stagnation in the agricultural economy and the
mining sector would spark further disturbances. They were right.
Industrial unrest and the ongoing nationalist schism dominated gen-
darmerie policing during Peyrouton’s first year in office.56
By March 1934 the Tunis command had cancelled gendarmes’ leave
entitlements, acting on political intelligence about the probability of
revolt. Plans were made to congregate settlers in remote districts at
defensible installations such as army garrisons and police buildings
should disorder occur. Colonel Mourot went further. Focusing on
the Monastir region where trade union activism and support for Neo-
Destour were especially strong, he improvised a network of informants
to provide early warning of dissent among agricultural labourers, mine-
workers and the unemployed.57 Mourot conceded that his gendarmes
had neither the contacts nor the linguistic proficiency needed to gather
such information directly. So beylical administrators and local caïds, as
well as settler managers and farm-owners that employed large numbers
of Tunisian personnel were asked to take the lead. These local nota-
bles, already the dominant force within Tunisian local government,
were natural choices as security force adjuncts.58 And Contrôleurs civils
coordinated the information gathered within their district.59 Consistent
with the existing system of bimonthly reporting on local opinion, mem-
bers of this informal coalition of local dignitaries and rural officials
were told to advise their nearest gendarmerie brigade of any concerns
they might have ranging from disgruntled neighbours and village gos-
sip to weapons caches and incipient revolution.60
The work stoppages and demonstrations that began in Moknine dur-
ing the first week of September 1934 therefore came as no surprise. The
town was a nationalist stronghold with a large industrial workforce. But
so confident were local gendarmerie and police captains that they had
things under control that they dismissed the need for reinforcements to
contain an initial demonstration outside the local khalif’s residence on
the morning of 5 September. It proved a fatal mistake. The nearby gen-

darmerie post at Madhia was soon besieged, and the khalifikat overrun
and set alight. By the time seven additional gendarmes arrived from
Sousse, a major riot involving an estimated 5,000 protesters was under-
way. One gendarme died in the ensuing clashes and five others were
seriously injured. Casualties among the demonstrators were far higher.
But they were never definitively tallied because several of those gunned
down by the security forces avoided local medical facilities for fear of
being reported to the authorities.61
The fact that verifiable intelligence had been gathered, and yet
ignored, highlighted deeper problems. Political protests were now
inseparable from people’s economic desperation. And gendarme num-
bers were hopelessly inadequate. Afraid of being rushed and lynched,
the handful of reinforcements sent into Moknine fired on the demon-
strators. The radicalizing effect of the depression on Tunisia’s labour
force provided the escalatory dynamic to political violence. Strikers
were happy to chant Neo-Destour slogans but their principal demand
was for better pay. Unfortunately for them, Peyrouton’s more repressive
regime had blurred the distinctions between conventional strike action
and anti-colonial, pro-nationalist protest.
Constrained by his commitment to cut government spending,
Peyrouton responded, not with more money for the security forces,
but with harsher measures against Neo-Destour. The Tunis Tribune
correctionnel convicted eight more party organizers of sedition against
the monarchy and the protectorate.62 Sent to join their colleagues in
internal exile in the country’s southern military district, their senten-
cing in September 1934 took the overall number of senior party fig-
ures in detention to twenty-two.63 Peyrouton then turned his attention
to Chadly Khairallah, a former bureaucrat and the son of the Bey’s
ex-chief of protocol, persuading him to take over day-to-day running
of Neo-Destour in the absence of its more familiar faces.64 An estab-
lishment insider and a social conservative, Khairallah seemed ill at ease
in his new role, a discomfort that the Resident General was happy to
exploit. During the winter of 1934–5 the Residency tightened the legal
screws even further in order to isolate the new co-opted leadership
from its radical rank and file. Severe punishments were imposed for
unauthorized party gatherings and municipal police forces redoubled
their efforts to break up Neo-Destour’s local networks.65 For his part,
Peyrouton applied his enhanced powers freely. Members of the party
executive scheduled for release in late 1935 were swiftly re-interned on
the dubious pretext that they had supported illegal communist pam-
phleteering in the capital.66
Events across the border in Algeria were also cited to justify Tunisia’s
stricter legal regime and the intrusive police surveillance that came with
it. Georges Le Beau’s Algiers government had been stung by its failure
to anticipate the outbreak of Constantine’s bloody anti-Semitic riots in
late August 1934. A thorough overhaul of colonial intelligence-gather-
ing procedures was launched, focusing on analysis of public opinion
by district and prefectural authorities.67 Where previously reports from
gendarmerie brigades, the native affairs service and district adminis-
trators were distilled by sub-prefects into periodic reviews of local sen-
timent, systematic intelligence collation by dedicated Arabic-speaking
staff attached to the prefecture became the norm.68 The outcome, by
the time the Popular Front began its abortive reform programme in
mid-1936, was the crystallization of a more professional – and sedition-
oriented – political intelligence office, the Centre d’information et d’études
(CIE, Information Analysis Centre). It distilled human intelligence
from informants and police interviews, ‘open source’ reportage from
press and other media and sensitive information from gendarmerie
posts and police stations, mayors and other local officials, into predict-
ive analysis about local opinion. Generously funded and deeply embed-
ded within the colony’s bureaucratic apparatus, by 1938 CIE offices
were at the cutting edge of Algeria’s internal intelligence system.69
Their example was, by then, replicated in Tunisia where the Residency
instructed police captains, gendarmerie commands and Contrôleurs civ-
ils to pool their political intelligence more systematically to counteract
Neo-Destour’s spreading influence.70
After the violence at Moknine and the shock of Constantine, com-
petition for new recruits between the three North African gendarmerie
commands intensified. While some additional gendarmes transferred
in from metropolitan army regiments, the Moroccan and Tunisian
gendarmerie commands pressed the War Ministry to transfer per-
sonnel from Algeria’s 19ème Légion. Not surprisingly, gendarme com-
manders in Algiers resisted this ‘poaching’ of their junior officers, but
with limited success. The net movement of gendarmes between the
Maghreb territories was outward from Algeria to Morocco and, espe-
cially, Tunisia where the likelihood of urban postings and rapid promo-
tion seemed greater. Seen from the Tunisian perspective, attempts in
Algiers to block such personnel transfers were selfish and short-sighted.
For one thing, the 19ème Légion by then counted almost 1,500 men,
more than eight times the size of the Tunisia force. For another, adverse
economic conditions, nationalist protest and violent industrial disputes
were, if anything, more severe in Tunisia. Neo-Destour’s dominance
was an accomplished fact and militancy among mineworkers, dockyard
labourers and the unemployed was at least as powerful as among com-

parable constituencies of opinion in neighbouring Algeria.71 In these
circumstances, the depression-era trend toward more overtly political
repression of nationalist opposition, accompanied by greater resources
devoted to the policing of workplaces, workers and industrial disputes,
was set to continue into the mid-1930s and the advent of Popular Front
reformism in 1936.72
Policing versus Popular Front reform, 1936–7

The outcome of the French general election in May 1936 was hugely
significant. Socialist politicians had served in previous administra-
tions, principally in the two short-lived Cartel des Gauches ministries
elected in 1924 and 1932. But never before had the Socialists, led by
new premier Léon Blum, ascended the commanding heights of gov-
ernment. More remarkable still, the French Communist Party for the
first time endorsed a sitting administration, offering parliamentary
backing to Blum’s ministers.73 This was consistent with Comintern
instruction and the anti-fascist edicts of popular frontism, but it
inspired garish accusations from the right that France was set on a
road to revolution that would bring the empire down with it. The
truth was more mundane. Few communists matched their penchant
for anti-imperialist rhetoric with any serious commitment to decol-
onization.74 Meanwhile, the determination of the two main coalition
partners, the Socialists and the Radicals, to rectify the parlous con-
dition of French defences against Nazi Germany was matched by an
unwavering commitment to imperial unity. There were some anti-
colonial firebrands on the government backbenches, but not in gov-
ernment.75 The Popular Front took the empire’s existence for granted,
presuming any reforms enacted should foster a closer colonial union.
Liberality and imperialism were thereby reconciled in the common
pursuit of colonial modernization.
Armand Guillon personified the new coalition’s ‘colonial humanism’.
Replacing the hard-line Marcel Peyrouton a fortnight before the elec-
tion results in mid-April 1936, Guillon came straight from his previous
posting as Prefect in the Nord, a centre of French labour militancy.
Local coalminers were, at the time, fighting to reverse their employers’
depression-era demands for heightened productivity.76 New collective
bargaining agreements were demanded – and secured.77 Just as Guillon
considered this result long overdue, he backed the Blum govern-
ment’s declared intention to release the great majority of colonial pol-
itical prisoners. The new Resident’s instinct was always to parley with
Neo-Destour and the CGTT, not to crush them. But whereas the
Ministry of Colonies came under the sway of an equally ardent
reformer, the Socialist veteran Marius Moutet, the Foreign Ministry,
whose jurisdiction extended to the North African protectorates, was
less intoxicated by the reformist spirit.78 Although the Quai d’Orsay’s
North African department did not block the release of Neo-Destour
internees in May, Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos did not encourage
Guillon to go further. Habib Bourguiba and his party executive rec-
ognized that the new Resident had little room for manoeuvre. Their
ability to regain lost momentum after three years of repression required
Guillon to retain the upper hand against a security force establishment
convinced that the release programme was, at best, naive; at worst,
criminally negligent.79
Little wonder that the gendarmerie command and the army’s mili-
tary intelligence service seized on the upsurge in strikes, political ral-
lies and street demonstrations as evidence of Residency folly.80 Still,
Guillon pressed on, keen, not only to free political prisoners, but to
extend the government’s industrial reforms to Tunisia. There were
three core elements to these Matignon accords, measures negotiated –
some would say imposed – in response to a strike wave in metropolitan
France immediately Blum came to power. Viewed dispassionately, the
introduction of a forty-hour working week, recognition of unions’ right
to collective bargaining and stricter enforcement of binding labour
contracts, merely laid the foundations for a mixed economy. This was
social democracy, not communization.81 But this verdict overlooks the
relative dearth of welfare legislation and workers’ rights within the
Third Republic, a political system whose outward liberality concealed
multiple discriminations from the disenfranchisement of women to the
lack of basic pension provision. Not without reason was ‘the system’
depicted then and since as ‘a Republic of pals’ and a ‘stalemate soci-
ety’.82 To the system’s beneficiaries, largely drawn from the bourgeoisie
and the professions, the Matignon accords called time on the Third
Republic’s cosy exclusivity.
As if to confirm conservatives’ nightmares, the carnival atmosphere
of sit-in strikes at several of France’s best-known factories turned the
customary hierarchies of French industrial relations upside down.
Employees of Michelin’s Clermont-Ferrand tyre plant, the architectural
embodiment of the clash between old-style family firm and new-style
worker mobilization, even occupied the local prefecture, overwhelming
the police guard at the doors, in defiance of their own shop-stewards.83
From Renault’s giant Parisian complex at Boulogne-Billancourt to
the naval arsenals of Brest, Saint Nazaire and Toulon, the June strikes
seemed to herald a new dawn, a symbolic emancipation, and the end of

depression-era austerity.84
To the French right, for whom market regulation and labour codes
were anathema, the Matignon accords and the display of factory-floor
militancy that preceded them were earth-shattering. Most were con-
vinced that a symbolic shift in the balance of power between the patronat
and their workforce had taken place. An informal alliance of employers’
organizations, conservative senators, more centrist deputies and right-
wing newspapers set out to reverse it. Senior bureaucrats and much of
the military establishment sympathized with their efforts. For those
implacably hostile to the Popular Front, the realization that some colo-
nial administrators favoured replicating the Matignon reforms in the
colonies was more shocking still. One can imagine the huffs of disap-
proval during the second week of August when Guillon lifted restric-
tions on press freedom, right of assembly and trade union operations.85
The Neo-Destour executive, now back in Bourguiba’s hands, took full
advantage. It excoriated security force actions in the party newspaper,
convened rallies of unprecedented size and forged a closer working rela-
tionship with a reinvigorated CGTT. Sûreté officers and gendarmerie
commanders were furious. Their anger intensified when the Residency
stipulated that punishments summarily imposed on demonstrators in
the past, including on-the-spot fines and jail terms of up to a week,
now required formal trial.86 Crowds, no longer fearful of being locked
up, flocked to speeches by Neo-Destour leaders, including Dr Sliman
Ben Sliman, Mahmoud Materi and Tahar Sfar. But Bourguiba was the
main oratorical draw. He spelt out the party’s core demand to a rally in
Gambetta Park in Tunis in early September: equality between Muslim
and European in everything from voting rights and educational entitle-
ment to tax liability and employment provision.87
Neo-Destour’s demands jarred with the Popular Front’s colonial
humanism. A striking term, its humanist element was also positivistic:
anything was possible through co-operation – but only in the fullness
of time. Colonial subjects and French citizens would attain equal rights
thanks to economic modernization and incremental legislative change
introduced at French behest and to a Parisian timetable. Bourguiba
called Guillon’s – and the Popular Front’s – bluff. By insisting that the
government fulfil its vague promises of participatory democracy and
equal opportunity, Neo-Destour asked for too much, too soon.88 To his
opponents within the administration, the hapless Resident-general was
victim of the false expectations his reformist gestures had raised. The
security forces would be left to sort out the mess as it became obvious
that nationalist hopes would be disappointed. Protest policing was set
to get much harder as the cycle of wildcat strikes and mass rallies con-
tinued into 1937.
The clearest evidence that security force priorities shifted in response
to these pressures in Tunisia and elsewhere in French North Africa
was the investment in larger additional GRM brigades. Their pri-
mary role as motorized crowd-control squads was to contain strike
actions and nationalist demonstrations before they could pose a major
threat to factories, government installations, internal communications
and commercial activity. In Algeria the number of GRM squadrons
was doubled from nine to eighteen within weeks of the January 1937
ban imposed on Algeria’s most disciplined integral nationalist group,
Messali Hadj’s Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA).89 Five months later the
Algeria GRM command was elevated in status, its senior officers rank-
ing alongside the head of the colony’s gendarmerie as the officials most
directly responsible for public order policing.90 Theoretically consist-
ent with the continuation of intelligence-led police work – the GRM,
after all, worked best when on the streets before disorder broke out and
not after it – the turn to protest policing actually came at the expense
of rural patrolling. It thereby contributed to the stagnation of the
gendarmerie’s intelligence-gathering capability in much of rural and
small-town Algeria. This change in emphasis could be dated back to
September 1934, when the Algiers government began planning for six
new GRM squadrons (then designated gendarmerie mobile algérienne)
in the towns of Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Bône, Mascara and Blida.
The 19ème Légion commander, Colonel Lavigne, subsequently pushed
for nine such squadrons on 3 December 1934, proposing to meet the
additional costs involved through the temporary closure of the Oran
gendarmerie training school. Approval of Lavigne’s scheme, with its
implicit abandonment of the Oran short-service training scheme for
Algerian recruits, confirmed the turn away from preventive policing,
guided by locally gathered intelligence, towards the short-term require-
ments of riot control.91
Security force preoccupation with the disorders arising from indus-
trial recession was matched by the pre-eminence of economic data
within the political intelligence reports filed by individual gendarmerie
brigades. Alone among the material supplied from rural units, sum-
maries of local economic conditions, foodstuff prices, unemployment
and internal economic migration between regions was collated by com-
mand headquarters and then relayed to the governments in Tunis and
Algiers.92 Some of this information found its way to the Steeg commis-
sion, one of several investigative committees established under Léon
Blum’s government to study socio-economic conditions in the empire.
Headed by Théodore Steeg, a former Minister of Colonies and North

African Governor, the commission divided into sub-committees to
study particular regions. That for French North Africa boasted some
political heavy-weights: among them Paul Reynaud, a future premier;
Henry Berenger, president of the Senate Foreign Affairs Commission;
Charles-André Julien the bookish secretary of the government’s stra-
tegic advisory group, the Mediterranean High Committee; and Paul
Rivet, Secretary-general of the Paris Institute for Ethnology. When this
committee first met to consider its priorities on 8 July 1937, labour condi-
tions ranked high. Guided by two other reformers, Gaston Monnerville
(Marius Moutet’s deputy at the Ministry of Colonies) and the former
journalist François de Tessan (a Quai d’Orsay deputy-minister), the
members decided to study Maghreb labour markets. They focused
on wage contracts, the persistence of unregulated day labour and the
effectiveness of the Popular Front’s newly instituted factory inspection
system.93 Unfortunately this genuine appetite for better understanding
of structural problems in the North African workplace was overtaken
by more widespread regional disorder.
Most gendarmerie and GRM call-outs in Algeria and Tunisia during
the twelve months before the Steeg commission convened were to police
wildcat strikes and protests by the unemployed. The mining sector was
worst affected.94 Two facets of these stoppages worried War Ministry
security analysts. First was the fact that industrial actions spread quickly
from place to place. Lock-outs at one site provoked sympathy strikes at
another, making police and gendarmerie deployment especially diffi-
cult. Second was the mounting evidence that Neo-Destour supporters
helped coordinate worker protest. It was this that explained the strong
ripple effect in Tunisia’s industrial unrest. The party’s national execu-
tive eschewed open involvement in strikes, fearing a renewed ban and
lengthy spells in detention for the senior leadership.95 But local activists
had no such reservations. Siding with striking miners or unemployed
farm labourers was an easy way to raise the party’s profile, particularly
in areas where the local caïd or other, more conservative notables had
links to the party’s Old Destour rival. Tunisia’s strike wave, in other
words, mirrored the dominance within Tunisia’s industrial workforce
of what the War Ministry’s overseas studies section, borrowing syndic-
alist terminology, termed Neo-Destour’s ‘mouvement de base’.96
The sheer scale of the ensuing policing challenge caused concern in
Tunis as well. General Charles Hanote, army commander in the pro-
tectorate, warned Defence Minister Edouard Daladier on 21 August
1937 that the frequency of large internal protests was becoming a stra-
tegic threat. Called in to reinforce gendarmerie and police during strikes
and demonstrations, army companies were diverted from their primary

responsibility to protect the country from external attack. Looking back
over the preceding twelve months beginning on 1 July 1936 – not coin-
cidentally, roughly the period of Popular Front government – Hanote
lamented that the efficiency of his frontline units had suffered.97 The
general cited revealing figures for Tunis. Between them, two squadrons
of North African infantry (zouaves) and one of West African riflemen
(tirailleurs sénégalais) had been called out on so-called ‘alertes au quar-
tier’ to assist the capital’s police 119 times over the past year.98 Over the
same period, fifteen ‘sections’ (each comprised of thirty troops) within
a single colonial infantry battalion stationed to the south in Kef worked
with police and gendarmerie in putting down six local strikes. These
included clashes at Metlaoui and Djerissa, which ended in fatalities.
Based on these figures, a soldier garrisoned near one of Tunisia’s min-
ing centres spent an average of twenty-two working days between 1 July
1936 and 1 August 1937 in policing industrial protest.99
There was no sign of improvement. Violent confrontations between
strikers and the security forces proliferated, especially in southern min-
ing districts and on the streets of Tunisia’s port cities.100 The shootings
at the Metlaoui mine complex in March 1937 were the most extreme
instance of this. Sixteen were killed by security force gunfire. The
nationalist press insisted that the large number of gunshot wounds was
proof of a new shoot-to-kill policy. Further accusations of army bru-
tality were made at the funerals for the dead workers, an unwanted
curtain-raiser to Resident-general Guillon’s tour of inspection through
the mining region.101 Metlaoui was the most widely reported case of a
disastrous military call-out, but it was soon followed by others. Within
days, CGTT-affiliated miners shut down production at southern mine-
works in Gafsa and Redeyef.102
Security force violence followed the same quickening rhythm. Four
dead at M’dilla on the same day as the Metlaoui killings; six shipyard
workers killed at Métline near Bizerta in clashes with police.103 Then a
lull, but only a brief one: on 20 July two striking miners were shot dead at
Djerissa where the mine company had requested troops. Another walk-
out at the Chauffour-Dumez workshops at Métline on 1 August culmi-
nated in the now familiar cycle of stone-throwing, scuffling and rifle-fire
from army reinforcements. The scene here was truly chaotic and final
numbers of killed or injured were unclear. A month later scores were
wounded during fighting between strikers, police and gendarmes at a
brickworks in Menzel-Djemil, north of Tunis, on 3 September 1937.104
Rather than limiting confrontation, the presence of armed police, gen-
darmes or regular troops turned strike actions into bloodbaths.
Sensing an obvious political opportunity, Bourguiba channelled

public anger against the security forces’ heavy-handedness into sup-
port for Neo-Destour. On 29 May he published a leading article in the
party newspaper, L’Action Tunisienne. Writing with venomous indigna-
tion, Bourguiba accused the Residency of using gendarmes and colo-
nial soldiers as instruments of repression. The GRM was singled out
as especially brutal.105 The gendarmerie command was so incensed
by Bourguiba’s allegations that it complained to prosecutors in Tunis.
Proceedings were launched against the newspaper for defamation, a
move depicted by Neo-Destour as a crude attempt to stifle legitim-
ate criticism by shutting down the presses of L’Action Tunisienne. If so,
the move backfired. Spurred into action, the newspaper published a
flood of articles attacking police brutality and restrictions on Tunisians’
right of assembly. It insisted that a ‘massacre’ had occurred at Djerissa
on 20 July. Revelations about killings at other sites were promised.
Anticipating an imminent ban, Bourguiba and fellow executive mem-
ber Mahmud Materi posed the rhetorical question in a 23 July editorial,
‘Isn’t this a return to dictatorship?’106
Investigative journalism perhaps, high principle maybe, but politick-
ing was also involved. Criticizing security force tactics and judicial coer-
cion made it harder for Bourguiba’s moderate rivals in the Old Destour
movement to advocate conciliation with the French authorities as an
alternative to Neo-Destour’s uncompromising nationalism. The timing
was crucial. Supporters of Old Destour were hoping that the imminent
return to Tunisia of Sheikh Abdelaziz Taalbi would reverse their seem-
ingly inexorable decline next to Bourguiba’s firebrand activism. The
elder statesman – or ‘apostle’ – of Tunisian nationalism, Taalbi was
first imprisoned by the Residency in 1920.107 Despite spending fourteen
years overseas, he enjoyed unrivalled political and religious prestige
next to the radical upstarts of Neo-Destour. Within weeks of his return
to Tunisia on 8 July the Sheikh began pressing for reunification of the
opposing Destour camps.108
Police stood by when the Sheikh’s followers took their campaign to
the streets, starting with a 27 August rally at Cap Bon at which Taalbi
demanded unity. Visibly encouraged by the crowd’s warm reception,
the Sheikh decided to take on Bourguiba in the press. He accused his
younger rival of sectarianism in an article published in several French
and Arab language papers on 4 September. But Taalbi went further,
promising a programme mapping out the terms of Destour reunifica-
tion by the end of the month. Bourguiba responded in kind, personal-
izing the battle. Taalbi, he claimed, was no conciliator but judge and
jury of Destour’s future. The Sheikh meanwhile packed his diary with
public engagements intended to demonstrate public support for a reuni-

fied Destour movement under its former leadership. But the Sheikh’s
decision to take his campaign south into the Tunisian Sahel, heartland
of Bourguiba’s support, proved his undoing. It was this that drove Neo-
Destour loyalists to mount counter-demonstrations, starting in Sousse.
Bourguiba loyalists dismissed Taalbi as a traitor to the nationalist
cause and a Residency stooge. Not surprisingly, the atmosphere at such
encounters was poisonous, often degenerating into fist-fights between
rival party factions. The fracas aside, the counter-protests confirmed
Neo-Destour’s entrenchment in the Sahel where economic hardship
among mineworkers and the peasantry was worst.109
Taalbi’s eclipse marked a watershed in Residency attitudes to
Bourguiba, his party and any demonstrations in support of it. The secur-
ity forces, which stood back as the rival Destour factions struggled for
supremacy over the summer of 1937, were immersed in the struggle by
late September. On 26 September gendarmerie reinforcements bussed
in from Bizerta clashed with several hundred Neo-Destour activists in
nearby Mateur. The town was an Old Destour stronghold, so followers
of the rival faction travelled in by train from Bizerta and Ferryville in
a bid to overawe Taalbi’s followers when the Sheikh arrived late that
afternoon. Scuffles broke out, which escalated into running street bat-
tles between the opposing groups. Several Old Destour supporters were
stabbed; at least five more received gunshot wounds at the hands of the
incomers. According to the Sûreté, police were later fired on while trying
to collar suspects boarding an evening train back to Bizerta. Over forty
arrests were made and weapons seized, including revolvers, knives and
razors. The Residency cited the mob-like behaviour of Neo-Destour’s
followers as justification enough for Contrôleurs civils to be given their
head in calling out gendarmes and garrison troops whenever required
to deal with the worsening political violence.110
The events at Mateur set the precedent. Acting on instructions from
local Contrôleurs, subsequent gendarmerie interventions were particu-
larly robust in places where Taalbi’s followers were cowed by Neo-
Destour counter-demonstrations. Béja was one such. A bustling town
south of Tunis, it counted a substantial settler presence among its 13,000
residents. On market day, 2 October 1937, a gendarme squadron was
deployed there on the advice of the town’s Contrôleur, the caïd and their
colleagues in Zaghouan, another town to the south-east from which
Taalbi was expected to depart later that day. Crowds were expected in
Béja’s central square where Taalbi was due to address his supporters
after making his way northwards from a morning rally in Zaghouan.
This earlier meeting passed off quietly, Zaghouan’s few police and
gendarmes having been reinforced by a unit of spahi cavalry brought in

from Bizerta.111 But in Béja, the military presence was smaller: twenty-
three gendarmes and five security guards, or maréchaux des logis, under
the command of Bizerta’s gendarmerie commander, a Captain Boso.
He headed for the edge of town with twenty of his men when told that
a pro-Bourguiba crowd, estimated at 300 to 400 strong, had blocked
the main road to prevent Taalbi’s arrival. Boso’s men were pelted with
stones in what looked like a repeat of the previous week’s events at
Mateur. Following standard practice in these situations, a gendarm-
erie snatch-squad arrested an individual identified as ringleader. While
the gendarmes put the man into their van, their colleagues blocked
the protesters surging forward. Boso gave the order to fire when two
officers were injured in the jostling. Five demonstrators were shot, one
fatally.112
News of the killing brought a much larger crowd of Neo-Destour
supporters onto the streets of Béja, perhaps 3,000 according to the local
Contrôleur. Afraid that the town’s settler district would be sacked, he
called in the army and additional gendarmes from the Bizerta naval
base. This overwhelming security presence imposed an uneasy calm.
The local Neo-Destour branch simply ordered that all Arab-owned
shops be closed the following day in respect for the dead man’s funeral
cortège – itself a powerful show of strength. The party executive was
less restrained. Leading radical Salah Ben Youssef poured scorn on
the protectorate authorities in L’Action Tunisienne. Ben Youssef linked
the Béja killing to the earlier deaths of protesters at Metlaoui, M’dilla
and Djerissa. The gendarmerie, he insisted, were tools of a ‘fascist’
state determined to exterminate its opponents. This was too much.
Ben Youssef accomplished what Bourguiba had not, provoking the
Residency to such an extent that he was arrested and his party’s news-
paper temporarily shut down.113
General Hanote’s earlier warning about the diversion of his troops
from their imperial defence duties registered its impact as Tunisia’s pol-
itical crisis intensified in late 1937. Daladier, the strongest voice inside the
Radical Party, was at the time serving as both the minister responsible
for the army and the coordinator of the French rearmament effort. He
understood the strategic value of Tunisia’s mining output and the vital
importance of its eastern land boundary with Italian Libya. Elevated to
become prime minister in April 1938, he later staked his reputation on
protecting France’s Maghreb possessions from Mussolini’s expansion-
ism.114 Hanote’s complaint crossed Daladier’s desk just as he was consoli-
dating his place as armed forces spokesman inside a reshuffled Popular
Front coalition. Good timing. When the Residency began deliberating
Tunisia’s internal spending budget for 1938 extra provision was made
for expansion of standing internal security forces. Police numbers saw
the largest increase, with an additional thirty independent units created
for public order policing. Greater use of mounted spahis was also rec-
ommended. To meet Hanote’s concerns, monthly talks were to be held
with the Algerian authorities regarding joint surveillance across their
common border. A tri-monthly North African security services liaison
conference was also envisaged to ensure that political intelligence was
shared more effectively between local prefectures of police and the pol-
itical intelligence specialists in the Sûreté’s police spéciale.115
Repression resumed, 1937–9

These additional security measures confirmed what was already abun-
dantly clear on the ground, namely that Guillon’s thirty-month spell
at the Residency had not revitalized relations with Tunisia’s Muslim
majority. As we have seen, months before Guillon said goodbye to
Tunis on 18 October 1938, the country’s security forces were chron-
ically over-extended. Between 1937 and 1939 police and soldiers in
Tunisia were called out more frequently than in any other of France’s
Muslim territories.116 The increase in police numbers did not assuage
settler anxieties about worsening disorder in the coastal cities and
near European-owned properties. Nor were the promised units suf-
ficient to assist hard-pressed Contrôleurs civils in keeping order in the
countryside.117
Tunisia’s southern Sahel and its urban industrial centres remained
focal points for Neo-Destour activism, even more so after Bourguiba
strengthened his grip over the party executive in late 1937.118 With street
clashes occurring almost daily, Bourguiba placed CGTT organizers,
the Destourian youth wing and its highly disciplined women’s move-
ment at the heart of his strategy of protest. Unionized workers, Muslim
scouting groups and female demonstrators could each in their different
ways ramp up levels of strike action and civil disobedience.119 In the
event, it was another constituency of nationalist support – university
students in Tunis – which, in April 1938, sparked the next decisive con-
frontation between protesters and security forces.
For students at the capital’s Sadiki College, the Zitaouna mosque
was part of university life. The mosque’s ascetic teachings on Muslim
cultural purity lent gravitas to Destourian nationalism and echoed the
views of some among Sadiki’s teaching faculty. Both locations were
closely monitored by the Sûreté. Student protests ensued after police
officers arrested a Sadiki lecturer for alleged sedition. Again, the
timing was critical. The demonstrations coincided with Neo-Destour

preparations for a general strike. For the capital’s police and gendarm-
erie officers, nationalist militancy and worker protest were becoming
inseparable. Strikers, university students, pupils from Koranic schools,
scouts, women’s groups and Neo-Destourians were increasingly diffi-
cult to distinguish at street level. Repeated stand-offs between protest-
ers and the gendarmerie in the centre of Tunis climaxed on 9 April.
Disturbances were reported across the city. An anonymous attacker
cut a gendarme’s throat. GRM squadrons posted around the Palais de
Justice, where the Sadiki lecturer was being held, struggled to prevent
students from breaking through.120 Regular troops arrived on the scene
and, for the first time, used machine-gun fire against an urban crowd.
The death toll was commensurately heavy: twenty-two according to
official figures; ten times that according to the nationalist press.121
Both sides had crossed a Rubicon from noisy but limited public dis-
order to insurrectionary violence. Sworn into office the following morn-
ing, Edouard Daladier’s new government – the first Ministry to break
definitively with the Popular Front – signalled its hard-line intentions by
authorizing martial law in Tunisia. Tunis, Sousse and Grombalia, the
towns worst affected by the rioting, were placed under state of siege.122
Legislation banning Neo-Destour was dusted off and reactivated on 12
April.123 General Jean Bessière, the Armée d’Afrique’s divisional com-
mander in Tunis, assigned some of his units to city patrolling. More
were deployed as required by police or gendarmerie. The 4ème zouaves,
an imposing colonial infantry section, became a unit almost entirely
devoted to urban riot control.124
Bessière’s forces swept through the capital over a forty-eight-hour
period on 22–3 April conducting identity checks and searching the
homes of known suspects.125 In compliance with the state of siege regu-
lations, every search unit was accompanied by either a police officer or
a gendarme. They determined the level of force to be used in effecting
entry to buildings and making arrests.126 In the event, what Bessière
dubbed the two-day ‘purge’ of Tunis passed off peacefully. Only one
person was detained for involvement in the violence of 9 April, a fur-
ther twenty-nine for possession of illegal firearms. But an additional
214 were held for various minor infractions. In total, fifty-two alleged
troublemakers either caught with a firearm or suspected of links to
Neo-Destour were arrested in Tunis by the military authorities and
held in the city garrison, camp Foch.127 A further 94 were detained in
Grombalia.128
The presence of additional troops on the streets of the major towns
and cities during the crackdown did not make policing safer. Residency
officials reported unusually high levels of verbal abuse against their

staff, and hundreds of teenagers were accosted by police after hurling
insults, stones or worse at European passers-by.129 Gendarmerie patrols
assigned to track down nationalist ‘saboteurs’ who pulled up railway
tracks, cut telegraph wires or took pot-shots at the security forces were
particularly vulnerable.130 Responding to the killing of another genda
rme during the 9 April disorders, on 17 May Lieutenant-Colonel Vallon,
Tunisia’s gendarmerie commander, ordered his men to carry a rifle at
all times.131 The state of siege endured for four months. Restrictions on
public gatherings and anti-colonial press statements remained in force
thereafter. Newspapers found guilty of incitement to violence, a crime
now very broadly defined, faced banning orders intended to drive them
out of business. As they had done under Peyrouton, Contrôleurs civils
once again devoted more attention to political intelligence, providing
the security forces with early warning of protests.132 Most important,
the new Resident General, Eirik Labonne, to whom General Hanote
handed over in October 1938, was the antithesis of Guillon. The
embattled Popular Front appointee tried to salvage something from the
political wreckage of martial law by putting out feelers to nationalist
moderates appalled by the recent turn of events. His successor did the
opposite.133
Labonne rejected any resumption of dialogue and instead resurrected
Peyrouton’s policy of severing all connection between Neo-Destour’s
leadership and its grassroots. A ban on unauthorized political meetings
under threat of internment became the Residency’s weapon of choice.134
But the structural conditions that nourished nationalist support were
unaltered. Rural hardship, although patchier, was, in places, worse
than during the trough of depression in 1933–4. Drought in central
and southern Tunisia devastated the 1938 cereals crop. Olive produc-
tion fell by between 30 and 40 per cent owing to lower rainfall in coastal
regions. Aphids did the damage in the wine industry. Commercial
vineyards were dominated by settler producers who employed Tunisian
day labourers according to seasonal requirements. After the phylloxera
aphid struck, the numbers of workers required for harvesting and wine
production collapsed. Unemployment soared in the wine belt south of
Tunis.135 Labonne was not insensitive to these problems. The minimum
wage in the agricultural sector was increased and rural councils were
invited to submit bids for emergency relief funding.136 Still, the under-
lying hostility to French rule persisted.
By 1939 the collective anxieties of Tunisia’s security forces had crystal-
lized around the associated challenges of political reform and industrial
unrest.137 When Prime Minister Daladier conducted a high-profile tour
of Tunisia in early January he expressed surprise at how few gendarmes

were locally available.138 Bourguiba, taken into custody immediately after
the April riots, was still awaiting trial. Residency staff warned Labonne
that lengthy court proceedings might ignite widespread disturbances,
which police, GRM and army units would struggle to control.139 So
Labonne chose expediency over exemplary justice. At his behest, in April
1939 some 600 internees, most of them low-level Neo-Destour activists,
were amnestied by decree. Bourguiba and fellow party executive mem-
bers were simply interned without trial.140 The Residency’s double-edged
response illustrated how stale-mated Tunisian politics had become. On
6 May, Labonne, exasperated by Neo-Destour militants who persisted
in convening secret meetings and organizing anti-French protests in
defiance of the official ban, instituted harsher penalties for proscribed
political activity.141 It would be another generation, many more residents
general, and countless more demonstrations before Bourguiba emerged
victorious as the first president of an independent Tunisian state in
March 1956.
Conclusion
Not until the decisive eighteen months from January 1937, a critical
moment that witnessed the proscription of Tunisia’s Neo-Destour,
Algeria’s PPA and the Moroccan Action Committee – together, the
three leading nationalist movements in French North Africa – did
the emphasis in gendarmerie repression shift unequivocally from the
industrial arena to the party political one.142 Prior to that, protest
policing in the French-ruled Maghreb was still driven by the actions
of local populations as economic actors rather than as nationalist
supporters.
The distinction is perhaps academic. Officials and security analysts
in Tunisia increasingly melded material hardship, industrial strife and
popular nationalism into a single threat. In January 1938, for instance,
Resident General Guillon, still a reformist at heart, dispatched the
results of an investigation into living conditions among mining families
working for the Compagnie des phosphates et des chemins de fer de Sfax-
Gafsa. Their grievances were hardly the stuff of revolution: real-terms
falls in wages despite the discovery of rich new mineral deposits; nuga-
tory pension provision; and managers’ presumption that minework-
ers, many of whom worked seasonally, could supplement their income
with farm labour.143 Yet these concerns, which pointed to hopes falsely
raised by the Popular Front’s industrial reforms, were politicized by
the harsh security force response they incurred. Strikes arising from
0 100 200 300 400 km Communist International–Comintern

Anti-colonial groups
0 100 200 miles
Paris North African Star
North African student associations
F R A N C E
A T L A N T I C
O C E A N
Genèva
Lyon
I TA LY
Toulon
Rome
L
S P A I N
GA
Madrid
TU
POR
M EDI TERR ANE AN SE A

Bizerta
Algiers
Tangier Blida
Tetouan Oran Tunis
Larache Orléansville Sétif Constantine
Mascara
Sidi-bel-Abbès
Rabat
TUN
Tlemcen Saïda Biskra
Fez
Casablanca
IS
MOROCCO
IA
Mzab
A L G E R I A
El Borma
Tunisian Destour
Communist International–Comintern
Anti-French political parties
Revolutionary groups including the
LIBYA
Neo-Wahabites/Algerian ‘ulamas
Pan-Islam supporters North African Star
Supporters of Dr Bendjelloul Worst affected regions
Map 5.2 War Ministry Muslim Affairs section map, ‘Comintern

activity in North Africa’, produced in August 1936 (AN, F60, 769).
conventional demands about terms and conditions were swept up in

the onward march of Neo-Destourian nationalism because the same
police, gendarmerie and troops called out to contain them also policed
the mass demonstrations organized by Habib Bourguiba’s supporters.
The result was a single narrative of anti-governmental protest in which
striking miners and nationalist radicals became indistinguishable as
targets of police repression.
Militancy among Tunisian workers, and mineworkers above all, was

nothing new. Nor was it unexpected after many of the Popular Front’s
industrial reforms were extended to Tunisia and Morocco from late
1936 onwards. In these circumstances, explanations for the use of riot
police and army units against Arab strikers may be better found by
analysing the prevailing culture of state violence within the Tunisian
administration and its security forces. Official fears of colonial break-
down in French North Africa were sharpest amongst those organiza-
tions charged with upholding imperial authority: the security services
and police agencies such as city Sûreté commands and the riot control
specialists of the Garde républicaine mobile. The colonial policing of
public gatherings and worker protests exposed a dangerous mix of
racial stereotyping, dread of external sedition (such as the Comintern
networks identified by the army’s colonial intelligence division in
Map 5.2) and a pseudo-psychology of Muslim crowd behaviour.144
The conviction that these perceived threats were coalescing into a
single overarching menace, as illustrated in Map 5.2, made the use of
armed force near inevitable.
When combined with Residency fears about the social consequences
of industrialization and the emergence of an urban underclass, the
result was a propensity to employ lethal force against organized polit-
ical opposition.145 One notable feature of the state of siege regulations
enacted in April 1938, for instance, was the enthusiasm with which the
security forces embraced them. The resumption of civilian rule with
the arrival of Eirik Labonne as Resident-general in October 1938 was
actually nothing of the sort. The security lockdown continued until the
first substantial amnesty of Neo-Destour members in April 1939. By
the end of the inter-war period, protest policing, now decisively turned
from the industrial arena to the political one, was a core element of
Residency policy.
6 Rubber, coolies and communists: Policing
disorder in French Vietnam
This chapter investigates Vietnamese political organization and

countervailing police activity from the perspective of working conditions
in the rubber sector. The point is to demonstrate the extent to which
industrial disputes, labour attrition (through death, epidemic illness,
injury and absenteeism) and worsening treatment of plantation work-
forces fundamentally altered colonial policing in inter-war Vietnam.
To do so we need first to examine the communist-backed disorders
that gripped the Vietnamese territories as the Indochina federation slid
deeper into depression conditions in 1930–1. Once these uprisings were
suppressed French colonial police work, as well as that of company-
hired overseers, foremen and security guards, was consumed by the
requirements of labour control, even more than in the North African
territories we’ve just left.1 This shift in focus – away from suppression of
rebellion and towards the regulation of the rubber industry – was less of
a new departure than might be imagined. The policing of workers, coo-
lie labourers especially, was reconfigured as part of the wider political
struggle against the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) whose activ-
ists had spearheaded the revolts of the early 1930s. After revisiting these
incidents, the chapter draws heavily on the example of the Michelin
rubber plantations of southern Vietnam, at the time the world’s largest,
to illustrate Vietnam’s protest policing in action.
Before, during and after the First World War French-ruled Vietnam
witnessed some of the colonial world’s most dramatic political vio-
lence.2 Anti-colonial secret societies proliferated in the early twentieth
century. Some built on links between Vietnamese exiles and students
in Tokyo, whose numbers increased after Japan’s 1905 victory in the
Russo-Japanese War. Others, such as the Vietnam Restoration League
(Viêt-nam Quang-phuc-hôi) developed within émigré communities in
China, and drew inspiration from the nationalist revolution that over-
threw the Manchu dynasty in 1911–12.3 Political assassinations and
killings of security force personnel became commonplace. In June 1908
supporters of Vietnamese patriot Huang Hoa Tham even poisoned
141
soldiers of the Hanoi garrison, lacing their evening meal with toxins
from the datura flower. Guillotining the plot’s thirteen ringleaders did
not prevent the resumption in attacks on colonial officials. Various gov-
ernment installations in Hanoi, Saigon and Hue were bombed between
1912 and 1919. On 7 May 1913 the colonial government suspended
normal legal process, enacting a system of preventive detention. A com-
mission under Jean Bourcier Saint-Chaffray, the governor, or ‘Resident-
Supérieur’ of Laos, was established to deliver quick verdicts against
secret society members.4 With so many political opponents locked up,
prisons became nerve-centres of sedition. Cell block riots and mass
break-outs mocked government insistence that security was assured.5
Sporadic disorders, elaborate plots, army mutinies; it was not sup-
posed to be this way. Albert Sarraut, an exceptionally capable politician
who was Governor-general for much of this period, piloted through far-
reaching legal reforms that laid foundations for a fairer, more respon-
sive colonial administration. From October 1911 proficiency in local
dialect became a sine qua non for certain posts in Indochina’s regional
bureaucracy.6 A January 1912 decree conferred an automatic right of
appeal on anyone sentenced to more than five years’ imprisonment.
Corporal punishment under customary law was banned in February
1913 (although rarely enforced). In the same year consultative assem-
blies were reorganized throughout Indochina, a considerable task given
the federation’s size and complexity, evident in Map 6.1.7
And yet … A generation later, in December 1931 French journal-
ist Pierre Herbart visited the Phu-Dien prison. Situated fifty kilome-
tres from Vinh, capital of Nghê ̣ An province, epicentre of the so-called
Nghê ̣-T ı̃nh soviet movement in northern Annam, Herbart’s descrip-
tion of what confronted him showed how little times had changed:
I entered one of the three long, dark, cramped prison barracks. There was an
overwhelming smell that made me gag. 200 prisoners per barrack were held
side by side, their feet locked in rings linked to a sort of long wooden tri-
angle. They had terrible skin complaints, the result of filthy conditions and
lack of washing facilities. Using a translator I learnt that they were beaten by
the guards and several did not know why they were being punished as they had
paid their taxes. There were deaths each day and night. I estimated that one
of the prisoners was only twelve years old, condemned to six months’ prison
after his parents were executed for being Communists. Female prisoners aged
between fourteen and seventeen were held in a nearby ‘cage’ and used as prison
prostitutes.8
The reason for Phu-Dien’s high prison population during the early
depression years we shall discover later. The point to stress here is
that harsh state repression and organized opposition to it were deeply
Rubber, coolies and communists 143
Map 6.1 French colonial map of Indochina, c. 1938
entrenched. Such was the case in three regions above all: Tonkin’s
densely-populated Red River Delta, centre of Vietnamese rice and coal
production; the town and hinterland of Vinh, a fast-growing industrial
centre in north-central Vietnam; and southern Vietnam’s plantation
economy. Very different in terms of agricultural activity, industrial

concentration and population density, the Red River Delta, the factor-
ies and workshops of Vinh and the plantation districts outlying Saigon
shared a common feature. Impoverishment of the local population was
tied to French land seizures and the decreasing availability of cultivable
plots for peasant households. A 1955 survey of Vietnamese land own-
ership conducted by French anthropologist Pierre Gourou calculated
that by the late 1930s 62 per cent of smallholder families in Tonkin
possessed less than one mau – or 0.36 hectares – of land: too little for
family subsistence farming and a stimulus for the flight from the land
in search of waged work. Gourou’s figures were more conservative than
those of the Popular Front’s January 1937 commission of inquiry into
social conditions in Vietnam. Its landholding statistics indicated that in
several northern provinces peasant agriculture was unviable. Farmers
could neither feed their families from privately owned paddy nor from
communally farmed village plots. Hence, the rapidity of Vietnamese
proletarianization that so terrified the Popular Front’s commissioners.9
Where French reformers dwelt on agricultural modernization, irriga-
tion schemes and improved rural credit facilities, leading ICP members
Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap were the first to ascribe the plight
of Vietnam’s peasantry to colonial land seizures, punitively high taxes
and the oppressive demands of plantation owners.10
Starting with this cognitive dissonance between rulers and ruled,
histories of colonial politics in inter-war Vietnam are understand-
ably drawn to popular opposition to French rule and the reactions it
elicited. Classic studies have focused on the ICP’s emergence, chart-
ing its rise through student politics in 1920s Paris, activists’ ties with
leftist revolutionaries in Moscow and China, factional struggles with
its principal domestic rival, the Vietnam Nationalist Party (or Viêt
Nam Quôc Dân Dang: VNQDD) and the development of a more
disciplined party machine following rebellion and repression during
the 1930s. Other recent works are accented towards diverse mani-
festations of Vietnamese literary expression and cultural resilience.
They have painted the communist challenge onto a broader canvas
of a vibrant civil society determined to reconcile Vietnamese values
with modernist alternatives to imperial tutelage.11 Two of colonial
Indochina’s most sensitive historians, Mark Bradley and Christopher
Goscha, have stressed that numerous French-educated radicals of the
urban intelligentsia came of age between the wars. Some embraced
western individualism, seeing in the modernist writings of liberal
thinkers prescriptions for escape from colonial subordination and
the stifling Confucianism of family life.12 Goscha has identified
complex networks of trade, cultural exchange and military innovation

exploited by Vietnamese anti-colonialists to build functioning social
and administrative alternatives to imperial rule.13 Challenges to French
domination in Vietnam were many and various.
Policing priorities
Reviewing the evidence above, it is tempting to assume that colonial
policing in the Vietnamese territories between the wars would be domi-
nated by efforts to contain these oppositional forces. This is part of
the story. Yet, despite the vociferousness of new-style anti-colonialism,
this chapter suggests that the focus of repressive policing lay else-
where: in colonial Vietnam’s fastest-growing export industry, rubber
production in the southern colony of Cochin-China. (The southern
orientation of plantation agriculture is shown in Map 6.2.) Few would
deny that the rubber industry figured large in official thinking about
how to govern Indochina, much as it did within the communist strat-
egies devised to end colonial rule. By 1939 rubber accounted for 34
per cent of Indochina’s total exports, and ranked just below wine, rice
and wheat as one of the four principal export products in the entire
empire.14 Rubber’s economic importance was matched by its impact on
Indochina’s workforce. Historians usually contend that the implantation
of communist ideology began in the north and was spread southwards
by the large numbers of migrant coolies employed in Cochin-China’s
rubber industry where the demand for labour exploded in the so-called
‘rubber boom’ of 1923 to 1928.15
Studies of the Vietnamese economy and of Vietnamese labour before
and after the depression have addressed leftist infiltration of the indus-
trial workforce. There was, of course, no clinical separation between
industrial protest, communist sedition and other forms of organized
opposition, and, as we shall see, the responses of Vietnam’s colonial
police to workplace unrest were conditioned by broader fears of anti-
colonial revolt. A critical distinction remains, nonetheless, for the large
rubber estates of southern Vietnam were European-run workplaces (see
Table 6.1 below).
In April 1936, with the Popular Front set to win power in France, the
number of registered plantations stood at 814. But these ownership fig-
ures were misleading because, of the 814 plantations, a majority – 432 –
belonged to Vietnamese or Cambodians. The difference was that the
remaining 382 European-owned plantations were far larger and heavily
capitalized, totalling 93.4 per cent of the total area planted. The biggest
belonged to a handful of large corporations. Most were organized into
YUNNAN
GUANGXI
Cao Bang
Lao Kay T O Na Sam

N
Re
GUANGDONG
d
iv Lang Son
K
R
e r
A Dien Bien Phu Bla
I
M ck
Riv
N Mong Cai
R
er
BU
Hanoi Hon Gay

Haiphong
s
Xieng Khang
rie
he
Luang Prabang
Fis
Rice
farming
Xieng HAINAN
Mekong
Khouang
Vinh
L Ben Thuy
Pak Lay
Vientiane
A
Thakheh
O
Quang Tri
Savannakhat Hué
M
S
Tourane
ek
on
S I A M
g
Pak Se
Bassac
A N
ng
Ko
Se
N A
Sisophon Qui Nhon

Angkor
CAMBODIA
Battambang
M
Arable
farming
Pursat Kratie
Nha Trang
Babaur
Fisheries
Kompong
MINERAL RESOURCES Cham
Oil and lignite Phnom Penh
Iron ore
Tin
Zinc Saigon Phan Thiet
Kampot
Gold
COCHIN CH IN A
Ha Tien My Tho
PLANTATION AREAS
Rach Gia International boundaries
Cotton
Administrative boundaries
Tea Soc Trang
Roads
Sugar cane Bac Lieu ies
er Railways
sh
Rubber Fi 0 100 200 300 km
Coastal and valley rice paddy Poulo Condor

0 50 100 150 miles
Map 6.2 Economic map of colonial Indochina in 1930

Table 6.1 Vietnam rubber plantations, size in hectares (he), distribution

and ownership, April 1936
Cochin-China Cambodia Annam Laos Tonkin Total %
European- 88,731 he 27,143 he 1,644 he 20 he None 117,640 he 93.4%

owned
plantations
Indigène- 8,181 he 66 he 10 he 12 he 1 he 8,272 he 6.6%
owned
plantations
TOTAL 96,913 27,210 1,654 32 1 125,812 100%
Percentage 76.3% 21.62% 1.31% 0.76% 0.01% 100%
Source: ANOM, FM/INDO/NF997: Indochine, Caoutchouc (1933–39), Institut des recher-

ches agronomiques, ‘La situation des principaux produits d’exportation’, Hanoi, 4 April
1936.
Table 6.2 Size of Vietnam’s rubber plantations (in hectares – he), April 1936
Greater Less
than 3,000 to 1,000 to 500 to 100 to 40 to than
5,000 he 5,000 he 3,000 he 1,000 he 500 he 100 he 40 he TOTAL
European- 4 3 24 21 90 105 135 382

owned
Indigenous- – – – – 12 43 377 432
owned
TOTAL 4 3 24 21 102 148 512 814
Source: ANOM, FM/INDO/NF997: Indochine, Caoutchouc (1933–39), Institut des recher-

ches agronomiques, ‘La situation des principaux produits d’exportation’, Hanoi, 4 April
1936.
the Section autonome de l’Union des planteurs de Caoutchouc de l’Indochine

(Indochina Rubber Planters’ Union) (see Table 6.2).16
The prime estate locations controlled by the big rubber companies
were concentrated in the fertile regions of northeast Cochin-China
and southeast Cambodia, where it was easiest to conduct large-scale
planting and build on-site accommodation.17 Workforces were trans-
ported in from northern and central Vietnam. These estates were
comparable in size and output to those of Malaya and Sumatra but
remained chronically malarial. By the late 1920s the three largest plan-
tation owners – Société des plantations des terres rouges (SPTR), Société
indochinoise des plantations de hévéas (SIPH) and Michelin – controlled

over half of them.18 SPTR enjoyed the financial backing of the Franco-
Belgian Banque Rivaud, while SIPH was supported by the Bank of
Indochina.19 Along with the larger Michelin plantation concessions, all
expanded during the 1920s rubber boom. At this point, the combin-
ation of heightened global demand and the Stevenson rubber export
restriction scheme, which limited rubber output from British Malaya
and Ceylon, created unprecedented market opportunities for French
growers.20 Like their Dutch counterparts, the existing rubber produ-
cers in French Indochina expanded production, keen to defy British
restriction plans and feed the burgeoning American market. Others,
like Michelin, joined the party late, tempted by rising prices for raw
rubber, which, by 1925, were more than double those of 1918.21
The rubber conglomerates were the engines of capital generation in
inter-war Vietnam, physical monuments to the ties that bound colo-
nial government to French corporate interests. These connections did
not produce a happy marriage. Relations between business and colonial
officialdom could be fraught, even hostile. But outright divorce between
government and private industry was inconceivable. Their underlying
common interest in wealth extraction proved too strong. Paul Reynaud,
Minister of Colonies when the depression first hit home in 1930–1, put
it succinctly in a June 1931 speech to business managers in Bordeaux.
To return to old-style, small-scale rubber cultivation would throw colo-
nial modernization into reverse.22 The abiding mutual interest between
government and rubber industry was institutionally personified in the
police, the soldiers, the plantation guards and the raft of administrative
services that maintained order in Vietnam’s largest plantations.
Post-war background to the Yen Bay revolt

In early 1919 Albert Sarraut reflected on his second term as Indochina’s
Governor-general. Speaking to Deputies in the French National
Assembly, he congratulated himself that a long period of ‘efferves-
cence’ in Vietnam’s internal politics was almost over. Almost, but not
quite: Sarraut conceded that violent ‘agitation’ in the rubber-producing
regions of Cochin-China remained endemic. Indeed, so frequent were
bomb plots in northern Vietnam that Tonkin’s police chief received
an official reprimand in August 1920 having not bothered to advise
the federal government about the latest police crackdown against con-
spirators planning assassinations of provincial officials in Hanoi and
elsewhere.23 Sarraut was undaunted. Even the recent arrests con-
firmed police success in infiltrating the secret societies involved in
recent sedition. Unravelling these clandestine networks revealed that

opposition to French control was marginal with nothing but disgrun-
tled mandarins, ‘sorcerers’, ‘malcontents’ and simple criminals behind
them. None had strong ties to the peasant population or to the planta-
tion labour force.24
Optimism came naturally to Sarraut, a man whose star was ris-
ing. He had returned to Paris as Minister of Colonies in Alexandre
Millerand’s new ‘National bloc’ centre-right coalition. The most influ-
ential pro-empire politician in France, he would also become leader of
the colonial lobby of imperialist deputies in the National Assembly. But
Sarraut’s rhetoric was more than personal. It captured a long-stand-
ing trend among French officials in Indochina: the portrayal of mili-
tant anti-colonialism as criminal rather than political; something, in
other words, that the police could handle as part of their normal duties.
Sarraut was also well-placed to judge. It was he who selected Louis
Marty to remodel Indochina’s Sûreté into an efficient political police.25
Ernest Outrey was another colonial official turned parliamentar-
ian, but one more firmly aligned with settler interests. As inter-war
deputy for Cochin-China, Outrey enjoyed the patronage of Henri
de Lachevrotière, owner of two Saigon newspapers, La Dépêche and
L’Impartiale, and the closest thing to a city press baron then existent in
southern Vietnam.26 To gauge by column inches in Vietnam’s French-
language press, during the final months of Sarraut’s term in Hanoi,
Indochina’s settlers, while unnerved by the ruthlessness of the secret
societies, were more interested in two other high-profile assaults. One
was the killing of a local army officer, Captain Domenach, shot by a
Monsieur de Monpezat who discovered the amorous officer in flagrante
with his wife. The other was the attempted murder of Sarraut himself.
His assailant, a Monsieur Devignes, a Hanoi land registrar sacked from
a lucrative government job, fired off his revolver as the Governor toured
the stalls at the Hanoi fair on 15 December 1918.27 The redoubtable
Governor’s predictions of calm political waters ahead seemed unduly
rosy.
There were structural problems too. French Indochina’s economy
began the inter-war years dogged by a mounting deficit and an over-
valued currency. The value of the piastre was tied to silver. Thus,
unlike the franc, it was neither linked to the dollar nor the gold stand-
ard. This made the origins of the federal deficit and currency inflation
easier to identify. Declining customs revenue, doubly disrupted by the
war’s aftermath and falling income from opium, explained the former.
The rising price of silver next to the falling tradable value of the franc
accounted for the latter. Curing the deficit required increased trade and
investment, something that was expected to materialize as peacetime

market conditions returned.28 But the process would be accelerated by
expanding the export volumes of Indochina’s four big saleable com-
modities: rice, coal, silk and rubber. It was the last of these that looked
set to grow fastest. Devaluing the piastre would ease the inflationary
pressure and improve export competitiveness, but it would also cut the
currency’s purchasing power, impoverishing the local population and
making it harder for the colonial government to service the federation’s
import requirements. There was no gold reserve in Hanoi sufficient
to permit a switch from a silver standard to a gold one. According to
Sarraut’s successor, Governor-general Maurice Long, the devaluation
problem would just have to wait.29 The new governor’s alternative rem-
edy was to attract corporate investors to Indochina with cheap land
deals and promises of government support in the marketplace. Long’s
red carpet for new business worked, transforming the rubber economy
into one dominated by vast commercially owned estates.30
High start-up costs and international restriction schemes designed
to maintain prices by limiting production dominated relations between
the colonial authorities and the rubber industry’s new investors in
the 1920s. Vietnamese hostility to the intensive colonial exploitation
attendant on this industrial growth gathered impetus meanwhile.
Opposition was initially urban and intellectual, not rural and worker-
based. But the two quickly intertwined as, by mid-decade, new party
political groups emerged. Foremost among them was the VNQDD, a
short-lived, Kuomintang-inspired nationalist party born in the intel-
lectual ferment of Hanoi’s radical Nam Dong publishing house.31 The
VNQDD’s embrace of violent extremism provoked a police crackdown.
Numerous former party activists not only escaped the net, but began
organizing more radical splinter groups, some with communist affili-
ations.32 Police in Annam detained members of one such faction, the
‘Party of Revolutionary Youth’ while, to the north, eighty-three ‘revolu-
tionaries’ (mainly VNQDD supporters) were imprisoned in connection
with the murder of Hervé Bazin, Tonkin’s notoriously unscrupulous
director of labour recruitment. His office supplied thousands of coolie
labourers to work in the rubber plantations north and west of Saigon,
often through coercive or duplicitous means.33
Links between Vietnam’s nascent anti-colonial parties were forged
during time spent in exile in China’s southern-most province of
Yunnan. The numbers involved were small. Yet the result, according
to the Haiphong Sûreté, was an unprecedented threat: a fusion of the
VNQDD’s Kuomintang-style integral nationalism and terrorist meth-
ods with the cell structure and ideological coherence of Vietnam’s
communists.34 The Yen Bay disorders together with the Nghê ̣-Tı̃nh
soviet movement in Annam would be read as affirmation that this
nightmare combination had occurred. These anxieties also seeped into
the precepts of policing Cochin-China’s corporate rubber estates.
Policing and the rubber industry I:

Michelin’s Phu-Riêng plantation, 1930
On 7 February 1930 Pierre Pasquier, another Governor-general with
extensive administrative experience in Indochina, received police
reports of a strike movement developing on the Michelin Company’s
Thuân-Loï plantation near Phu-Riêng in Biên Hòa province, 125 kilo-
metres east of Saigon.35 This was the second among the Michelin broth-
ers’ trio of vast rubber estates in southern Vietnam. At 5,500 hectares,
it was smaller than their flagship 8,700 hectare plantation at Dâù-Tiêng
in Thu Dau Mot province (now Binh Duong). Dâù-Tiêng was, at the
time, the world’s largest rubber estate.36 Yet Michelin was a relative
newcomer to the industry, buying its first land in Cochin-China dur-
ing 1926. The smaller Thuân-Loï plantation at Phu-Riêng was still in
development.37 By 1931, only 1,800 hectares of its cultivable land were
planted with high-yield hevea braziliensis trees, which typically required
at least six years from sapling to first tapping.38
The fact that production had yet to begin did not mean that workers
were superfluous. All stages of the plantation work cycle from clear-
ance and planting to husbandry of the young trees and eventual tap-
ping were labour intensive. By the early 1930s, Michelin’s plantations
employed over 4,000 workers. Most were north Vietnamese coolies
hired on three-year contracts, some of them, undoubtedly, by Bazin.39
The recruitment agencies relied on local recruiters, or cai, who served
as overseers and intermediaries through whom wage payments were
made. Their role in all stages of the process from recruitment, through
labour supervision to ultimate payment, lent itself to abuses. Deception
during the recruitment process and intimidation after it were preva-
lent.40 Michelin’s directors fretted less about recruitment methods than
the economic climate, worried lest the crash denied them the long-
anticipated returns on their plantation investments.
Pasquier was meanwhile preoccupied by new intelligence from
Saigon. The bare facts looked clear enough. The Phu-Riêng dispute
apparently started on 4 February with pleas for the reinstatement of
a coolie dismissed for extorting money from his co-workers. Wider
demands for an eight-hour working day and the dismissal of two widely
loathed overseers followed a day later.41 But, according to the strike’s
principal organizer, Tran Tu Binh, not only did the stoppages begin a
week earlier on 30 January, first day of the lunar new year, but they were
part of a larger ICP protest wave – a 1930 ‘Tet offensive’ designed to
spark uprisings across Cochin-China.42 If this was indeed the case, the
communists were soon disappointed. The stoppages fizzled out within
a week.
More alarming for officials was the image of violence only narrowly
averted at Phu-Riêng and, by implication, throughout the surrounding
region as a whole. The local Residency delegate, a low-ranking official
seconded to administer the workforce, made the decisive intercession at
Phu-Riêng. His efforts to contain the strike did not begin well. Jostled
by angry coolies on arrival, he needed help from the plantation’s twenty
police militiamen to reach his office. But he did get news to Cochin-
China’s Lieutenant-Governor, Jean-Félix Krautheimer, about the
situation. Fearing a riot, Krautheimer despatched gendarmerie rein-
forcements from Biên Hòa and Saigon to restore order at Phu-Riêng.
Work resumed.43 Pasquier even told Minister of Colonies François Piétri
that labour relations on Michelin’s plantations were exemplary; coolies
were ‘particularly well treated, with first class medical services, abundant
food, schools, etc’. The Governor was trying to justify Krautheimer’s
decision to arrest the strike leaders, an action which provoked the only
serious clashes during the dispute. The crackdown, Pasquier concluded,
was justified because ‘credulous’ plantation workers made willing, if
unwitting, communist recruits. Clearly, both the Governor-general and
his deputy in Saigon viewed the Phu-Riêng strike through the prism of a
gathering red menace, soon to become manifest in the Yen Bay mutiny
and the wider rebellion in Nghê ̣-T ı̃nh.44
Their threat perceptions reflected underlying worries that North
Vietnamese workers in Cochin-China were obvious targets for com-
munist propaganda and key transmitters of seditionist ideas between
the densely populated peasant economy of the north and the highly
regimented, overcrowded lines of Cochin-China’s rubber estates.
Krautheimer’s cabinet advisers judged the colonial plantation a uniquely
volatile workplace. Employers in France typically dealt with strike com-
mittees, union personnel or other recognized worker representatives.
Estate owners confronted a faceless mass of coolies with ill-formed
demands, which, it was presumed, were secretly orchestrated by others.
The combination of deeply felt, but inchoate coolie frustration and sur-
reptitious communist infiltration of the lines made plantation labour
disputes peculiarly susceptible to eruptions of mob violence.
Who were these coolies? Predominantly, they were young, single men
living in quasi-confinement in crowded barrack-type accommodation – the
lines – whose dirt floors were reportedly littered with communist pam-
phlets. The social and regional composition of this workforce changed
fundamentally in only a few years. Initially dependent on local Viet
from Cochin-China to clear plantation land, the labour intensive-
ness of further jungle clearance, planting and tapping led southern
Vietnam’s principal estate owners to cast a wider net in the quest for
workers. They focused on Vietnam’s poorest, most densely populated
areas, primarily Tonkin’s Red River Delta. In 1922 there were still only
3,242 registered coolies from Tonkin and Annam engaged as contract
labourers in the south’s rubber industry. Their numbers climbed rap-
idly thereafter: to 29,168 in 1926 and 41,750 at the rubber boom’s peak
in 1928.45 Those recruited were forced to abide by terms of indenture
that left their working hours, their living space, their food rations and
their health and sanitation in their new employers’ hands, normally for
at least three years. In 1928, the last boom year before the crash, 17
per cent of the coolies on Michelin’s Phu-Riêng plantation died. Most
of the survivors, healthy young men on arrival, endured repeated bouts
of malaria.46
Older, married workers were considered a force for moderation
because of their family obligations and their exposure to feminine
domestic influence. Whether their quiescence was fact or fiction, mar-
ried workers were housed apart from their single counterparts. This
made the lines seem even more forbidding and politically explosive,
their sickly, desperate occupants prone to malign, extraneous influence.
Worst of all from the Saigon authorities’ perspective, it looked as if
plantation managers and their networks of guardians and militiamen
were losing control. ‘Successful’ plantation management demanded
that high output be reconciled with the primordial requirement for
workplace security. It fell to the labour inspectorate to restore a bal-
ance between profit, wage cuts and coercion. Established by Governor-
general Alexandre Varenne in October 1927, the labour inspectorate
assumed responsibility for monitoring plantations and wage levels.47
Their oversight thus extended to the pécule, the deferred payment sys-
tem whereby employers were supposed to match workers’ contribution
of 5 per cent of their wages. The total amassed was paid as an end-of-
contract lump-sum to discourage labourers from deserting the planta-
tion before completing their term of service.48 By 1929–30 local labour
controllers were busier than ever conducting site visits and submitting
quarterly reports about the larger plantations. Their reading of work-
place politics derived, in turn, from the regional officials and police-
men that furnished more workaday reportage of plantation conditions
and the ‘mood’ prevailing inside the lines. Taken together, the labour
inspectorate and local officials provided the raw intelligence required

to deploy police resources effectively. Things had gone well in this
respect at Phu-Riêng. But they could just as easily go wrong, particu-
larly in adverse economic circumstances. Industrial unrest, communist
extremism and anti-colonial sedition were by now intertwined in offi-
cial thinking, making rapid police repression of plantation dissent seem
imperative.49
On 1 April 1930 fourteen Vietnamese identified as ringleaders of the
February strikes were convicted, not on the basis of witness testimony,
but by Sûreté political intelligence reports sent to the Biên Hòa Tribunal
correctionnel in mid-March. Their sentences, ranging from six months to
five years’ imprisonment, exemplified the combination of harsh labour
discipline and fear of sedition that informed government responses
to industrial protest. Those handed the lighter sentences were found
guilty of ‘denying labourers the freedom to work’, while those jailed for
longer terms were, in addition, convicted of ‘actions intended to com-
promise public security’.50
From their base of operations in Clermont-Ferrand, Michelin’s
board of directors, dominated by the two Michelin brothers, Edouard
and André, took a keen interest in these proceedings. The directors
welcomed the stiff punishments for those behind the original strike,
but remained uneasy. A handful of communists had managed to
convince 1,300 coolies to join the strike action. Only Krautheimer’s
decision to send in the gendarmerie prevented attacks on the few
police hitherto deployed. The board concluded that its plantation
managers remained dangerously exposed. An on-site delegate was one
thing, but only a strong, permanent police presence would suffice to
prevent greater violence in future. The Thuân-Loï plantation lay in
an isolated, thinly populated, forest region. It was, admittedly, barely
125 kilometres from Saigon, but had few police posts, and none of any
size, in its vicinity. The closest, Nuï-Bara and An-Binh, lay between
twenty and thirty kilometres away. This was unacceptable. Michelin’s
board pressed for the immediate reinforcement of these police posts
and, more significantly, for the creation of an armed militia centre
located at the plantation’s edge. The directors offered to meet the
set-up costs involved. Company representatives in Saigon had, in
fact, proposed these measures less than a week after the February
strike ended, only for Krautheimer’s administration to reject them on
28 March 1930.51
Fundamental questions about the distribution of colonial power were
at stake. First, the largest corporate actor in French Indochina effect-
ively claimed that the colonial government could not guarantee the
safety of its operations. Second, in the absence of what it deemed suf-

ficient state protection, the company wanted to arrogate to itself secur-
ity powers by funding a dedicated militia without defined legal status.
Third, the Michelin board presumed the right, not just to influence
policing but to redefine it. Little wonder that Indochina’s bureaucratic
establishment bristled at Michelin’s overweening presence. On 14 April
Gaston Joseph, political director at the Colonies Ministry, politely
rejected the company’s demands, noting that the Saigon administration
had matters in hand.52 Joseph, Pasquier and Krautheimer meanwhile
shifted responsibility for the strike’s escalation from the inadequate
police presence, as alleged by Michelin, to the maltreatment that made
the workforce receptive to communist propaganda in the first place.
Losing patience with the company, Pasquier assigned his economic
affairs division in Hanoi to investigate health and hygiene standards on
Michelin’s estates.53
Whether a genuine attempt to impose tighter regulation, a way to
discredit Michelin demands for stronger policing, or just part of the
blame-game between the two sides, the subsequent report deflected
attention from the company’s accusation that local police and troop
levels were too low. Pasquier told his ministry superiors on 12 August
that Michelin’s complaints were groundless. The Thuân-Loï planta-
tion was less remote than claimed. It was close to a metalled road,
route locale 1, and was ‘surrounded’ by police posts. Admittedly, the
closest, at An-Binh, was 70 kilometres distant and the largest – forty
gardes civils at Nuï-Bara – was 130 kilometres away. Yet these distances
were easily traversed – as the February reinforcement had proved.
Police and gendarmerie posts throughout the Phu-Riêng region were
also due to be connected by telephone and telegraph lines in 1931.
The plantation offices would also be linked in to this network and
thus to Biên Hòa, the provincial capital, and Saigon. Most import-
antly, further troubles at the plantation had been averted thanks to
the measures taken by the Cochin-China administration, includ-
ing reforms to working practices and the arrival of a new plantation
manager. Michelin’s directors might do well to remember that their
plantations were not the only ones in Cochin-China needing police
resources. Additional forest guards (gardes champêtres), not a standing
militia force, were the obvious – and legal – solution if their security
worries persisted.54 Although the Michelin board refuted Pasquier’s
implicit criticisms of its plantation management, for now at least the
heat went out of its argument with the colonial government. By the
time François Piétri advised them of Pasquier’s views on 3 November
1930, events in Indochina had moved on.55
Security force responses to Yen Bay and the

Nghê -̣ T ı̃ı nh soviet movement
The killings that announced the Yen Bay mutiny were less remarkable
to French officials than their careful planning, which, evidently, went
unremarked by the local civil and military authorities. A Tonkin river-
side town on the Haiphong-Yunnanfu railway, Yen Bay’s barracks were
originally built to house units of the Foreign Legion’s 1st Regiment.56
On the night of 10 February 1930, however, troops of the 3rd battalion,
4th regiment of tirailleurs tonkinois occupied the garrison. Disturbances
broke out at around 2 a.m. after soldiers admitted a mixed group of
rebels and army deserters into the army compound. A red flag was
hoisted. The insurgents then sought out the battalion’s white officers
and NCOs, cutting them down with traditional swords, colloquially
known as coupe coupes.57 Two French army officers, four NCOs and two
Vietnamese infantrymen died in this way. Four mutineers were killed
in the ensuing fire-fight. Others were arrested after the garrison was
reinforced soon after daybreak on 11 February by an additional com-
pany of European-officered tirailleurs. At least sixty rebels fled into the
surrounding countryside.58
Another Red River military post at Hung-Hoa in Phu-Thô prov-
ince was also attacked on 10 February by a group of around twenty.
They, too, made their escape, this time down the river, after setting fire
to another guard post on the opposite bank. News of these outbreaks
reverberated in Tonkin’s capital, Hanoi. There, a French police brigad-
ier was shot and wounded after flagging down a taxi on Paul Doumer
Bridge.59 His assailant was a VNQDD organizer later captured in a vil-
lage outlying the capital. He confessed under police torture that he had
been en route to advise regional party cells to begin coordinated attacks
on various government installations. Within hours VNQDD supporters
threw home-made bombs at Hanoi’s central prison, the city courthouse,
gendarmerie offices and the commissariat of police.60 These incidents
triggered the arrest of all known VNQDD activists still at large in the
capital.
Further north, army reprisals, disguised as a security sweep, began
on 15 February. French troops and Foreign Legion units brought in by
train and bus from Hanoi fanned out across the provinces of Ha-Dong
and Thaï-Binh over the next four days. Village round-ups of alleged
rebels were supplemented by aerial bombardments, one of which, at
Co-Am in Thaï-Binh province on 16 February, left at least thirty inhab-
itants dead. The cycle of killing then abated – briefly. Unrest erupted in
northern Annam between 25 April and 5 May. These disorders began
with the sabotage of the railway near Tourane and culminated in an

anti-French demonstration on 1 May at Ben-Thuy, southeast of Vinh
(Nghê ̣ An’s provincial capital and the centre of Indochina’s railway
industry), during which seven demonstrators were killed.61 Strikers from
a nearby match factory tried unsuccessfully to present their grievances
to the local Resident, who was by then convinced that further shows
of strength were essential.62 On 5 May police shootings killed sixteen
Vietnamese and wounded fifteen more during operations conducted in
Thanh-Chuong, also in Nghê ̣ An. Annam’s Governor Aristide Le Fol
and his police chief in Hue, the protectorate’s capital, congratulated
themselves that ‘forceful’ police crowd control during the May Day
protests stopped the government’s opponents in their tracks.63
A lull certainly preceded another southward drift in the unrest.
Between 28 May and 22 August Cochin-China became the focal
point for renewed disorders. Once again, May Day demonstrations
culminated in police volleys, this time killing two or more protesters
in Chôlon province. Anti-tax riots and religious protests figured more
prominently in the southern Vietnamese disturbances, which continued
intermittently in Saigon’s outlying provinces well into November. As in
the north, the escalation in violence mirrored heavy-handed security
force intervention.64 The sequence of ‘revolutionary demonstrations’,
police shootings and mass detention of protesters was also much the
same. Police cracked down against ICP cells throughout Cochin-China
in a series of coordinated arrests. With Saigon (if not the surrounding
provinces) locked down, on 30 August trouble resurfaced in northern
Annam. Again, it centred on Vinh and its hinterland of village commu-
nities. An estimated 1,000 demonstrators at Nam-Dan sacked govern-
ment offices, district infirmaries and schools. Garde indigène posts were
singled out for attack in the weeks ahead.65
Reports of widespread destruction to state property, roads and
bridges, plus news of several assaults on local officials flooded into
government offices in Hanoi, Hue and Saigon.66 Alarmed by the col-
lapse of French authority in the Vinh region and significant disruption
elsewhere, General Charles Aubert, Indochina’s military commander,
ordered the Foreign Legion into northern Annam on 25 September.67
The Legionnaires cut a swathe through Nghê ̣ An province. Army
accounts recorded the killing of ‘at least eighty’ during intense fight-
ing against ‘rebel bands’ at Thanh-Qua and Vo-Liet on 5–6 October.68
Official casualty figures for the eight-month period 10 February–10
October registered 345 rebels killed, 124 wounded and 429 arrested
during demonstrations or organized attacks. Casualties were nugatory
on the government side: six French soldiers killed (all in the first night of
violence at Yen Bay) and the same number wounded.69 Five Vietnamese
guards and two mandarins also died.
To recap, after the first wave of attacks, not a single French citizen
or soldier died but army and police repression took the lives of almost
350 Vietnamese, most of them villagers in Nghê ̣ An.70 Nor was this
the end of the killing in Annam. An important date in the communist
calendar, the 11 December anniversary of the communist uprising in
Canton three years earlier, heralded renewed protests followed by fur-
ther Foreign Legion bloodletting. In one incident eleven communist
detainees were murdered by their Legionnaire guards.71 Huge imbal-
ances in colonial security force–protester fatalities, while not uncom-
mon, beg obvious questions. Was this repression or retribution? Can a
line be drawn between the two?
As we have seen, worst affected was Nghê ̣ An province, birthplace of
both Ho Chi Minh and Phan Bô ̣i Châu, Vietnam’s illustrious nation-
alist exile and architect of the Duy Tân Hô ̣i (Vietnam Reformation
Society) founded in 1903.72 Nghê ̣ An’s strong radical tradition reflected
its material condition. It was among the largest – and poorest – admin-
istrative districts in the federation with 400,000 or so inhabitants
grouped into 934 villages and the administrative centre of Vinh. Despite
the immense areas of paddy under cultivation, the provinces of Nghê ̣
An and Ha-Tinh (immediately to the south) were economically diverse.
Tobacco, sesame, hemp, peanuts and tea were all produced for mar-
ket; a timber industry employed others, as did locomotive repair shops
and match factories. Still, agriculture predominated. Problems of poor
soil quality were exacerbated by prolonged drought. This resulted in
consecutive harvest failures and incipient famine.73 Taxes, meanwhile,
remained punitively high.74 So desperate were some villagers for food
that attempted thefts of rice stored in neighbouring settlements resulted
in over 130 murders during 1930–1.75 As this statistic indicates, state
demands and diminishing access to communal land undermined social
relations at village level. The result was what Hy Van Luong terms a
‘cognitive crisis’ in the cultural relations between peasant cultivators
and the local Confucian elite, whose members could no longer ensure
any equity in resource distribution. Reflecting this, several Nghê ̣-T ı̃nh
soviet leaders, including key ICP organizers, came from Confucian
scholar and richer peasant families.76
Strict police licensing of all firearms in Indochina helped ensure
that the rebels were poorly armed. Most carried nothing more than
sticks and agricultural implements. VNQDD assassins sometimes
used revolvers to kill officials but, although small quantities of weap-
ons were smuggled across Vietnam’s frontiers with Laos and Yunnan,
guns were noticeably absent from either the large peasant demonstra-
tions in Annam or the later street protests in Saigon.77 Among the
first protesters shot by security forces were those carrying red flags
or hammer and sickle emblems, the cold logic of which was to kill
identifiable ringleaders. The point was taken to extremes. Improvised
communist paraphernalia from painted cardboard to torn red rags
featured prominently in police and army intelligence reports insist-
ent that northern Annam was in the grip of Vietnam’s first commun-
ist uprising concerted by the fledgling ICP.78 More substantial police
intelligence in Hanoi and Hue pinpointed twenty-seven ICP émigrés
as the rebellion’s architects. All took Comintern instruction and had
recently returned to Vietnam from locations as diverse as Moscow,
Berlin, Thailand and Yunnan.79 The Hanoi Sûreté dwelt upon a docu-
ment seized during a raid on the ICP’s Tonkin executive committee,
‘Peasant propaganda and protest techniques’, which was distributed
to provincial party bosses. Drawing its lessons from the abortive
Indonesian Communist Party uprising in Java during 1926–7, the
document instructed activists to prepare local revolts in support of the
larger rebellion in northern Annam. Police interrogations of ICP mili-
tants indicated a common pattern of anti-government propaganda,
low-level coercion and inflated pledges of land and wealth redistribution
to incite rural populations to rebel.80
Villagers were encouraged to join the protests by stories that the garde
indigène had mutinied, that sympathetic Chinese troops were landing
on the coast, that victory was thus assured. Wild promises were made
of total equality, an end to taxation and the release of prisoners held
in the region’s jails. Alcohol was much in evidence before marches
took place. Those disinclined to take part sometimes faced angry ret-
ribution from a drunken mob. Although Nghê ̣ An had a history of
defiance to central government control, the rebellion, as constructed
in police intelligence, became a caricature of a desperate population,
naive in the ways of politics, mesmerized by fanatical revolutionary
outsiders.81 Sûreté reports stressed that the Indochinese Communist
Party, launched in February 1930 with the unification of Vietnam’s
three existing communist groups, was a foreign creation. There was
some truth in this. Aside from the Comintern’s interest in party merg-
ers that facilitated Soviet influence, the ICP’s foundation was indeed
driven by Vietnamese exiles whose decisive meetings took place in
Kowloon on the Chinese mainland opposite Hong Kong Island.82 But
identifying the ICP with the malevolent outsider served another pur-
pose as well. Demonizing extremist agitators as alien to Indochina’s
domestic politics absolved the regional authorities of blame for the
administrative malpractice, economic neglect and crippling tax bur-

den that explained the demonstrators’ choice of targets.83
By early August 1930, the resident administrator in Vinh was well
apprised by police of divisions among the town’s workers and traders
over a planned general strike; information that provided the basis for a
round-up of ICP sympathizers on 17 August. The latest crackdown also
became part of a fast-developing propaganda war in which the colo-
nial authorities reiterated that a few bad apples caused all the trouble.
Pasquier’s officials refuted ICP claims that a popular revolution had
begun and dismissed accusations from liberal critics in France about
misrule and arbitrary killing. The Hanoi government ‘line’, derived
from a selective reading of police and security force reports, remained
that impressionable local populations were simply led astray.84 The
rebellion’s participants were not dirt-poor artisans, peasants and share-
croppers further impoverished by Vietnam’s rice crisis; they were child-
like innocents, misguided, even murderous, but still retrievable for
France provided the iron rod of discipline were swiftly applied. That
discipline was soon in evidence. On 13 September 1930 the Resident
of Vinh took hugely disproportionate action to bar a protest that he
claimed would involve several thousand angry peasants and striking
workers converging on the town. He authorized the use of aircraft to
bomb what French journalist Pierre Herbart later termed an ‘inoffen-
sive gathering’. Collating eye-witness accounts, Herbart estimated that
around two hundred demonstrators died in the bombardment and the
stampede it caused. Those who fled the chaos were chased down and
thrown into jail.85
On 1 October Pasquier and Aubert dispatched a specially formed
mobile police column to retrace the Foreign Legion’s earlier trail of
destruction through Nghê ̣ An province.86 Two aircraft provided recon-
naissance to guide the police towards any suspicious groups spotted
from the air.87 Sûreté officers in the port of Haiphong were equally busy,
interrogating VNQDD dissidents and claiming to have foiled numerous
assassination plots, including the murder of Governor Pasquier.88 The
killing, execution or arrest of ICP organizers were, according to senior
inspectors in Hanoi, more pivotal still. Ongoing convictions of alleged
seditionists, both by the purpose-made criminal commissions and in
the courts of Tonkin and Annam, denuded the revolts of local leader-
ship.89 Even fellow imperial powers were helping out: British colonial
police arrested Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong on 6 June 1931.90 If this
suggested to the police that their clampdown was working, early indica-
tions of the counter-productiveness of such harsh repression emerged
from inside Vietnam’s overflowing prison system where many of those
incarcerated forged new oppositional networks, both within the prison

walls and, ultimately, beyond them.91 Still, the arrests continued. Over
three weeks in January 1932 Sûreté officers in Hanoi, Vinh and Ha-Tinh
province, as well as in the French international settlement in Shanghai,
rounded up scores of alleged communist sympathizers. Documents,
donation lists and party funds were seized, convincing Pasquier that
ICP strength in the heartlands of the 1930 rebellion was broken.92
Government, business and colonial disorder

If land hunger and worsening poverty helps explain why Tonkin and
northern Annam were becoming more insecure places, French refusal
to brook any interruption to the extension of colonial economic control
ensured that such violence was bound to escalate. Pasquier took office
as the rubber boom neared its end. A bonanza of commercial profit
driven by the post-war explosion in European and North American
industrial demand for processed rubber (principally for tyre manufac-
ture), the boom transformed Indochina’s economic fortunes and, with
it, the federation’s place in the hierarchy of the French Empire. Currency
conditions also drew in new money. In the six years to 1930 foreign
investment in Indochina surged to 2,870 million francs, its expansion
reflecting the dramatic appreciation of the silver-backed piastre against
the French gold franc.93 Rubber profits made Cochin-China the high-
est earning French colony per franc invested by the hugely influential
Bank of Indochina in the 1920s.94 Investing in rubber rewarded fore-
sight, but required patience. Long-term investment was essential to
capitalize the large estates necessary to extract the huge quantities of
raw rubber needed by western industry. As we saw with Michelin’s first
Vietnamese ventures, quick investment returns were unlikely. Much
could happen to levels of competition and wholesale prices in between
times. In the fifteen years that preceded the mid-1920s rubber boom,
investors’ financial calculations were further complicated, first by
former Governor-general Sarraut’s ambivalent attitude to industrial-
ized plantation agriculture and then by the disruption of global supply
chains during the First World War. It was only from 1923 that tenacious
French rubber growers were rewarded with the opportunity to make
enormous profits.95
These economic vicissitudes were not the entire story. Alexandre
Varenne, a Sarraut protégé and Pasquier’s predecessor as Governor-
general, was determined to reform the rubber sector.96 A socialist with
a journalist’s political acuity, Varenne was loathed by Indochina’s
European community.97 He spent much of 1926 battling with the
Ministry of Colonies and the settler-dominated Colonial Council to

liberalize the system under which plantation concessions were granted.
Like Sarraut, Varenne wanted to transform major estate owners into
leaseholders contributing directly to colonial development. Purchase
taxes for rubber concessions were increased and investors in larger
plantations were required to modernize production and provide con-
tractual guarantees for their workers. The idea was to discourage short-
term speculation while creating a proper regulatory regime.98 Linked
to this were Varenne’s plans to improve local farmers’ access to credit.
Varenne wanted to attract Crédit Agricole-type banks offering farmers
affordable loans, thereby providing the capital needed to modernize
Indochina’s agricultural economy. Finally, as we have seen, he cham-
pioned a labour code, central to which was a network of inspectors.
All of this threatened French planters’ dominion over their estates and
their workforce.99 A virulent and successful campaign for Varenne’s
removal was orchestrated by the Marquis Henri de Montpazet, one of
Indochina’s most vocal planters.100 But, once again, Michelin was piv-
otal. The largest newcomer to the rubber industry acquired its lands
just as rubber prices peaked in 1925–7.101 Good times would soon turn
to bad for the commercial investors involved as rubber prices tumbled
in 1929 before bottoming out in 1931–2.102 With market prices slow to
recover, at the start of 1934 the total area under cultivation was only 6
per cent bigger than in 1929.103
Indochina’s federal administration always doubted that the boom
was sustainable, but successive post-war governors welcomed the extra
revenue generated by increased rubber exports and by taxes imposed
on commercial property and on the migrant workers flooding into
Cochin-China’s wage economy. Desperate to restore a balanced budget
after rubber values plummeted, the Hanoi government and its colonial
adjunct in Saigon raised the tax burden further after stabilizing the
piastre through two quick-fire devaluations in May and August 1930.104
Wage-earners were especially hard hit by this double blow of dimin-
ished purchasing power and higher taxes. Their complaints were not
well received either by estate owners facing declining profit margins or
by authorities nervous of any signs of organized dissent in Vietnam’s
premier export industry.105
Business met colonial politics in three other contexts relevant to
us here. One was in the tension between the principal French plan-
tation owners and the colonial administration over the scale and rap-
idity of estate consolidation and the human displacement it provoked.
Plantation owners expected the colonial government to live up to its
rhetoric of support for venture capital, settler enterprise and economic
modernization, and to cope with the inevitable human consequences

of land eviction, market distortion and coercive labour recruitment.
For their part, the federal authorities in Hanoi and Cochin-China’s
colonial government in Saigon could not align their endorsement of
inward investment in an outstandingly remunerative export industry
with the notional obligations of colonial rule. If these obligations never
amounted to the ‘civilization’ or ‘protection’ of the local population
(both terms still much in vogue), they did imply the effective man-
agement of Vietnamese society within a framework of social order.
These tensions coalesced around ongoing disputes between Pasquier’s
administration and the Michelin rubber company over the use of police
resources.
Little wonder that a second source of friction between colonial gov-
ernment and business interest was security. The term was understood
in numerous, overlapping ways. At one level, it connoted the economic
security of commercial enterprises and, by implication, their expect-
ation of state support in periods of acute financial distress. At another
level, it meant the physical security of business properties, investments
and personnel. Owners, managers and foremen expected protection
from undue public criticism, from domestic opponents, Vietnamese
nationalists and communists in particular, and from disgruntled
workers liable to become involved in any anti-French backlash. Just
as this reading of security involved colonial policing, then so did its
final aspect – the wider political integrity of Indochina’s colonial state.
Official fears that European-dominated industries, the plantation sec-
tor above all, would be an arena for anti-colonial unrest intensified as
the rubber boom spectacularly imploded and the depression deepened.
Finally, recent suppression of the uprisings in northern and central
Vietnam ensured that, throughout the 1930s, policing of industrial
unrest on rubber estates would be coloured by the underlying assump-
tion of communist involvement in each and every dispute, whatever the
evidence to the contrary.
Colonial business, then, stood at the interface of colonial govern-
mental concerns about long-term political stability. In part, it was a
core interest to be protected; in part, its privileges and activities under-
mined the very security that was sought. This paradox emerged equally
strongly in the third arena where money and politics clashed: relations
between the colonial authorities and Indochina’s predominant financial
lender, the Bank of Indochina.106
The profits generated by the rubber industry caused sparks to fly
between the Bank of Indochina, the Ministry of Colonies, colonial
authorities in Hanoi and Saigon and business groups in Vietnam.
Tensions between them mounted sharply in the decade before the

Indochina federation plunged into recession in 1930. But it had deeper
historical roots. Before 1914 Indochina’s Government General strug-
gled to attract inward investment from French commercial lenders for
the expansion of rubber plantation agriculture in Cochin-China.107
This left the way open for the Bank of Indochina to consolidate its
position as the main provider of capital to settler enterprise, whether
in the rubber industry or elsewhere.108 The Bank’s runaway profits on
the back of the 1920s rubber boom confirmed the widely held sense
in government that shareholders creamed off huge dividends without
contributing to Indochina’s social development. The Bank’s returns in
the decade 1921–31 were certainly exceptional, with interest earned on
invested capital averaging over 50 per cent over the decade 1921–31.
The nub of the matter was deceptively simple: the Bank’s directors
channelled lending towards capital intensive and European-run com-
mercial projects to the exclusion of loans to rice farmers and other
indigenous agriculturalists in desperate need of short-term borrow-
ing.109 As the ill-fated Governor Varenne had realized, this had to
change. Yields from rice paddy farming, Vietnam’s prevalent farming
method, were unlikely to grow without greater access to loan fund-
ing to irrigate more fields or to buy new seed varieties, fertilizers and
basic equipment.110 Loan funding was equally essential to redress the
imbalance in land ownership. In Cochin-China, for instance, land,
like capital, was concentrated in very few hands. By 1931, 45 per cent
of the colony’s cultivatable paddy was owned by less than 3 per cent of
its population.111
Vietnam’s pressing requirement for better credit facilities, whether
for established corporations, new commercial ventures or rural pro-
prietors, became more obvious once raw material prices collapsed and
businesses, plantation owners and farmers retrenched, cutting back
on workers and wages. Yet this calamitous downturn only reinforced
the Bank of Indochina’s reluctance to lend short-term, particularly
when smaller, less prudent lenders, such as the Bank of Saigon, col-
lapsed in 1931. With raw material prices falling by up to 80 per cent
from their pre-depression peak, and with other commercial banks,
including the Hong Kong and the Franco-Chinese Bank, cutting back
their activities in Vietnam, the Bank of Indochina board was better
placed to ignore government strictures about the need for new lines
of credit to hard-pressed farmers.112 Indochina’s dominant bank had
won the depression-era contest with colonial officials over the extent
of its responsibility to rescue domestic agricultural producers.113 The
norms of laissez-faire capitalism and tightly restricted lending remained
unchanged, frustrating the Ministry of Colonies’ efforts to alter the

balance of power between government and bank.
This brings us to Michelin. For all its problems in Indochina, the
company had a good depression. The corporation could rely on what
Stephen Harp terms, ‘an emerging cultural divide between production
and consumption, one that allowed companies to focus on the lifestyle
their products offered without reference to the production that made
consumption possible’.114 Seemingly immune to domestic criticism,
the Michelin brothers took a controlling stake in their major corporate
partner, the car manufacturers Citroën, as the French economy stayed
mired in recession over the winter of 1934–5. Citroën was set to launch
its revolutionary front-wheel drive onto the market, but what it enjoyed
in bold design, it lacked in short-term cash flow. Faced with suppliers
and sub-contractors demanding payment of outstanding invoices, and
its bankers unwilling to extend further credit, the company filed for
bankruptcy in November 1934. The courts opted instead for ‘judicial
liquidation’, a legal device that enabled the company to relaunch under
new ownership. The Michelin brothers seized the opportunity to buy a
controlling stake in the new, slimmed down Citroën that rose from the
ashes eighteen months before the Popular Front’s May 1936 electoral
victory. Their reputation for no-nonsense economizing enhanced, the
frères Michelin emerged from the takeover more influential than before
in France’s automobile sector, the Paris Bourse and among the coun-
try’s leading employers, or patronat.115
Back in Cochin-China, large estate owners enjoyed other advan-
tages. They responded to price falls by organizing a new lobby group,
the Rubber Planters’ Union (Union des planteurs de caoutchouc), which
pushed hard for government handouts.116 Busily trimming state spend-
ing elsewhere, on 4 April 1931 Pierre Laval’s government created a
compensation fund under the Ministry of Colonies’ control to under-
write the empire’s rubber production capacity. Indochina’s individual
colonial governments set aside reserves of up to fifty million francs to
bail out any planters threatened with bankruptcy. The reserves derived,
in turn, from a special tax on imports into France of both unprocessed
rubber and rubber-based manufactured goods. Responding to this
legislation, during the second quarter of 1931 Pasquier’s administra-
tion fixed the cost price of rubber at five francs per kilogram. Planters
immediately objected that this figure was too low, suggesting that
seven francs was more reasonable. Acrimonious bargaining contin-
ued for the rest of the year.117 These niggles aside, between January
and July 1932, the colonial government paid out 2,002,000 piastres
(£225,000 at 1932 rates) to producers as premiums on the 7,436,515
kilograms of rubber exported. Planters, in addition, received advances

of 1,880,000 piastres (£212,000) over the same period. Outstanding
rental charges and land purchase payments were also postponed. Few
paid their plantation land tax (impôt foncier) in full. The tax was not
payable anyway during a plantation’s first six years of operation, while
trees were maturing. It was then progressively applied over the follow-
ing five years. Ironically, then, older, small-scale estates bore the heavi-
est tax burden while newer investors like Michelin virtually escaped
it.118 George Maxwell, chair of Britain’s Rubber Growers’ Association
(RGA), the umbrella lobby group that represented the bulk of Malaya’s
producers, looked on enviously, fruitlessly urging the British govern-
ment to lend his members comparable support to ride out the economic
storm.119
As for wages, Pasquier’s government, in the first half of 1932 accepted
a reduction from 40 piastre cents (10.8 pence) to 30 piastre cents (8.1
pence) per day for labourers renewing their contracts. Equivalent reduc-
tions were admitted for contracts still in force if the parties concerned
agreed – an invitation for estate managers to impose the cuts. Planters
made additional economies. Non-contract labourers (misleadingly
named ‘free coolies’) were increasingly offered half-day work only. And
contracted workers faced arbitrary increases in daily tapping rates, typ-
ically from 400 to 500 trees, a gargantuan workload that self-selected
the most efficient, facilitating dismissal of those that fell short.120
As these demands on tappers indicate, the era of break-neck expan-
sion was not quite dead. In 1935 total rubber exports exceeded 29,000
tonnes for the first time. The Bureau du Caoutchouc’s forecast figures
for the years 1936, 1937 and 1938 predicted healthy annual growth
in export tonnages from 36,656 to 59,871 over the three years ahead.
In the most fertile, red soil regions of Cochin-China’s largest planta-
tions, output per hectare regularly hit between 500 and 600 k ilograms,
whereas average output in 1930–1 had been 333. But the statistics
hid structural inequalities. Rapid improvements in productivity were
largely attributable to better planting strategies that accommodated
a higher density of plants. Variations in output between plantations
also pointed to the importance of ready investment capital, soil qual-
ity, estate size and numbers of available workers. Put simply, only the
biggest producers could compete. Their capacity to do so was, if any-
thing, enhanced as wage rates – and, with them, unit labour costs –
plummeted in the depression. Plantation workers were being exploited
harder than ever.121 The fortunes of government, finance capital and
business are worth bearing in mind as we return to the estate ‘front-
line’ of colonial policing.
Policing and the rubber industry II:

Michelin’s Dâù-Tiêng plantation, 1932–3
As France and its empire entered the worst twelve months of the
economic downturn over the winter of 1932, the colonial residency
in Saigon, the federal administration in Hanoi, and backroom staff
of the Ministry of Colonies’ Indochina section began a rare public
relations exercise. They faced probing questions tabled by Socialist
and Communist deputies in the National Assembly about abuses of
north Vietnamese coolie labourers trapped in the rubber industry.122
Salacious Paris press accounts depicted thousands of plantation work-
ers forced to survive for months without pay. This was an exagger-
ation. But keen-eyed deputies reading the more sober imperial news
columns in Le Temps recognized that several European estate man-
agers were refusing to negotiate labour contracts, both to keep wages
down and to avoid unwanted visits by the colonial labour inspector-
ate. Withholding contracts was a familiar tactic among managers who
knew that the new inspectorate’s administrative purview technically
covered only those industrial concerns where government-regulated
contracts were in force.123
There was other bad news. Most incendiary were details of a per-
functory trial recently concluded in Saigon where the killers of a Tonkin
labourer were brought before a French prosecuting magistrate. Their
victim was reportedly a plantation ‘escapee’ (évadé) who, in March 1932,
was first captured, then chained for illegal trespass on a neighbouring
estate owned by a Monsieur Durban. The labourer managed to escape
once more, a fatal mistake. He was hunted down and beaten to death by
a search team led by the plantation’s overseer: a Monsieur Loupy. The
magistrate fined Loupy 100 francs. The penalty was imposed solely for
the coolie’s arbitrary arrest, which infringed recent legislation that ter-
minated the right of plantation staff to imprison and punish their work-
ers for breaches of contract. The magistrate dismissed the more serious
charge of murder because he was unsure who inflicted the lethal blows.
His evidential qualms forgotten, he then sentenced two Cambodian
plantation workers known to have assisted in the manhunt to prison
terms of two years and six months respectively. The Saigon author-
ities knew that certain French journalists had taken an unusual inter-
est in this otherwise unremarkable trial, and that their accounts might
stoke another parliamentary outcry. So the Governor was at pains to
stress that there was no endemic violence by white overseers against
Vietnamese employees on European-owned rubber plantations. The
killing pointed instead to racism of a different sort: the petty hatreds
between Vietnam’s subject peoples. It was this, quite rightly, that the
magistrate punished.124 Or so the story went.
Scandals such as these foretold another spate of confrontation
between Indochina’s government, colonial business and organized
anti-colonial opposition on the rubber estates.125 Simmering tension
over levels of policing and plantation security between Michelin and
the colonial administration boiled over once again in December 1932.
On the night of 16–17 December several hundred coolies walked out
of the Dâù-Tiêng plantation in protest at the Michelin management’s
announcement of 25 per cent pay cuts and reductions in workers’ daily
rice rations. On leaving the estate, the coolies encountered the guards
manning a nearby police post. The mood turned ugly and shots were
fired. Police accounts claimed they tried to disperse the crowd by fir-
ing in the air.126 It didn’t work. Three coolies died and seven more
were seriously wounded in the subsequent police volley. Site visits from
Cochin-China’s Governor, an investigating magistrate, and a team of
Saigon labour inspectors finally persuaded the coolies to return to
their cantonment and resume work the following day. Mollified by the
promise of a judicial inquiry and an inspectorate investigation into the
management’s apparent flouting of contracts by summarily reducing
food and wages, the labourers seemed to have the authorities on their
side. Pasquier even issued a circular on 19 December warning estate
owners not to try anything similar.127
A lethal combination of high-handed management decision-making
and indiscipline among the gardes civils emerged more clearly as the
Hanoi political affairs office gathered further evidence about the chain
of events at Dâù-Tiêng. Not only was a reduction in day labour rates
arbitrarily announced in contravention of existing wage contracts, but
the daily rice allowance for female workers was reduced by 100 grams.
Women workers were left to survive on a starvation diet of barely 350
grams of rice per day – 250 grams less than the management originally
claimed. For all that, Pasquier’s administration laid the blame, not on
Michelin’s plantation managers, but on the six Vietnamese gardes civils
who originally confronted the coolies on the night of 16 December. Led
by a local adjutant indigène, broadly equivalent to a gendarme NCO, the
six men were taken into custody pending their investigation by Saigon’s
prosecuting magistrate.128 The crumbling edifice of colonial solidar-
ity between government and business propped up, days later Pasquier
kicked away the buttress.
The Governor’s change of heart was easily explained. About to celebrate
Christmas Eve 1932, Pasquier received notification from Pierre Pages,
successor to Krautheimer as Cochin-China’s Lieutenant-Governor,
of a conversation that took place three days earlier between Michelin’s

estate manager at Dâù-Tiêng and Jean-Pierre Rougni, the local labour
inspector. Monsieur Planchon, the manager in question, had clout. He
was director-general of Michelin’s rubber operations in Indochina and
was at the centre of the controversy over what exactly had transpired the
week before. For his part, Rougni had visited Dâù-Tiêng on 21 December
to ensure that work resumed. While on site, he tried to get to the bottom
of coolies’ allegations that Michelin staff ignored contractual obligations.
He was frustrated on both counts. Planchon had decided that tapping
would restart the following day; a gesture, he said, to remind the work-
force who was in charge. He refused to let Rougni speak to any coolies in
the interim. Unnerved by Rougni’s probing, the manager then launched
into a tirade against the Saigon administration, which he accused of
undermining his position. So explosive were his comments that Rougni
transcribed them word for word to Governor Pages. Do-gooder officials,
Planchon spluttered, would do well to remember the power of Michelin, a
company without whose support the colonial government could not func-
tion. The manager’s closing remarks were – and are – worth quoting:
The Governor is boss of the local officials and labour inspectors. The Governor
has the Governor-general above him; and above the Governor-general there
stands Michelin and Co. of Paris … As is well known, Michelin can ruin a
bureaucrat’s career (briser la situation d’un fonctionnaire) much as it can advance
those of the officials with whom it is satisfied.129
Already incensed, Governor Pages learnt more from another labour

inspector, a Monsieur Beneyton. After assuring Beneyton of Michelin’s
full support, Planchon had added portentously that the company wielded
enough influence in France to ensure that its placemen were appointed
as lieutenant-governors of Cochin-China. What did this mean? The
manager, it seemed, was throwing his weight around in a game of div-
ide and rule with senior officials. Planchon was searching for allies in a
bid to throw the blame for the Dâù-Tiêng affair onto Rougni and Pages.
It also became evident that Planchon had told workers that Pasquier
personally endorsed the wage cuts he imposed on 16 December. This
was the final straw. Armed with such damning evidence, the Governors
in Hanoi and Saigon entered the New Year convinced that Michelin’s
activities in Indochina must be brought into line.130
Thus assured of strong administrative backing, the prosecuting
magistrate filed his report in Saigon on 24 February 1933. He could not,
in good conscience, establish the Vietnamese militiamen’s responsibility
for the violence at Dâù-Tiêng as originally alleged. Indeed, the guards’
statements were remarkably consistent, concurring that the adjutant had
issued three verbal warnings before firing repeatedly into the air. Jostled
by the crowd and terrified that their weapons would be prized from
them, the men eventually shot directly at the protesters on their adju-
tant’s command. The magistrate was unequivocal. The six Vietnamese
gendarmes had behaved with exemplary restraint and in conformity with
changes to the regulations governing crowd dispersal made in light of
the Yen Bay disorders three years before. Their actions were disciplined
and proportionate. Entire responsibility for the carnage rested with
the plantation management. The magistrate also recalled that Cochin-
China’s garde civil was reorganized after Yen Bay, with French officers of
the gendarmerie’s riot control specialists, the Garde républicaine mobile,
taking charge of their training.131 The report’s unequivocal conclusions
brought matters full circle. Sure that he had the ammunition necessary
to expose Michelin’s malpractice and gain the upper hand over the cor-
poration, Pasquier forgot his earlier readiness to make scapegoats of the
unfortunate policemen. His ministry bosses in Paris were equally keen
to press ahead. Lashed by the harsh tongues of Michelin’s executive
board over the Phu-Riêng incidents in 1930, Ministry of Colonies’ staff
relished their opportunity to turn the tables.132
The ministry’s legal advisers duly authorized Saigon legal proceed-
ings against Planchon. Dâù-Tiêng’s plantation manager was accused
of unlawfully imposing wage cuts and reducing the food allowance for
women to an injurious level, wrongly claiming that this was done in
conformity with instructions from the Governor-general. The only bur-
eaucrat charged alongside him was the local labour inspector who had
manifestly failed to make planters respect government-arbitrated labour
contracts as legally binding. Other officials, including Biên Hòa’s labour
controller and the Thudaûmôt province administrator were, by con-
trast, singled out for praise. The former had instructed his Vietnamese
deputy, the local administrative delegate, to visit the Michelin planta-
tion on 16 December, only hours before the night-time disorders, to
ascertain whether a minor outbreak of violence on a neighbouring plan-
tation had had any repercussions there. (Michelin’s plantation man-
ager told him nothing of the impending wage reduction.) Having just
visited Dâù-Tiêng, the labour controller was also the first government
representative to arrive at the scene of the guard post shootings, where
his prompt intervention helped restore calm. The overall conclusion
was simple: if European managers ill-treated their plantation workers
in defiance of government attempts to uphold minimum wage rates and
basic living standards, they should take the blame for the consequent
security breakdowns.133
Was this a watershed, a fundamental rupture between government
and European estate owners? And did it suggest that colonial security
forces were not, ultimately, servants of French moneyed interest? Albeit

clouded by the palpable official disdain for Michelin’s managerial
methods, the answers to these questions are negative. Certainly, the
labour inspectors worked hard to improve the sorry conditions in which
coolies lived and worked. And Pasquier’s staff were, by now, openly
contemptuous of Michelin’s bombastic management style, recognizing
the human misery it caused and the devastating political consequences
it could have. But the colonial police were not about to become defend-
ers of the people against rapacious exploitation. Saigon prosecutors
still sent strike organizers to prison and gendarmerie units were still
deployed to keep plantations’ revenues flowing.134
In this respect French critics of the excesses of colonial capital-
ism in Vietnam had a point. In May 1933 some of the finest minds
of the French left came together in a committee for the amnesty of
Indochinese political prisoners. Its members included the writers
Victor Margueritte, whose depiction of free-thinking women in the
novel La Garçonne scandalized 1920s France; fellow novelist and phil-
osopher Romain Rolland, founder of the ‘people’s theatre’ movement;
Henri Barbusse, renowned pacifist, dedicated anti-imperialist and
author of Le Feu (Under Fire, 1916); and Félicien Challaye, the com-
mittee’s president, who would cement his reputation as a trenchant
critic of colonial abuses with his 1935 Black Book of Colonialism, a com-
pendium of his key writings on empire since 1902. Not surprisingly,
publication of the committee’s first Bulletin d’Information was as much
a literary event as a political one. Actually a sober fifteen-page pamph-
let, the bulletin detailed the grim economic conditions and continuing
repression throughout the Vietnamese territories in the wake of the
Yen Bay uprising. Accounts of prison torture, aerial bombardments of
villages and mothers forced to sell their children in order to pay their
taxes made for discomfiting reading. Sensationalist perhaps, yet, argu-
ably, the bulletin’s most searing passages reprinted testimonies signed
by 235 Vietnamese plantation workers in Cochin-China describing
their working conditions and overseers’ maltreatment. It was in these
factual accounts that the injustice inherent in the colonial economy
and the brutality used to uphold it emerged with crystalline sharpness.
The committee members were in no doubt: Vietnam’s oppressive eco-
nomic system and the repressive habits of its police and security forces
were unaltered.135
The Popular Front interlude

If the bitter clashes of the early 1930s between colonial government and
industry did not fundamentally change the relationship between them,
perhaps the advent of a left-wing coalition in Paris, substantially elected

to defend workers’ rights, might do so.136 This rhetorical question tel-
escopes us forward three years to the brief ‘moment’ of the Popular
Front – actually an interlude of one or two years (depending on one’s
point of view) – during which French political life, and France’s colo-
nial policies, lurched leftwards.
The new Minister of Colonies was the Socialist Party’s veteran colo-
nial advocate, Marius Moutet. He was a prominent figure in the League
for the Rights of Man and an outspoken critic of repressive policing and
other judicial abuses in Indochina.137 On 24 June 1936 Moutet held his
first meeting with senior parliamentarians on the National Assembly’s
colonial commission, a watchdog committee that monitored imperial
policy and spending. Moutet told them that he read an administra-
tive inspector’s report about an unnamed black African colony soon
after taking office. It indicated that 98 of the 280 political prisoners
held there had died since the start of the year. Moutet’s impassioned
comments to the commissioners revealed the strong impression this
dreadful statistic had made: ‘I shall govern on behalf of all the people
for whom I’m responsible. Forty-five million [colonial subjects] depend
on me, and I’ll put them first. I shall be Minister of the working masses,
whatever their colour or religion.’ His first decision in this respect was
to order an immediate amnesty for French Indochina’s political pris-
oners. Other directives followed, legalizing trade unions and restoring
freedoms of association suspended in the wake of Yen Bay.138 It was a
bold start but right-wing commission members warned him that those
released would surely bite the hand that freed them.139
The prisoner releases did indeed transform Vietnam’s internal pol-
itics, affording communist activists and other left-wing publicists
grouped around the Saigon newspaper La Lutte (The Struggle) the polit-
ical space to expand their anti-colonial campaigns while engaging with
Popular Front reforms. The doctrinaire Stalinists of the ICP emerged
more single-minded and organizationally adept than ever, their circles
of influence widened by time spent in the prisons of Son La province
in northern Tonkin or on the islands of Poulo Condor off Vietnam’s
southern coast.140 The result was an odd sort of truce. Urban Sûreté
offices used their informant network to acquire the evidence necessary
to prove charges of sedition and so facilitate another crackdown against
ICP cells should the political climate in Paris or Hanoi change and the
necessary order come.141 Such would occur over the winter of 1937–8.142
Over the preceding two years, however, provincial Sûreté and their rural
adjuncts in the garde indigène were once again consumed by the imme-
diate requirements of labour control.
On 26 November 1937 a weary Jules Brévié, Indochina’s penultimate

pre-war Governor-general, sent his latest report on Indochina’s labour
conditions and industrial stoppages to his ministerial masters in Paris.143
A Moutet loyalist, the Governor embraced the new reformism.144 Attuned
to their boss’s keen interest in labour relations, Brévié’s ministerial cab-
inet grew accustomed to compiling these reports, usually two to three
pages long, every fortnight during a turbulent eighteen months that
began with the Popular Front’s May 1936 electoral victory.145 Central
to this bureaucratic effort was a closer working partnership between the
labour inspectorate and rural police. The former agency was now at the
heart of government. Nurtured by Alexandre Varenne ten years earlier,
Moutet further enhanced its powers. But labour inspectors struggled
to reconcile the Minister’s call for better protection of colonial work-
ers with the overarching requirement to restore export production as
Indochina finally emerged from the depression. Rubber producers lob-
bied aggressively in Hanoi and Paris to ensure that their commercial
recovery was not jeopardized by unwelcome regulation.146 The police,
too, faced conflicting demands. Expected to enforce order on planta-
tions and at factory gates, it also fell to them to curb labour abuses and
investigate any that occurred. They were kept busy.
Industrial disputes acquired unprecedented intensity in the six
months from November 1936. These included coordinated strikes on
the railways and in train-yards and workshop complexes from Saigon
to Truòng Thi in Nghê ̣ An province.147 Factory equipment, tracks and
trains were vandalized, actions that the Sûreté attributed to ICP sabo-
teurs.148 Saigon’s bustling tram service was halted. Events at Saigon’s
naval arsenal made police officers more anxious still.149 The arsenal
workers struck twice – in November 1936 and again in April 1937 – first
to demand better pay and then in protest at new shift arrangements.150
Saigon’s naval authorities refused to allow labour inspectors to arbitrate
on site, so police intelligence filled the government’s inevitable know-
ledge gap. Sûreté reports convinced Governor Brévié that ICP factory
‘soviets’ orchestrated the stoppages, silencing shop-floor moderates and
cynically exploiting the collective bargaining system introduced under
the Popular Front’s industrial legislation.151 The parallels with Nghê ̣-
T ı̃nh seemed overwhelming.152 In 1937 the May Day demonstrations
became a show of communist triumphalism, coming soon after two
ICP candidates and one Trotskyite won election to Saigon’s city coun-
cil. And, in another echo of the 1930–1 political violence, anti-tax riots
broke out in Cholon province between 7 and 10 May. Days later, around
1,500 coolies from Michelin’s Dâù-Tiêng plantation, dissatisfied with
a day rate increased from twenty-seven to thirty-two piastres, marched
on Saigon to lay their grievances before the director of labour. Saigon’s

Governor, Pierre Pages, intercepted the coolies en route, and implored
them to turn back.153 Meanwhile, Saigon’s naval commander caved
in, inviting the labour inspectorate to negotiate an end to the arsenal
strike. The victorious workers resumed work on 12 May. It was a pyr-
rhic victory. The de facto alliance between industrial workers, peasant
protesters and plantation coolies so unnerved Brévié’s cabinet advisers
that Sûreté hardliners like Marcel Bazin in Saigon made their voices
heard within the administration. All agreed the fast-spreading com-
munist contagion must be halted.154 The outbreak of another, larger
railway strike in early July drove the message home. Locomotives were
sabotaged; overtly political demands made. From then until November
1937 a series of arrests targeted the publishers and followers of La Lutte.
By this point the Saigon newspaper had become much more. Its blend
of militant anti-colonialism and revolutionary activism had catalysed
a clandestine movement with Trotskyite leanings. Intelligence from
Sûreté informants suggested that dedicated lutteurs helped radicalize
industrial workers and coordinate industrial protests in Cochin-China
and Annam. The eagerness of senior officers to act against these lutteur
networks transformed the political atmosphere in southern and central
Vietnam.155 Indochina’s Popular Front interlude was over.
Brévié sounded cautiously optimistic as the winter of 1937 approached,
predicting that the worst of the preceding year’s protests was over. The
labour inspectorate was making great strides. European employers
were sticking to labour contracts under threat of prosecution. Wilful
non-compliance was rare. Most plantation bosses and factory man-
agers upheld basic standards in the treatment of local workers, whether
in terms of sanitation and hygiene, working hours and labour require-
ments, or wages and entitlements. November 1937 witnessed the fewest
strikes of the year so far. Shocking exceptions could still be found.
Indeed, Brévié and his deputy, Pierre Pages, had just run into one. A
local foreman employed at the Xatrach rubber plantation by the Terres
Rouges rubber company had beaten a north Vietnamese coolie to death,
kicking him so hard in the abdomen that his spleen had ruptured. The
coolie’s offence? A dirty bucket from which the latex residue had not
been properly cleaned. Brutality like this was supposedly banished to
the past. Labour inspectors were there to prevent it. Stricter enforce-
ment of legal penalties for maltreatment of workers was meant to dis-
courage it. Above all, French planters and their estate managers had
supposedly woken up to the perils of casual violence, recognizing that
the permissive colonial environment of old had given way to a humane
system of labour relations; if not quite French, then not quite colonial
either. The reality was rather different. Having referred the killing to the
Saigon criminal assizes, Brévié was stonewalled when he reprimanded
the planters of Cochin-China’s ‘Red Soil’ region, heartland of southern
Vietnam’s rubber industry, for tolerating such practices.156
Conclusion
Workplace violence and the need to police it figured large in the
Indochina government’s calculations at the end of the inter-war period,
just as it had at the beginning. By way of conclusion, consider how we
might evaluate police investigation of the following two incidents. Each
centred on a human tragedy – a suicide; a phenomenon all too com-
mon on colonial plantations. The frequency – the banality even – of
such workplace deaths exemplified routine police work in the rubber
industry and the ways it was changing. In the first, on 27 August 1936,
Ninh Dac Dong, a young coolie at Quan Loi plantation in Binh Long
province, north of Saigon, hanged himself. On hearing the news, sixty-
five of his co-workers started an impromptu protest. They accused
the plantation’s local overseer, Phan Ke Thien, of culpability for their
workmate’s death. Aware that the foreman had beaten him the previous
day, four coolies wrought immediate revenge. Gendarmes arrived just
in time to prevent a lynching and began recording the enraged coolies’
complaints. The matter was then passed to the labour inspectorate,
which, under Brévié’s administration, worked hand-in-glove with the
police in such cases, relying on police evidence of assaults or other con-
tract violations to impose changes in management procedure.157 The
dead coolie had spent six months at the plantation, employed as a tap-
per (saigneur). He loathed the job, probably because his overseer kept
beating him for being slow at it. On 24 August he ran away. Unable to
get far, he returned to the plantation two days later and was reassigned
to work. He killed himself in his line block as the following morning’s
shift began. Police and labour inspectors took the case seriously. They
examined the dead man’s body for signs of physical abuse, but found
nothing. Eventually the coolie’s death occasioned nothing more than a
reprimand.158
Events at another southern Vietnam plantation took a different turn
three months later. On 1 November 1936 sixty-five Tonkinese coolies
at the Ben Cai plantation in Tay Ninh province, northwest of Saigon,
downed tools in protest at the death of a workmate the previous night.
Police investigators and the local labour inspector soon discovered more
than a ‘routine’ suicide. This time the unnamed victim hanged himself
in the plantation’s private dungeon (cachot privé) after being beaten and
locked inside by the estate’s assistant manager, a twenty-four-year-old

‘Monsieur Schmidt’. Once the inspectors arrived on the scene, coolies
queued up to file their testimonies about Schmidt’s repeated assaults
on them. So numerous were these accusations that Governor Pages in
Saigon felt bound to open a wider police investigation into the mal-
treatment of Ben Cai’s workers over the preceding three years. What
began as a single report on a suicide turned into the largest investiga-
tion hitherto conducted of systematic labour abuses in Cochin-China’s
northwest.159
Two tragedies, two contrasting results: but the readiness of police to
gather evidence about workplace violence and labour inspectors’ will-
ingness to investigate them might suggest that the triangular relation-
ship between government, business and police was cracking. Not so.
The resumption of police repression with the clampdown against the
ICP and other anti-colonial groups in 1937–9 confirms that, once again,
the rupture was fleeting.160 By 1939 colonial policing in Indochina was
still configured to suit the requirements of major exporters and pred-
icated on the assumption that Vietnam’s civil society was inherently
threatening. The policing of politics and the policing of plantations
were thus two sides of the same colonial coin. Restricting oppositional
political space and enforcing labour control were not discrete security
force tasks but part of the same imperative to sustain order and eco-
nomic output.
7 Stuck together? Rubber production, labour
regulation and policing in Malaya
Still in Southeast Asia, my focus switches now from French colo-

nial territory to British. Malaya was no Vietnam politically. It was
comparatively placid until Japan’s southward expansionism gathered
pace after 1937. Geographically more compact, but no less ethnic-
ally diverse (see Map 7.1), Malaya did, however, share similarities
with French Vietnam both in the economic dominance of key export
industries and in the requirement to provide and police their work-
forces. The coalescence between political violence, labour protest and
emergent communism dominated the story of policing the Indochina
federation between the wars. In Malaya, these outcomes were sub-
stantially avoided, making this chapter more a story of the dog that
didn’t bark. That is not to say that British rule was more consensual.
Nor is it to argue that its police forces, certainly less prone to brutal-
ity, were more efficient. It is, rather, to point out that order – political,
economic and colonial – was maintained in different ways, albeit for
much the same ends. The sections below illustrate this process in
action.
A political economy approach

The colonial state in inter-war Malaya was not self-confident, all-
pervasive and powerful, but was, instead, cautious and conservative.
It was also narrowly focused, first, on the revenues accrued from the
control of Malaya’s fast-expanding industrial base, its plantation and
mining sectors above all, and, second, on the strategic and commercial
benefits derived from controlling Singapore, the Straits Settlements
and the Malacca channel. Any suggestion that colonial Malaya was
governed by far-reaching police agencies whose investigative tentacles
enveloped the colony’s multi-ethnic society is untenable. Admittedly,
rigid European conceptions of ethnic difference promoted greater
stratification between Malays and non-Malays. So did the stereotyp-
ing of particular ethnic groups as suited to certain occupations. The
177
THAILAND
S o u th C h in a Sea
PERLIS
Kangar
Langkawi Alor Setar Kota Bharu

KEDAH
Redang
BESUT
PENANG Butterworth
PRAI Kuala Terengganu
(Province Wellesley)
PERAK KELANTAN
KERIAN
Taiping TERENGGANU
Port Weld
Kuala Kangsar
LARUT
Ipoh
DINDINGS PAHANG
Kemamar
Teluk Anson
Kuala Bernam Kuantan
Semantan R. Pahang R.
SELANGOR Pekan
Straits of Malacca
Kuala Lumpur
(Selat Malaka)
Kelang NEGRI
(Port Swettenham) Tioman
SEMBILAN
Seramban
Kuala Linggi
MELAKA
JOHOR
Melaka Kuala Kesang
Muar
Johor
Bahru
Bengkalis
SINGAPORE
Pulau Gontong
Bentan
I N D O NE S I A
0 50 100 150 200 km
0 25 50 75 100 miles
Map 7.1 Colonial Malaya
laws and rules applied by administrators and police hardened racial

difference, whatever the rhetoric of official colour-blindness. Social
segregation was thus embedded within Malaya’s regulatory framework,
whether in employment, in the use of public space or transportation,
Stuck together? 179
or in terms of rights under civil and criminal law.1 From 1904, for
instance, the right of ‘natural born British subjects’ to sit the entrance
examination for the Malayan Civil Service and to serve in the Straits
Settlements or Federated Malay States police was withdrawn from
those of ‘non-European descent’. This was one marker of what A. J.
Stockwell defined as a growing ‘white tribalism’ in Malaya as white
Britons asserted their sense of political, legal and cultural superiority by
enforcing stricter racial boundaries.2 For all that, concepts of identity
and colonial subject status remained more fluid in multi-ethnic British
Malaya and Singapore than in other, more sharply divided colonial soci-
eties.3 But the countervailing trend was clear: ‘difference rather than
similarity … often dominated the accounts of English-born Malayans
when they described the people around them’.4 Just as important, as
Charles Hirschman argued some twenty-five years ago, colonial impos-
ition of stricter ethnic hierarchies was predicated on consolidation of a
wage economy that relied on cheap imported labour to service Malaya’s
principal export industries of rubber and tin, the former of whose dis-
tribution is shown in Map 7.2.5
Still, Malaya was remarkably dynamic, at least in relative colonial
terms. By 1918 the tenets of British governance were changing, becom-
ing more subtle and less bluntly divisive. Imperial authority rested on
the judicious, often surreptitious management of communal politics,
something more likely to result in studied non-interference than high-
handed interventionism. A flavour of this approach emerges in a March
1931 letter sent to Governor Sir Cecil Clementi by his senior adviser in
Singapore:
There is not much news special to the U[nfederated] M[alay] S[tates] of suffi-
cient interest to bother you with while on leave (if you are managing to get any
leave in spite of the proximity of the Colonial Office). Johor has been jogging
along quietly except for a little Communist trouble in the Muar District in
January … Kedah carries on more or less in isolation. Kelantan has got a fur-
ther loan from the Colony. Terengganu is financially on the rocks. In Brunei
the Sultan’s mother has been making rather a nuisance of herself.6
Making allowances for the government’s lighter footprint (notably when

compared with French Indochina), political economy still comes into
play when considering processes of change in Malaya’s distinctive com-
munal politics. If administrators were becoming more adept at ruling the
place, colonial capitalism and British concepts of property ownership
and legal title to land conspired to undermine them. Local opposition
to British commercial practices and the proliferation of foreign-owned
enterprises with large estate holdings became intensely politicized. The
THAILAND S o u th C h in a Se a
Kangar
Alor Setar
Kota
Bharu
Butterworth Kuala
Terengganu
Ipoh
M A L AYA
Kuantan
Straits of Malacca
Kuala
Lumpur
(Selat Malaka)
Seremban
Melaka
Kluang
Johor
Bahru
I N D O N E S I A SINGAPORE
Rubber
0 50 100 150 200 km
0 25 50 75 100 miles
Map 7.2 Rubber cultivation in Malaya
outcome was not to turn Malays overnight into nationalists committed

to a nation-state ideal; rather it was to raise anxieties about how ideas of
community, whether religiously or ethnically rooted, could withstand
such intrusion. While British imperial power was never hegemonic,
Stuck together? 181
colonial economic, legal and political requirements were sufficient to

upset the hierarchies, customs and values of Malay society.7 Anthony
Milner puts it nicely: ‘Changes in the legal, administrative or economic
spheres, as far as the colonialists themselves were concerned, probably
possessed no deliberate ideological purpose. Nevertheless they tended
to promote, for instance, “perceptions” of the individual and his role
in society which would have challenged profoundly certain critical and
long-standing Malay doctrines.’8
Much of Southeast Asia began the inter-war years in the grip of a
severe rice crisis.9 Between 1919 and 1921 supplies of Burmese, Thai
and Vietnamese rice ran short in British Malaya and Ceylon, as well
as in Dutch Sumatra, all colonial territories in which large numbers of
indentured labourers complicated official efforts to ensure adequate
provision of imported foodstuffs.10 Examining colonial Malaya’s
socio-economic stratification, historian Lim Teck Ghee contended
that economic requirements set the parameters of its communal polit-
ics. According to this interpretation, ethnic Malay peasants were, for
the most part, expected – and, to a degree, compelled – to remain
rice farmers rather than join the ranks of plantation and mining wage
labourers dominated by Indian Tamils and Chinese.11
Another historian, Paul Kratoska, refined the argument, insisting
that colonial policy was neither as consistent and intrusive, nor as
rigid and controlling as this communal division of labour implies.12
Kratoska’s interpretation is supported by Ooi Keat Gin whose ana-
lysis of rice cultivation in colonial Sarawak after the acute rice crisis
of 1919–21 suggests that the British authorities sought above all to
increase the volume of home-grown crops, not to entrench communal
divisions between agricultural and industrial sectors.13 Both observers
identify a connection between Malaya’s changing economic structure,
the consequent growth of its wage labour force and official percep-
tions of likely threats to social and political order. These dangers were
constructed in socio-ethnic terms. Government fears were twofold:
first, that a particular ethnic group might become implacably hostile
to colonial rule and, therefore, unmanageable. Or, second, that anti-
colonialism might break down inter-communal divides, uniting the
entire population against the British presence.
Adam McKeown’s insight that the globalization of migration after
1850 generated sharper racial difference at the same time as it promoted
closer economic integration between geographically remote territories
certainly holds true for Southeast Asia’s colonial territories.14 For much
of the inter-war period, as we shall see, Malaya’s government – and its
police – were confounded by the gap between their operating assump-

tions and the behaviours and concerns of Malaya’s multi-communal
society, whether in the workplace or elsewhere. By extension, official
uncertainty about Malaya’s differing communities, their cultural norms
and political expectations, plus a more basic lack of knowledge about
local opinion, were persistent problems. These blind-spots made it dif-
ficult to gauge popular reaction to policy initiatives. The introduction
of western-style registration and legal title to land provides one instance
of this. During the 1920s the colonial administration calculated that
security of tenure would promote rural stability, insulating the Malay
peasantry against political extremism, Bolshevism especially. But what
struck colonial Land Commissioners time and again was the cultural
gulf that separated them from peasant smallholders whose attitude to
land holding was so different to their own presumptions about private
property, value and community rights.15
Some officials, their expectations about the building blocks of
Malaya’s social structure disproved, lost confidence in their ability to
understand the foundations of local politics. This uneasiness drove
post-war police and intelligence reforms. One result was the establish-
ment in February 1922 of a Malaya Political Intelligence Bureau (PIB),
modelled on its Indian equivalent. The Bureau was required to collate
and interpret information from all branches of civilian and military
government about what the local population was thinking, discussing
and planning; not an easy task.16 Writing in early 1923, the PIB director
identified two barriers to success: lack of enthusiasm for intelligence rep-
ortage among mid-rank officialdom and the enduring ignorance among
provincial bureaucrats about currents of rural opinion. In the words of
the director’s first annual report, district officers, ‘have so far sent in
little or nothing of any value. It is probably true that at the present time
there is not much active sedition in Malaya, and it is by no means to
be desired that district officers should in any way become “agents pro-
vocateurs”, but it is remarkable that they should have been able to com-
municate to the Bureau, for the information of Government, so little of
the common talk of the people – talk that is known to the Bureau from
other sources to be not very friendly.’17 Colonial government in 1920s
Malaya was still feeling its way forward, enveloped in the fog of hostile
majority opinion. Few officials or planters feared being murdered in
their beds or shot on their rounds, but the rigidities and restrictions of
labour control that we shall encounter later in this chapter were nour-
ished by underlying anxieties about those compelled to work on British
terms, for British benefit.
Stuck together? 183
The importance of rubber production

Its socially disruptive effects notwithstanding, colonial government
refashioned Malaya’s economy to suit British interest. Here, the sin-
gularities of large-scale plantation agriculture intervened. Rubber
already constituted between 50 and 66 per cent of exports from the
Federated Malay States (Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan and Pahang:
the FMS) in the years 1915–22. These figures were broadly com-
parable with the industry’s prominence in the external trade of two
Unfederated States – Johor and Kelantan – as well.18 After the open-
ing of the Panama Canal in 1914 maritime trade between Singapore
and the USA also increased markedly. By 1917, America absorbed
approximately 177,000 tons, or 65 per cent of the world supply of
rubber, much of it shipped via the Singapore Straits. Taking Perak
and Selangor, admittedly the wealthiest of the Federated States as his
example, Colin Newbury points out that colonial revenue from these
two states increased fourfold between 1890 and 1905. It quadrupled
again in the years to 1928 and the eve of the Crash.19 But it was not
all plain sailing. At this stage, tin duties and land taxes generated
more revenue than cultivated rubber, which even underwent a net
decline in prices during the First World War. Sharper fluctuations
in ‘spot’ prices (the price at which a sale for immediate completion is
concluded) for rubber followed during 1919, leading to louder calls
from producers for government help.20
Rubber seemed the product of the future, even so.21 British-produced
rubber dominated the world market and was already the foremost export
commodity in Britain’s balance of trade with the United States. With
these facts in mind, in March 1921 the Colonial Office invited the main
producers’ group, the Rubber Growers’ Association (RGA), to submit
proposals for an officially sanctioned restriction scheme to mitigate the
impact of the continuing trade depression. Restriction had obvious
advantages for estate owners. Limiting production, rather than aban-
doning a crop, enabled them to link labour supply and wage rates to
market demand. Put simply, both the colonial authorities and the major
plantation owners sought to stabilize prices and unit costs by restrict-
ing overall output. They saw other potential benefits here. A restriction
scheme counteracted pressure from US purchasers for the exact reverse:
expanded production and lower market prices.22 And labour costs could
be restricted alongside production.23 The RGA recommended drastic
action: a compulsory 50 per cent restriction of crops to reduce the glut
in supply. The proposal was poorly received in Whitehall. Government
fears over loss of market share to Dutch Indonesia’s producers, and
worries that numerous smallholders would go under if compelled to cut

production so severely, led to deadlock.24
The logjam was eventually broken on 20 October 1921 when four
RGA members joined a Colonial Office committee chaired by Sir
James Stevenson to investigate whether a restriction scheme would
serve the industry’s long-term interests. Coordinated action with
producers in Ceylon and, more challengingly, the Dutch East Indies
seemed essential. It was not to be. Although a Dutch government rep-
resentative attended the Stevenson committee’s final deliberations, in
late August 1922 the authorities in The Hague announced that they
would not restrict rubber production or export volumes from Dutch
Indonesia. (The French, as we saw, were always against it.) The setback
was ignored. The Stevenson committee report, approved by the British
Cabinet at Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill’s behest on 5 October
1922, recommended a ten-year restriction scheme. This, it was hoped,
would be extended to cover the Ceylon rubber industry.25 Churchill
made no bones about the economic self-interest involved. Limiting rub-
ber production to sustain high market prices suited British planters.
It also pleased Treasury officials for whom high dollar receipts from
rubber exports reduced Britain’s balance of payments deficit with the
United States.26
Restriction cemented the alliance between Malaya’s leading rubber
producers and the colonial state. The industry’s pivotal importance to
the prosperity – and profitability – of colonial Malaya was thus well
established by the start of the inter-war period and continued through-
out the remaining years of colonial rule.27 There were other side-effects.
By artificially maintaining rubber prices, restriction discouraged mod-
ernization. Malaya’s rubber industry would remain highly labour
intensive and dependent on a cheap labour supply to sustain its profit-
ability.28 But this problem was not immediately apparent because, soon
after the Stevenson scheme came into operation, the industry’s boom
years began.29
The huge growth in rubber (and, to a lesser extent, tin) exports
accelerated Malaya’s integration into the world economy, a process that
rebounded on the colony as raw material prices collapsed in 1929–30.
The depression’s disintegrative effects should not be exaggerated. The
crisis in Malaya’s primary industries did not sever Malaya’s closer con-
nections with western markets. The growth of secular education under
colonial auspices and the rapid expansion of Malaya’s print and news-
paper culture promoted wider political engagement with empire and,
more especially, Asian regional politics. Evidently, industrial expan-
sion and social modernization had consequences that were difficult to
Stuck together? 185
control.30 Both were globalizing processes with disruptive local effects,

challenging cultural traditions and ideas of what it was to be Malay.31
The speed and scale of immigration, much of it to feed demand for
estate labour, made issues of communal identity, ethnic difference
and an immigrant threat to authentically ‘Malay’ culture inseparable
from controversies over the rubber industry – its growth, the com-
position of its workforce and the policing of its activities. The immi-
grant influx waxed and waned with the colony’s economic fortunes.
But its longer-term growth provoked mounting unease among Malay
writers and press commentators, Muslim ‘ulama and Malaya’s royal
courts. Chinese and Indians comprised 64 per cent of the population
in the FMS at the height of the depression in 1931. Less prominent in
the other ‘Unfederated’ Malay States (Kelantan, Terengganu, Kedah,
Perlis and Johor) these ethnic groups still made up 29 per cent of the
total.32
Closer government monitoring of plantations contrasted with the
paucity of official intelligence about life outside them. The Commission
of Lands drew on information from the Malay States and Straits
Settlements governments to produce detailed annual reports on rub-
ber estates, their acreage, their productivity, their ownership and their
prospects.33 By contrast, in April 1929 the Malayan government’s lack
of accessible information about rural conditions beyond the estates
was brought into sharp relief. The occasion was an officially sponsored
inquiry into the advisability of establishing a co-operative banking
system to give farmers and other smallholders easier access to credit
and a network of trading stores. Neither cadastral surveys nor other
land-holding data gathered by the Commission of Lands were readily
available or widely understood. Levels of rural debt, the incidence of
land tax, the size of national livestock herds, the proportion of land
planted with arable crops and even the average size of cultivators’
holdings were all unknown. Such information could be extrapolated
from diverse local government agencies – but none of it was centrally
collated or routinely distributed to policy-makers in Singapore or
London.34 The Indian civil service investigator who conducted this
inquiry, perhaps unsurprisingly, recommended following Indian gov-
ernment practice by establishing a board of economic inquiry and
a bureau of rural economic research. Only then could the Malayan
authorities get to grips with the material concerns of the rural poor.35
The message hit home. The Straits Settlements government led the
way. By 1931 it included analysis of Singapore’s socio-economic con-
ditions in annual reports to the Colonial Office. The far larger Malay
States followed suit – but more gradually.36
As these gaps in reportage suggest, the colonial authorities viewed

Malaya’s rural interior through the prism of its key export industries.
The recruitment, allocation and policing of labour was regarded in a
similar, functional way.37 Take the approach to the health of estate work-
ers.38 As we saw in the Vietnamese case, rubber planting and tapping
were physically draining and often conducted in areas with astronom-
ical rates of malarial infection. To be sure, mortality rates on Malaya’s
larger estates declined sharply in the 1920s. Morbidity (the incidence of
debilitating ill-health) also peaked in the early 1910s. Still the incidence
of death and chronic illness remained shockingly high. RGA figures
indicated that each estate worker in the Federated Malay State of Negri
Sembilan averaged nine to ten episodes of malarial fever during 1914
alone.39
Malaria was still the main killer after 1918. Overcrowding within
estate ‘lines’ promoted viral infectivity; diarrhoeal diseases and hook-
worm infection also remained commonplace. Construction of brick and
concrete lines with running water and deep-pit latrines, plus a more
rigorous inspection regime codified in the early 1920s, reduced coolie
deaths significantly. Malaria was not eliminated, however, in spite of
spraying programmes and the draining of fetid water to eradicate mos-
quito larvae. Its principal victims were immigrant labourers with min-
imal resistance to plasmodium falciparum malaria, as opposed to the more
common plasmodium vivax strain, which many had encountered before.
Most came from southern India where malaria, although widespread,
was characterized by high morbidity and low mortality. The constant
turnover of estate labour meant there were relatively few long-serving
workers whose bodies had built up resistance to infection over time.40
Government and estate owners monitored these health trends and
worked hard to improve them, but dividends figured larger in com-
pany thinking. It would be dehumanizing and unhistorical to ascribe
such medical interventionism to wholly instrumental motives. Keeping
workers healthier conferred economic benefits nonetheless.41 Estate
profits were acutely susceptible to fluctuations in global demand and
market price. To ensure its commercial viability in an increasingly com-
petitive international market, the planting, extraction and processing of
rubber in Malaya needed an assured cheap, imported labour supply.42
The state was much more visible in this context. Contrary to its limited
interventionism in Malay politics, the hand of colonial government per-
vaded the rubber economy.43 Regulation of the labour supply, from the
organization of quotas by the Indian Immigration Committee (IIC) to
the appointment of overseers to recruit and manage contracted labour-
ers shipped in from South India, was a fundamental part of governing
Stuck together? 187
inter-war Malaya.44 The determination of wage levels and the policing

of industrial disputes by the Labour Department fitted this wider pat-
tern in which state agencies became attuned to the political economy
of colonialism.45 Malaya’s federal police forces were also part of the
process, vital adjuncts to the bureaucracy of labour importation and
workplace regulation.
At lower levels, the line separating recruiters and regulators from
overseers and police was similarly indistinct. Should we, for example,
regard Malaya’s plantation foremen, or kanganis (Tamil for foreman or
overseer) as cogs in the wheel of Malayan colonial policing? In the early
1920s it was to the kanganis, most of them Tamils from South India,
that the recruitment of contract labourers from their home regions to
work on Malaya’s rubber plantations was officially delegated by the IIC
and the colony’s labour controller.46 Here, again, the economic crash
was decisive. Dependence on kangani recruiters would diminish after
1930, first because of falling labour requirements in the slump and then
because Labour Department bureaucracy expanded to the point that
it could manage the process directly.47 The trend away from coercive
labour recruitment may have been clear, but the fact remained that
throughout the inter-war years kangani recruiters, who usually returned
to their villages to select more men, enabled European planters in con-
junction with colonial officials to sustain their ‘unbreakable monop-
oly’ over the labour supply for Malaya’s rubber industry.48 Ordering the
workplace in Malaya’s rubber industry thus began on the other side of
the Bay of Bengal in the rural communities of southern India on which
estate owners depended.
The end of the boom on the estates

In the Federated Malay States plantation labourers’ pay rates at the
start of 1928 – see Table 7.1 below – were much the same as they were
in 1925 at the rubber boom’s height.
Three key factors were not immediately evident in the wage rate fig-
ures. One was that numbers of South Indian and Chinese plantation
labourers were much increased. A second was that wage differentials
between Indians, Chinese and Javanese labourers – as well as between
men and women – were structurally embedded in a system of labour
recruitment in which British-owned estates often took only Indian
workers and Chinese-owned estates only Chinese.49 The IIC still set
coolies’ pay rates, in conjunction with the estate owners, and used the
1923 Labour Code to enforce them. Chinese plantation labourers were,
by contrast, almost all employed on contract at significantly higher rates
Table 7.1 FMS plantation wage rates (in Malayan dollars), January 1928
Perak Selangor Negri Sembilan Pahang

Indians cents cents cents cents
Stores & factories 50–$1 50–60 60–5 60–5

Tappers (men) 45–50 40–5 to 50 45–50 55–60
Tappers (women) 35–45 35–45 to 50 45–50 50–60
Field labour (men) 40–50 40–5 40–50 50–5
Field labour (women) 30–5 30–40 30–40 45–50
Source: TNA, CO 717/60/1, Controller of Labour note, ‘Work and Wages’, 23 January
1928.
of pay varying from 80 cents to $2/ a day.50 The IIC was also highly
interventionist, conducting seven inquiries to determine standard wage
rates between 1924 and 1930 alone.51 Thus, while the Chinese estate
system was largely self-regulating, the British-run estates depended on
state intervention to obtain and transport workers, to impose their pay
scales and to police any dissent provoked by them. These trends were
also apparent in the Unfederated Malay States and in British North
Borneo (Sabah), although overall numbers of workers were smaller and
Chinese and Javanese plantation labour predominated in the latter.52
Here, too, labour ordinances were used to enforce criminal punish-
ments for workers’ contractual breaches. To take one typical year of
the rubber boom, in 1926 909 labourers of a total North Borneo plan-
tation workforce of 18,083 faced police prosecution for breaking their
work contracts in some way.53 A third factor was the growing pay gap
between Indian coolies and workers in other sectors of Malaya’s econ-
omy on the eve of the depression.54 The margins involved are indicated
by the figures below. These indicate average wages across a number of
common occupations in the FMS, and were compiled in September
1927:
Average wages rates (Malayan dollars) in the Federated Malay

States’ main classes of employment, 1927
Carpenters – $1 to $3 per day

Bricklayers – $1 to $2.50 per day
Painters – 60 cents to $2.50 per day
Lorry drivers – $1.65 per day
Coolies, Chinese – 55 cents to $1.30 per day
Coolies, Indians (male) – 45 to 75 cents per day
Stuck together? 189
Coolies, Indians (female) – 35 to 48 cents per day

Minors (various occupations) – 15 to 30 cents per day
Unskilled labour (male) – 45 cents to $1.84 per day
Unskilled labour (female) – 30 to 60 cents per day.
Skilled factory workers could earn more:

Chargemen – $3.36 to $4.80 per day
Fitters – $1.40 to $3 per day
Assistant fitters – 60 cents to $1.50 per day
Apprentices – 40 to 96 cents per day
Turners – $1.92 to $3 per day
Blacksmiths – $1.76 to $2.50 per day
Carpenters – $2 to $2.50 per day
Masons – $1.25 to $2.50 per day
Store coolies – 60 to 70 cents per day.
Source: TNA, CO 717/60/1, ‘Persons employed in industrial undertakings

under the control of Government’, 28 September 1927.
The plantation pay gap further increased once economic conditions

declined from 1928 onwards.55 And coolies had little capacity to pay
bargain. Their contracts precluded them from doing so and the con-
stant traffic in migrant workers rendered almost all plantation workers,
even the most highly skilled, easily replaceable.56 From August 1925 the
British India Steam Navigation Company was contracted by the British
government to ferry up to 2,100 southern Indian labourers per fortnight
from Avadi and Negapatam in the southern state of Tamil Nadu to the
Malayan ports of Penang and Port Swettenham.57 But, during 1927,
the last full year of rubber boom prices, the net flow of migrant workers
between India and Malaya reversed. Although 156,132 new arrivals,
including 22,571 minors, trod onto Malaya’s docksides, the number
of returnees was higher still. The excess of departures over arrivals
reached 53,000 by the end of that year. The reverse traffic persisted
into 1928 with only 63,072 migrants travelling from southern India.
The work of kanganis, while significantly reduced, remained pivotal,
sourcing approximately 60 per cent of all coolies recruited in 1927–8.58
Adverse economic conditions in Tamil Nadu, plus a brief rally in rub-
ber prices in 1929, resulted in higher numbers of new arrivals, with
114,252 labourers and their dependants disembarking at Penang alone
to work on FMS estates and mines.59 Kanganis were busier too, the
government issuing forty-five recruitment licences. In total, kanganis,
licensed or otherwise, recruited 44,314 labourers to work in both the
Federated and Unfederated Malay States during 1929.60 The 1929 fig-
ures were the final spike before demand for labour collapsed in the early
1930s.61 In the next year 151,735 Indian labourers were shipped back to
Tamil Nadu from Penang alone.62
It is not fair to suggest, though, that the Malayan government’s
immigration service and its labour controllers were simply agents
of the plantation owners. When prices began to fall in 1928, labour
ordinances once used to hold wages down and enforce contract dis-
cipline on workers were employed in the opposite fashion: to uphold
minimum wages and punish estate owners who ignored contractual
pledges. Estates employing more than twenty-five Indian coolies were,
for instance, required to display details of their contractual rights, writ-
ten in appropriate vernacular language. Estates found in breach of con-
tract regarding minimum wages and working conditions were liable
to fines calculated according to the total number of coolies employed.
And labour controllers acquired enhanced powers to arbitrate in dis-
putes over pay and living conditions, each of which increased sharply
as plantation revenues fell away.63 Thanks to their regime of on-site
inspections, during 1928 labour controllers investigated over 3,400
labourers’ complaints against their employers, the principal categories
of which are shown below. Some were trivial and handled ‘in house’ by
the Labour Department, but others were extremely serious, requiring
the intervention of police and the courts.
Principal categories of plantation labourers’ complaints

against their employers, 1928
Assault by manager or assistant manager 52

Assault by clerk or kangani 165
Non-payment/late payment of wages 1,960
Refusal to accept or pay notice claims 50
Wrongful dismissal 246
Separation of families 216
Miscellaneous 771
Source: TNA, CO 717/67/14, FMS Labour Department report,

1928, p. 9.
Forty-two convictions for contravention of labour laws by employers

or their agents resulted. The majority were for failure to pay wages on
time, for breaches of minimum wage limits, or for omitting to provide
official labour returns. Neither labour controllers nor police instituted
any prosecutions of managers or staff accused of assaults, nor was the
nature of these attacks described in any detail.64 The rhythm of inspec-
tions continued in subsequent years, with labour controllers typically
exceeding annual figures of 900 colony-wide visits to estates, lines and
Stuck together? 191
workers’ infirmaries.65 Yet, despite the persistence of assaults by man-

agers, clerks and kanganis in the resultant complaints lists, none pro-
duced any criminal convictions in the early depression years.66
The Labour Department’s primary concern with pay and contract
issues is understandable, but the absence of sustained police inquiries
into the maltreatment of workers points to a plantation culture in which
the beating of labourers was routine. This deduction is supported by
high rates of coolie suicide. In 1928 forty-three south Indian labourers
killed themselves on FMS rubber estates; in 1929 forty-five. This made
suicide the foremost working hazard for coolies in both years.67 These
were not anomalous years. Statistics for suicides were so large that they
were typically recorded in double-page spreads within annual labour
reports.68 And they remained stubbornly high as economic conditions
deteriorated.69 Even the peremptory investigations into these deaths,
summarized in the official accounts with banalities such as ‘family
trouble’, ‘melancholia’, or, more frequently, ‘reason unknown’, again
suggest that neither the police nor the courts concerned themselves
overmuch with the underlying reasons that drove so many workers to
take their own lives.70 Few policemen were Tamil speakers and, whereas
labour controllers often hired a Tamil-speaking assistant to accompany
them on estate visits, police officers were unable to communicate with
coolies, either directly or via an intermediary, in vernacular language.71
Through small acts of defiance – showing up late for roll call, go-slows
at work, and feigning ignorance of overseers’ instructions – Indian
labourers subverted the hierarchies of colonial authority that demar-
cated life on the rubber plantation.72 But, as the suicide statistics indi-
cate, the severity of coolie life could be overwhelming.
Labour regulation and order on the plantations

The Labour Department’s annual report for 1930 was the first pro-
duced after rubber prices tumbled following the Wall Street crash. It
painted a picture of orderly adjustment to difficult economic conditions
with wage rates agreed and ‘no very serious strikes or disturbances dur-
ing the year’.73 Does the Labour Department’s depiction of coordinated
management decisions and reasoned discussion between state represent-
atives and workers suggest that the Malayan rubber industry escaped
industrial conflict as the depression began to bite?74 Or does the image
of inevitable cutbacks belie the reality of chronic hardship and stringent
labour control on Malaya’s large European-owned estates? Spending
on anti-malarial measures provides some answers. 1920 saw the cre-
ation of a separate health branch within the FMS Medical Department
to oversee estate living conditions, including provision of stone-built

accommodation, potable water, adequate foodstuffs and basic sanita-
tion. Additional health checks of estate labourers were also instituted. It
nonetheless required another commission of inquiry, this time in 1924,
to break down, if not to eradicate, estate managers’ resistance to this
intrusive and, for them, potentially expensive state regulation of their
immigrant workforce.75 The medical supervisory regime withered in
the depression years. Site visits ceased in 1932 after which the govern-
ment quietly allowed estate managers to flout its earlier stipulations in
the interests of economy and estate survival. Infectivity and mortality
rates rose accordingly.76
The depression was clearly a watershed for estate living conditions.
The escalation in labour unrest from 1930 onwards was less abrupt.
Paradoxically, industrial disputes were more widespread in the preced-
ing two years. During 1928, for instance, there were three strikes on
European-owned estates in Selangor, one in Perak to the northwest and
one in Pahang, the large central state in Peninsular Malaya. Outside
the plantation sector, Indian workers employed by the British Insulated
Cables Company on a hydro-electrification project in Perak downed
tools, refusing to resume work until Labour Department representa-
tives agreed to arbitrate a settlement. More seriously, labourers engaged
on a government public works scheme in Fraser’s Hill (Pahang) staged
a wildcat strike in October 1928 in response to police arrests of eleven
fellow employees accused of riotous assembly. Muscular police action
was explicable in light of previous outbreaks of inter-communal vio-
lence between Indian and Chinese labourers on the Perak River hydro-
electric power scheme in which thirty Indians were wounded, one

fatally. Two Chinese were subsequently jailed at Ipoh for their involve-
ment in the killing. Here, too, Labour Department intervention, this
time organized direct from Kuala Lumpur, was required before the
dispute subsided and police units could withdraw.77
Why was this so? Perhaps the severity of the rubber crash induced
recognition among plantation labourers that this was not the time to
push their demands. Several estate managers were either dismissing the
majority of their workforce or threatening to amend contract terms to
exclude family dependants from those housed in plantation lines. Their
economizing was supported by the Malayan government which author-
ized repatriations of larger numbers of South Indian labourers to prevent
the emergence of any reservoir of potentially dangerous unemployed
coolies in the colony. Squeezed by their employers and threatened with
forcible repatriation, plantation workers had little option but to accept
harsher working conditions and reduced pay. Yet the most sustained
Stuck together? 193
pressure for cost and manpower reductions originated neither on the

estates nor in Government House, but far away in the City of London.
Based at Cheapside, the Rubber Growers’ Association was the largest
and most powerful interest group in the global rubber industry. The
RGA Council represented 560 British companies, of which 344 oper-
ated in Malaya. Even at the depression’s trough in mid-1932 it retained
an issued capital of £102,500,000, over £57 million of which derived
from British rubber estates in Malaya.78
Dedicated to the promotion of rubber consumption at prices most
advantageous to its members, the organization cultivated close work-
ing relationships with the British and Dutch governments and their
respective colonial authorities in Malaya, India, Ceylon and Sumatra.
Integral to the colonial establishments in all of these places, the RGA
was hamstrung less by any lack of influence with colonial officialdom
than by three other factors entirely. One was its long-running bat-
tle with Dutch, French and other rubber producers over the need for
agreed caps on the quantity of rubber brought to market. The RGA’s
goal here was to sustain minimum prices for raw and refined rubber
by limiting aggregate production. This proved exceptionally difficult
once the depression began.79 Linked to this was a second problem: the
split in British planter ranks. Most British estate owners working in
Dutch Sumatra had joined ‘Verubo’, an Amsterdam-based lobby group
that petitioned in favour of a new rubber restriction scheme that would
impose annual production quotas. This grouping was thrown off course
by frenzied efforts among certain producers, French ones especially, to
increase production to offset collapsing market prices. By 1932 Verubo
was virtually defunct.80 But Verubo’s rise and fall highlighted a third
problem: the proliferation after the First World War of estate owners’
pressure groups, each with local commercial and labour interests, and
only some of which were formally affiliated to the RGA.
Malaya was a case in point. Sharper falls in rubber and tin prices
during 1930 drove estate owners and mining companies to stricter
economies. While most employers showed the same instinct to cut,
some did so more arbitrarily than others. In July the IIC concluded
from a survey of estate revenues that reductions in standard wage rates
had to take place.81 More urgent was to impose some kind of order on
estate owners’ demands that unneeded coolies should be repatriated
and thus discharged from contracts and company wage rolls as soon
as possible. Month-by-month repatriations increased between August
and November 1930 before a brief rally in rubber prices slowed them.
But repatriations resumed with comparable intensity the following
March and continued throughout the rest of 1931. With market prices
so low, several estates turned to partial cultivation, leaving wider areas

untended. The Labour Department meanwhile convinced the largest
estate owners’ group, the Planters’ Association of Malaya (PAM) to
uphold minimum wage provisions, using repatriation rather than fur-
ther pay cuts as the means to keep costs down. It was soon apparent,
however, that some PAM members and other estate managers ignored
this recommendation and reduced coolies’ pay still further. The latest
spate of cuts and repatriations stirred little worker protest. Many Indian
labourers preferred pay reductions to repatriation and an uncertain eco-
nomic future in South India. The Labour Department was caught in a
cleft stick – stymied in its efforts to curb employers’ unilateral actions
by the understandable desperation of labourers to avoid dismissal.82
Because labour controllers attached paramount importance to their
arbitral role between estate owners and labourers, there was a real
danger that friction between the rubber industry and the colonial gov-
ernment over permissible limits to cost-cutting might get out of hand.
The prospect of British officials and managers at one another’s throats
was not one that the colonial authorities wished to entertain. During a
November 1932 speech to the Federal Council in Kuala Lumpur, the
chief secretary to the FMS government noted the colonial authorities’
fond hope that the planting industry might learn to speak with a single
voice. The multiple groups claiming to represent planting interests pre-
vented rubber producers from putting a coherent case to government.
The cacophony of planters’ special pleading inevitably diminished their
capacity to win support for their commercial arguments in favour of
cutting operating costs in general, and plantation wages in particu-
lar. It was hard to argue with the chief secretary’s logic. In Malaya
alone, besides the PAM, there existed an RGA local committee, the
Malayan Estate Owners’ Association, the United Society of Japanese
Planters, the Kedah Asiatic Planters’ Association, the Malacca Asiatic
Planters’ Association and numerous other local bodies, loosely grouped
as District Planters’ Associations, eighteen of which were also members
of the PAM.83 Owners of the larger rubber plantations may have strug-
gled to get their message across, but there was never much doubt about
what they wanted. Nor was their capacity to set the agenda for every-
thing affecting daily life on rubber estates in doubt. The major estate
owners ruled the roost in all matters from labour supply and wage rates
to the regulatory regimes supposed to monitor equitable treatment for
the plantation workforce.
In late 1931 the Malayan government’s controller of labour fired off
an indignant letter to the Negri Sembilan Planters’ Association. A tour
of certain estates in this southern Malayan state revealed systematic
Stuck together? 195
flouting of contractual terms and basic ethical standards. On only three

estates out of six, which he had chosen at random and subsequently vis-
ited, did the average earnings of Indian male labourers equal or exceed
$8.50 for the month of June. In none of these cases did average female
monthly earnings reach the legal minimum of $6.50. In one case, con-
ditions were so bad that the average combined earnings of a married
couple working the same plantation were less than $11. These were star-
vation wages. The controller anticipated similar results from forthcom-
ing inspections of other European-owned estates in Negri Sembilan.
He accused estate managers of implementing wage cuts so ruthless that
labourers were falling victim to malnourishment.84
Albeit unusually widespread in Negri Sembilan, planters’ disregard of
minimum wage legislation became increasingly flagrant as the depres-
sion bore down on operating costs and consequent profits. Little won-
der that relations between the PAM and government labour inspectors
were so fraught. Pressed by the colonial authorities, who feared adverse
publicity in South India if news of estate owners’ attempts to evade
their contractual obligations leaked out, on 25 April 1932, the Malayan
Planters’ Association acquiesced in the controller’s demand that ‘in no
circumstances should [South Indian Estate] labourers be paid starva-
tion wages during the present crisis.’ The PAM Council also conceded
that those labourers reduced to part-time day work should be paid pro-
rata at the prescribed standard minimum wage.85
These exchanges pointed to an increasingly adversarial relation-
ship between planters and the colonial state. But other indicators in
the plantation labour market suggested that, as in Vietnam, underlying
common interests between employers and government endured. The
labour controller’s intervention was, after all, pre-emptive, reminding
planters to comply with previously agreed minimum wage arrange-
ments. More generally, the colonial authorities in both the Federated
and Unfederated Malay States, as well as their colleagues in the govern-
ment of India, worked hand-in-glove with the major plantation owners
to minimize costs by regulating the labour supply. Put simply, the argu-
ments between them over wage rates were only part of a bigger economic
system in which the primary weapon used by government and produ-
cers alike to hold down wages was the compulsory repatriation of South
Indian labourers whenever market conditions worsened. Essential to
planters’ acceptance of new minimum wage rates was the government’s
assurance that any adult male labourers for whom no full-time work
was available would be repatriated to India at one month’s notice. This
arrangement, variations of which existed throughout inter-war Malaya,
avoided any long-term charge on estate employers for the subsistence of
those workers (and their dependants) left idle by production cutbacks.86

The mechanism was as ruthless as it was effective, treating the planta-
tion workforce as dispensable livestock to be herded back and forth as
required.
In May 1933 the Colonial Office even recorded, with no trace of
irony, that a combination of repatriations and rising rubber prices had
eliminated unemployment in Malaya. Equally blithe encouragement
was derived from the latest estate medical statistics, indicating that
‘health is good – in part the result of repatriations, since the most aged
and decrepit are the first to be thrown out of employment’.87 Lurking
behind this bureaucratic insensitivity was nascent optimism that the
worst of the depression was over. The sustained fall in rubber prices
finally ended in June 1932. Most estates continued their cost-cutting
measures until later that year, dismissing labourers, releasing others
(especially Javanese) from contracts, reducing tapping and, occasion-
ally, shutting down production entirely. Signs of a stronger recovery
registered in the final quarter of 1932 with more coolies taken on.88 Real
wage levels were still far below pre-1929 levels. If anything, income dis-
parities attenuated between Indian and non-Indian labourers, between
coolies in the FMS and those working on estates in the Unfederated
Malay States, between men and women and between coolies and other
unskilled labourers outside the plantation sector.89 Wages were lowest
of all in Perlis where no minimum wage rates were in force. Perlis’ one
remaining working estate paid female tappers and field workers only fif-
teen cents per day – not even close to subsistence level.90 Only the drop
in foodstuff prices and labourers’ resourcefulness in finding additional
sources of income from hunting, fishing, firewood-selling and vegetable
growing enabled those retained on estates to struggle through.91
Although tensions between them persisted, the Labour Department
continued to work alongside the PAM, combining assisted repatri-
ation with a semblance of minimum wage rates in an effort to avoid
hunger, labour unrest and violence on the estates.92 In this context,
controllers looked to two indicators of successful state intervention.
One was the relative stability of estate mortality and morbidity rates;
the other was the absence of prolonged strikes requiring police inter-
vention.93 Labour legislation, more widely applied in the FMS than
in the Unfederated Malay States, also made controllers’ work easier.
The Labour Department used four main items of industrial law –
the Labour Code, the Mining Enactment and Rules, the Machinery
Enactment and Rules and, finally, the Workmen’s Compensation
Enactment – to enforce minimum standards on rubber estates and
tin mines.94 The result was that, through pre-emptive arbitration and
Stuck together? 197
regular estate inspections, the Labour Department estimated that it

lifted an otherwise heavy burden from the police.95
The improving economic outlook added to the confidence among
labour controllers that Malaya’s key export industries had escaped the
depression unscathed by industrial unrest or political violence compar-
able with that in French Indochina or the Dutch East Indies. Recovery
in the plantation sector accelerated in 1934. Rubber prices rose stead-
ily and the introduction of a new restriction scheme helped estates
that had shut down production to resume it.96 This time foodstuff
prices did not rise comparably.97 So labourers could at last anticipate
real wage increases. Not surprisingly, labour controllers reported an
excess labour supply throughout the Malayan Peninsula as coolies
returned in their tens of thousands seeking work.98 In March 1936
the Labour Department negotiated general wage increases for Indian
labourers working on the larger rubber estates in the Unfederated
Malay States.99 New wage settlements were also agreed with the RGA
and the United Planting Association of Malaya. These came into
effect on 1 January 1937.100 Government attention had, by this point,
shifted away from the threat of labour unrest on the plantations to
the greater danger of urban protest in the Straits Settlements where
policing was of a different stripe.
Urban policing and extremist threats

Policing in Singapore, Penang and Malacca was conducted by the
Straits Settlements police, a predominantly Sikh force whose European
gazetted officers were recruited by the Crown Agents acting on behalf
of the British government.101 In each of the Straits Settlements a chief
police officer commanded subordinate territorial divisions and depart-
mental branches headed by more junior officers. Newly appointed police
inspectors were offered free passage to Singapore, family accommoda-
tion and the services of an orderly. Service began with a three-year
probationary period that included three legal examinations, sharp-
shooting and drill practice and a Malay language test.102 Chief police
officers in Penang and Malacca reported, in turn, to Singapore’s
Inspector-general of Police.103 Singapore also housed the Special Branch,
which confined itself to the investigation of political crime and subver-
sion, not just in the Straits Settlements but throughout colonial Malaya.
District courts and separate police courts handled the bulk of criminal
cases in the Settlements and the Governor could establish additional
police courts on an ad hoc basis if, for example, large numbers of strik-
ers were arrested during an industrial dispute.104 In practice, the work
of the Straits Settlements’ police and local courts between the wars was
dominated by the politics of Singapore’s ethnic Chinese majority, the
policing of industrial disputes and a vast construction project: comple-
tion of Singapore’s naval base.
Construction of the Admiralty-run naval dockyard, at Sembawang
on the northern tip of Singapore Island, continued from its inception
in 1921 until 1938. By far the largest dockyard anywhere in the British
Empire, many of its 10,000-plus workforce were of Chinese and south-
ern Indian Malayalee origin. Their British employers applied discrete
racial stereotypes when assessing workers’ aptitudes and propensity to
strike.105 In 1924, for instance, Admiralty planners drew on a Royal
Navy Staff College paper that stressed the importance of dockworkers’
political loyalties over their mechanical skills. Thus, while southern
Indian and Malay dockworkers were judged less technically proficient
than their ethnic Chinese counterparts, they were untainted by the
associations with industrial militancy that had attached to Chinese
dockyard personnel since a prolonged, Kuomintang-inspired 1922
seamen’s strike in Hong Kong. Despite Admiralty reservations, how-
ever, no viable alternative was ever found to the recruitment of a mixed
workforce of Chinese, Malayalee and Malay personnel. Periodic
industrial protest at the dockyard was never reducible to questions of
pay and conditions. Rather, as Liew Kai Khiun, puts it, dissent was
‘also shaped by the broader undercurrents of colonialism, imperial-
ism and nationalism … it represented responses to the fundamental
inequalities and uncertainties inherent in the global labour politics of
the Admiralty’.106
Royal Navy planners responded in March 1934 by creating a dock-
yard police force of their own, modelled on an existing naval base police
in Hong Kong. The scheme posited a force of around seventy constables
under a British gazetted officer responsible for base security and moni-
toring dockyard personnel. Although not described in terms of labour
regulation, the projected force was clearly intended to help impose order
should industrial disputes threaten completion of Singapore’s centre-
piece battleship dry docks.107 Redolent of their French counterparts in
Saigon’s naval arsenal, Singapore’s dockyard planners also resisted the
legalization of trade unions until the eve of the Second World War.
That is not to imply that the naval base avoided industrial strife in the
depression. Admiralty strictures did not prevent dockyard workers from
organizing mass walkouts in August 1930 in protest at threatened wage
cuts. On this occasion, dockyard managers belatedly agreed to abide by
the colony’s labour ordinances in matters of housing, food allowances
and hospital care for its personnel.108
Stuck together? 199
Testy labour relations at the Singapore dockyard were part of the

hubbub of the city’s inter-war policing. But the anti-colonial tenor to
communal politics in the Straits Settlements became more voluble after
the Kuomintang’s re-invention in 1925 as a leftist revolutionary move-
ment in tactical sympathy with Soviet communism. British interest
was further piqued in 1925–6 by the Kuomintang-sponsored Chinese
boycott of British goods traded in Canton.109 By early 1926 the PIB,
the agency that collated and analysed incoming police intelligence
throughout Malaya, focused its primary effort on tracking political
alignments among Singapore’s Chinese population. This intelligence
work was closely tied to labour market regulation. Its guiding prem-
ise was that radical ideas arrived with revolutionaries from China and
students returning from study overseas. Both were suspected of target-
ing foreign-born workers, coolies and other recent immigrants without
links to the established – and, it was presumed, peaceable – Chinese
trading communities in Singapore, Penang and Malacca.
This exteriorization of anti-British sentiment conferred three
benefits. It depoliticized the resident Chinese majority population; it
delegitimized what opposition there was as alien and ‘non-Malayan’;
and it justified harsher immigration restrictions and tighter surveillance
of suspect minority groups. Recent Hailam immigrants from Hainan
were most seriously affected. The PIB’s monthly review for April 1926,
for example, connected a rise in the number of Chinese junks bringing
in Hailam labourers with mounting support for the KMT. Other tran-
sient groups – merchant seamen, coolies and visiting students – were
accused of providing traction for Soviet-directed organizations and
other leftist anti-colonial groups to make inroads into Malaya. Backing
for the Moscow-based Peasants’ International, or Krestintern, was
linked to a small number of Tamil coolies on the Malayan mainland.
Other newly established groups including the Peking-based League of
Asiatic Races, the Oriental Congress of Oppressed Nationals and the
International Labourers’ Help Committee (each based in Berlin), as
well as looser pan-Islamist networks tied to Cairo’s Al Azhar University
or to the Caliphate movement, were similarly evaluated by assessing
the support they drew among particular ethnic groups – Chinese and
Indian plantation labourers and Javanese students respectively.110
Appraisal of the communist uprisings in Dutch Indonesia over the
winter of 1926–7 heightened the Special Branch’s preoccupation with
transnational communist networks under Soviet or Kuomintang con-
trol. The point is that the Straits Settlements force was consumed by
the search for foreign seditionists before the depression took hold.111
The police shootings outside the Kreta Ayer station during the 1927
Sun Yat Sen commemoration march (described in Chapter 2) under-

lined the equation drawn between foreignness, radicalization and
sedition. Special Branch intelligence reports both mirrored this shift
and contributed to it. Monthly surveys contained sub-sections describ-
ing events in nationalist China, mainland India, Southeast Asia and the
Hijaz before passing to consideration of internal unrest in Malaya. This
paper transition between the perceived sources of external threat and
the incidence of domestic disorder emphasized linkages between the
two, once again implying that, but for outside interference, Malaya’s
resident population would be quiescent and easily policed.112
To take two examples, the June 1927 Special Branch political intel-
ligence bulletin focused on Comintern documents stolen from the
Soviet legation in Peking. These confirmed the existence of an exten-
sive network of agents, recruiters and funding arrangements connect-
ing communist groups in the colonies of Southeast Asia. The report
then moved on to review three other topics: a Chinese boycott of the
Singapore trolley-bus company, the creation of a Chinese students’
association in Malacca and the need for tighter immigration checks on
immigrants. The suggestion of an invisible seditionist thread linking
each of these episodes was evident in the sequencing of intelligence
analysis and in the conclusions drawn from it.113 The following month’s
report began by assessing post-uprising conditions in Java before evalu-
ating the strength of trade unionism in British India and, finally, exam-
ining splits among KMT supporters in the Strait Settlements’ Chinese
community. The obvious conclusion here was that the organizational
methods and ultimate objectives of Indonesia’s communists, India’s
labour activists and KMT supporters were much the same.114
Singapore’s Special Branch detectives also led the fight against
Chinese secret societies and criminal gangs. This was a battle the detec-
tives felt they were winning when recorded serious crimes, including gun
crimes and other acts of violence, declined year on year between 1930
and 1932.115 With the secret societies apparently in retreat, as depres-
sion conditions worsened during 1932 the Special Branch went on the
offensive against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The resultant
spike in arrests – details of which are reproduced in Table 7.2 below –
disrupted communist organization in the three ports of Singapore,
Malacca and Penang.
A general crackdown was one thing, but improved intelligence gath-
ering and targeted raids proved more effective. By late 1934 Special
Branch officers exuded confidence in their assessments of Comintern
infiltration and MCP activity in the territory. Repeated raids against
party offices during 1932 and 1933 yielded details of the MCP’s
Stuck together? 201
Table 7.2 Straits Settlements Special Branch arrests of communist

suspects, 1932–3
Location/year Total arrests Numbers charged Numbers convicted
Singapore
1932 462 213 189
1933 631 411 48
Malacca
1932 101 55 51
1933 132 28 14
Penang
1932 54 34 24
1933 36 21 2
Source: TNA, CO 273/616/8, Straits Settlements police Special Branch, ‘Report

for the year 1934’, p. 2.
conference deliberations, its policy priorities and its subvention by the

Comintern. Agents’ reports and police arrests elicited further details of
the Comintern’s Malayan operations, controlled from its Far Eastern
Bureau in Shanghai. And comparisons with French Indochina appeared
to confirm that the Straits Settlements Special Branch achieved greater
success in stifling communist activity without antagonizing the wider
public in the process.116 Two additional raids, first on the MCP ‘post
office’, or propaganda distribution centre, on 4 January 1934, and then
at the MCP’s ‘central office’ in Singapore’s Paya Lebar district on 22
June 1934, reaffirmed the connections between foreign-borne extrem-
ist threats and labour unrest.117 Detectives seized a Comintern report
that reviewed the MCP’s orchestration of rail strikes in April and May.
Other documents listed details of over fifty Indonesian communists and
nationalist activists who had fled to Singapore after Dutch suppression
of the Javanese uprising in 1927. These newcomers were identified as
key figures in the MCP’s deepening involvement in workplace sedition
and internationalist protest.118
By 1935 the rhythm of anti-communist repression had slowed. Special
Branch raids and arrests, already fewer and better targeted in 1934, fell
back sharply with only thirty-five suspected communists arrested in
Singapore, thirteen in Penang and twelve in Malacca during 1935 as
a whole.119 But variations between the three Straits Settlements in the
convictions arising from police swoops pointed to two other factors: the
Table 7.3 Straits Settlements Special Branch anti-communist section raids,

1931–5
Raids Raids Raids Raids Raids

Settle- 1931 yielding 1932 yielding 1933 yielding 1934 yielding 1935 yielding
ments Raids results Raids results Raids results Raids results Raids results
Singapore 174 44 118 84 95 78 33 13 12 7

Penang 44 11 70 12 34 8 33 4 26 2
Malacca – – 60 0 8 2 5 2 4 1
Total 218 55 248 96 137 88 71 19 42 10
Source: TNA, CO 273/616/8, Straits Settlements police Special Branch, ‘Report for the Year
1935’, 1 January 1936, p. 1.
greater intensity of MCP activity in Singapore and the larger numbers

of police informants in that city relative to Penang and, more especially,
Malacca. Raids statistics are shown in Table 7.3 above.
The earlier clampdown and the diminution of industrial disputes
as economic conditions improved played their part in this.120 So, too,
did Special Branch success in disrupting networks of communication
between the MCP and its Comintern controllers in Shanghai. The par-
ty’s manipulation of local trade unions continued, but police analysts
confidently predicted that Malaya’s communists were directionless and
‘in low water’.121
Henceforth, the Special Branch anti-communist section worked to
prevent the MCP from restoring its Shanghai connections, thereby
cutting off a key source of party funding. The section also targeted
communist youth groups and organizers of strike actions by builders,
tram-drivers, pineapple cutters and tin miners. All were affiliated to the
Singapore general labour union – an umbrella body that the police were
convinced was the cornerstone of MCP efforts to radicalize Malaya’s
workers.122 With the MCP for the time being debilitated, Special Branch
could reorient its intelligence-gathering priorities towards a more press-
ing threat: Japan. The late 1930s would see a gradual shift towards a
stronger counter-intelligence effort directed principally against Japanese
espionage, covert funding and commercial penetration in Malaya. By
the start of 1936 the Japanese section was fast emerging as the cut-
ting edge of police surveillance operations in the Straits Settlements.123
Monitoring of Japanese subversion intensified in the five years ahead.
Meanwhile, individual police units were once more preoccupied by the
interlocking problems of communal politics and labour unrest.
Stuck together? 203
Epitaph: policing and the politics of labour

protest in Malaya, 1937–40
It was clear by late 1937 that depression-era problems were not wholly
consigned to the past. On 30 November a new rubber restriction scheme
came into force. Production fell by anything between 20 and 40 per cent
over the next year. Smaller estates began shutting down; coolie wage rates
were pegged back. Plantation workers were better placed to find alter-
native employment this time around, however.124 The same could not be
said of the tin industry where similar problems of over-production and
falling prices led to widespread lay-offs, mostly of Chinese minework-
ers. The government responded with a public works programme, whose
priorities indicated a step-change in official concerns about workplace
security: by 1939, the Chinese, and not the Indian, workforce caused
greatest anxiety among labour controllers and police chiefs.125
Aside from mounting unemployment, two extraneous factors pro-
voked resurgent labour protest in Singapore and the Malayan Peninsula
in the years 1937 to 1940. One was the heightened politicization of
Chinese labour in Malaya that followed the resumption of war between
China and Japan in July 1937. As anti-Japanese feeling among Malaya’s
ethnic Chinese population intensified, so remittances and other forms
of support for Chiang Kai Chek’s Nationalist Kuomintang forces
increased.126 More important, once the Chinese Communist Party
declared its willingness to work alongside its Kuomintang rival in fight-
ing the Japanese invaders, Malaya’s communists seized the opportunity
to win new followers among ethnic Chinese workers, hitherto pre-
dominantly aligned with Chiang Kai Chek. Emulating its Vietnamese
cousin, although never as powerful, by 1940 the MCP was the domin-
ant organizational force in Malaya’s labour activism. As a result, the
policing of strikes and worker demonstrations became tied to a second
factor: the colonial government’s hardening resolve to suppress com-
munist dissent as war clouds darkened across Asia and Europe. There
was no place for leftist sedition in Malaya’s industries, whether rubber
production and tin mining on the peninsula or port construction and
ship repair in Singapore. Government officers needed no reminding
about the importance to Britain and its empire of Malaya’s strategic raw
materials and a fully functioning Singapore naval base. Once Britain
went to war, street-level deployments of police and army units occa-
sioned by industrial disputes were contingent on Special Branch read-
ings of the threat posed by communist anti-colonialism to colonial state
security and Malaya’s industrial output.127
This repressive turn was matched by Singapore Governor Sir Shenton
Thomas’ longer-term effort to ensure that Malaya and Singapore’s
major industrial employers acted in accordance with government wishes

in matters of pricing, war production and, above all, the regulation of
the wages and conditions of their workforces. Thomas’ approach was
preventive. He wanted industry to sing the government’s tune when
responding to workers’ demands for improved pay and better con-
ditions.128 The Singapore government-general may not have had an
incomes policy with prescribed wage bands or uniform working condi-
tions. It nonetheless expected Malaya’s leading industrial concerns to
exercise pay restraint without, in the process, antagonizing their employ-
ees to the point that labour disputes became endemic and impossible to
police. The Governor was under no illusions that this would be easy. On
3 November 1939, two months after the outbreak of war in Europe, he
advised the Colonial Office thus:
Already there are clear signs of possible labour trouble. The cost of living is
going up and, even though the rise may not be appreciable at present, the
unsatisfactory feature about it is that it has occurred in spite of the efforts of
the Government to keep it down. The price of raw products has risen, and may
rise still further. I imagine that the price of many locally manufactured articles
has also risen as a result. We are faced therefore with the fact that it is costing
labourers more to live, while the value to employers of those engaged on pro-
ductive work is far greater than it was a few months ago.
The refusal of a few employers to raise wages in sufficient proportion to the
increase in the selling price of raw products was in itself enough to cause the
1937 strikes in which, through the efforts of agitators, at one time some 20,000
men were involved; but if this failure to recognize that higher produce prices
justify higher wages is aggravated by an increase in the cost of living, then
we may have a much worse situation to face than we had two years ago. The
labourer knows perfectly well whether his particular industry is prospering or
not, and it is in times of prosperity, not in a slump, that strikes are most likely.
The agitator then comes into his own, and the strike for better conditions is
converted into resistance of lawful authority.129
In sum, Shenton Thomas was convinced of two things: economic
conditions would generate heightened protest and employers would
not respond willingly to ease the situation. Government’s task was also
twofold: to police labour and to cajole employers. To this end, heads
of departments employing large numbers of staff were instructed to
monitor signs of unrest among them. The United Planting Association
of Malaya and the Chamber of Mines were requested to exhort their
members, not merely to pay proper rates – in the case of rubber, con-
tractually agreed wages – but to monitor their workforces with equal
vigilance. The Labour Department was, as ever, in the vanguard of
this intelligence gathering. Workplace inspections increased; reports of
possible strike actions were relayed more promptly to Special Branch
and police. Every state government was to ensure that liaison between
Stuck together? 205
its labour controllers, its Chinese-speaking officials and its local police
force was as efficient as it could be. Malaya’s colonial authorities entered
1940 with one eye on Japan, the other on its labour force.130
There was, then, a certain consistency to the politics of policing
in inter-war Malaya, although perhaps not what one might expect.
Keeping colonial order demanded deeper knowledge of the communal-
ism and sharpening ethnic differences between Malays and non-Malays
even though nothing, as yet, amounted to a ‘nationalist challenge’ to
British rule. Political alignments among Malaya’s Chinese commu-
nity, especially in the Straits Settlements, became more complex and,
from a governmental perspective, more threatening once the previous
barriers between Chinese republican nationalism and internationalist
communism collapsed from 1925 onwards. And backwards glances at
communist-inspired disorder in Shanghai’s international settlements,
the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina sent occasional shivers
down the robust institutional spine of the Special Branch.
For all that, the dominant task in ordering Malaya’s colonial sub-
jects between the wars lay elsewhere: in the regulation of labour in
its foremost export industries – and large rubber estates above all.
Relations between government and industry, typified by the major rub-
ber exporters in the RGA, were sometimes fraught. But friction over
wage rates, the treatment of contracted labour and measures neces-
sary to prevent any explosion of unrest among labourers never escalated
beyond control, even in the depression’s testing conditions. Malaya, in
this respect, offers a useful counterpoint to French Indochina’s experi-
ence of repeated strikes and major revolt. That is not to suggest that
the authorities across Malaya got most things right. Nor is it to imply
that employers treated their workforces well. The sorry statistics from
plantations, whether in regard to health and hygiene, repatriations and
wages, or suicides and complaints of maltreatment, indicate otherwise.
It is to argue, however, that it is to these workplaces that we might
look to enhance our understanding of how colonial order in Malaya
was maintained. The links between the Labour Department and the
police – explicitly identified by Governor Shenton Thomas in 1939 –
were integral to the functioning of Malaya’s political economy through-
out the inter-war period.
8 Caning the workers? Policing and violence in
Jamaica’s sugar industry
On Monday morning the cutters struck work on all estates, mostly as the
result of a more or less organized agitation. On Tuesday work was resumed
at Spanish Wood but, as the cutters were being secretly threatened, it was
necessary to find police protection for them. Yesterday, Wednesday afternoon,
a start was made to cutting in Golden Grove and P[lantain] G[arden] River
under police protection, and to-day there has been a general resumption on all
estates. The demand was that the rate should be raised from nine pence to one
shilling per ton, and there is no doubt that the trouble was caused by strangers
to the district, – we believe by some of those recently repatriated from Cuba.
No concession whatever has been made but efforts to find the ringleaders have
been unsuccessful. The running of the Factory has in consequence been inter-
mittent and the week’s production will be poor.1
A February 1934 letter from a sugar estate manager to his company
bosses in Glasgow, a matter-of-fact account of a strike action, the above
extract highlights key themes to be explored in this chapter. It points
to the labour crisis in Jamaica’s foremost agricultural export industry
and it reveals the speed with which worker protests could spread within
the island’s sugar economy. It exposes the underlying fear of external
sedition – of outsiders, troublemakers, or, in this case, recent economic
migrant returnees, who, in the depression era, seemed to Jamaica’s
estate owners to be the viral cause of an incipient social breakdown.
Finally, the letter chimes with this book’s central concern: growing
police involvement in the politics of labour protest.
As this estate-level correspondence indicates, the smaller size of the
Caribbean economies relative to the rubber colonies of Southeast Asia
allows us to drill deeper into the policing of their dominant export
industries. Physically remote from one another (see Map 8.1) but closely
attuned socially, Jamaica’s British-owned sugar estates and Trinidad’s
oilfields (discussed in the next chapter) were sites of bitter industrial con-
frontation and political violence in the 1930s. These conflicts catalysed
more orchestrated protests that came to be known as labour ‘rebellions’
or ‘revolts’. Both terms imply much wider political objectives, even the
overthrow of colonial rule. These actions – originally economic protests
206
U.S.A.
BA
H
GULF OF MEXICO Nassau A
M
A
(Br.)
IS
A T L A N T I C
LA
Havana
ND
C
S
U
CAICOS IS
B
A TURKS IS O C E A N
O DOMINICAN
I C CAYMAN IS REPUBLIC VIRGIN IS
X (Br.) (U.S.) (Br.)
E HAITI San Juan ANGUILLA
M Belize (Br.)
Ciudad ANTIGUA (Br.)
BRITISH JAMAICA Port- Trujillo PUERTO ST. KITTS-
HONDURAS (Br.) Kingston au-Prince RICO MONTSERRAT (Br.)
(U.S.) NEVIS GUADELOUPE
(Br.) (Fr.)
GUATEMALA DOMINICA
(Br.) MARTINIQUE
HONDURAS (Fr.)
C A R I B B E A N S E A ST.LUCIA
(Br.) BARBADOS
EL SALVADOR (Br.)
ST. VINCENT
(Br.)
NICARAGUA
ARUBA BONAIRE GRENADA
(Neth.) (Neth.) (Br.)
TOBAGO
CURAÇAO (Br.)
(Neth.) Port of Spain
COSTA Canal TRINIDAD
zone (Br.)
RICA
PANAMA Georgetown
P A C I F I C
VENEZUELA FRENCH
BRITISH
O C E A N GUIANA
GUIANA NETHERLANDS
GUIANA
COLOMBIA
0 250 500 750 1000 km
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 miles B R A Z I L

Map 8.1 Caribbean territories
that expanded into movements for socio-political change – were, in

turn, associated with the emergence of organized trade unionism and
the political parties that would dominate both islands after they secured
independence from Britain in the early 1960s.2 So much is reasonably
familiar and capably explored in the historiography of British imperial-
ism in the Caribbean.3 Yet the labour revolts were also something more.
They offered strong evidence of the intimate connections between pol-
itical economy and colonial security, between colonial government,
export industry and policing. To study this triangular relationship at
the micro-historical level of individual protests is to grapple with exist-
ential problems of British colonial rule in the Caribbean as the global
economic crisis took hold.
Usually analysed in relation to the emergence of a new generation
of Jamaican political leaders such as Norman Manley and Alexander
Bustamante, labour protest in late 1930s Jamaica also represented the
severest test of British colonial rule in the Caribbean since the Morant
Bay rebellion of 1865.4 The political economy of this crisis was fun-
damental to the way it was policed, explaining why high levels of state
violence appeared strategically imperative to its perpetrators.
The political economy of Jamaica’s labour revolt

Was Jamaica’s depression-era police force the defender of the socio-
economic status quo – of strict work regimens in the plantation sec-
tor, of a low-wage economy crucial to sugar profitability, of prohibitive
sanctions against organized labour on the plantations and in the ports –
in short, of the political economy of West Indies colonialism? Or, had it
advanced in structure and purpose from its post-emancipation origins
in the mid-nineteenth century as the protector of white hierarchy, of
landowner and corporate privilege and of maximum extraction from
the sugar economy?5 Less lethal certainly, but, in other ways, Jamaica’s
Constabulary was not so different, sixty-five years later, from the police,
militia and naval forces that, in Governor Eyre’s chilling words, ‘with
God’s blessing on the means used’ tracked down and killed hundreds
of Jamaicans accused of involvement in the Morant Bay insurrection.6
Eyre’s ruthlessness provoked liberal outrage in Victorian Britain. But
metropolitan criticism focused on the application of colonial martial
law, not on the need for a different style of policing.7 In the early twen-
tieth century the island’s police force remained a coercive instrument
without roots or legitimacy among the black majority communities in
Jamaica’s rural parishes and urban centres hardest hit by inter-war
economic crisis.
Caning the workers? 209
The earliest record of paid constables in Jamaica dates from 1716,

when the British Crown authorized parish justices and vestrymen to
levy up to £20 in local taxes to pay for armed officers to protect the
property and interests of estate owners and ‘the middling sort’ of less
affluent settler.8 But Jamaica’s Constabulary force originated in 1867 as
a professional replacement for the militias that wrought such havoc two
years earlier. White-officered, paramilitary and backed by the British
West India Regiment (BWIR) battalions garrisoned in Kingston’s Up
Park Camp, in the eyes of most Jamaicans the new police force resem-
bled its predecessor.9 Continuity was also apparent in the severity of
the island’s criminal code and its differential application across the col-
our line.10 The code’s rigours were, if anything enhanced during the
1890s and 1900s to assist clampdowns against public order offences
and traditional obeah sorcery. Long prison terms and flogging for
minor criminal offences remained the norm. Provision continued for
white vigilante militias to serve as additional protectors of property or
internal security.11 Discussing the iniquitous treatment of whites and
non-whites charged with violent crime in the Caribbean before the turn
of the twentieth century, Martin Wiener concludes thus:
The race question in the West Indies was always at the back of white minds,
both of local whites resisting the interference of ‘ignorant’ and ‘self-righteous’
officials with their dominance, and of such officials, English visitors, and
imperial bureaucrats in London worried over the arrogance of Creoles toward
their nonwhite populations. As long as things remained reasonably quiet, how-
ever, the local white elites generally could have their way; these islands in their
late nineteenth-century decline had become too peripheral to broader British
interests to be worth sustained attention from the metropole.12
Not surprisingly, open signs of popular dissent were rare – until, that is,
the depression catalysed the labour rebellions.13
If economic factors were so pivotal to colonial violence, in Jamaica
and elsewhere, why has political economy not been used to explain
it? A purely functionalist reading of collective violence in the British
Caribbean and the repression it triggered might use ethnic tensions,
economic discrimination and resource competition as explanatory
tools, while an instrumentalist account might reduce the violent acts of
both sides to the achievement of political goals – nationalist insurrec-
tion on the one hand, restoration of the state’s hegemonic power on the
other.14 What unites both approaches is the connection made between
violent action and its socio-political consequences – means and ends – to
the exclusion of the structural economic factors behind violence itself.
Security force responses to labour unrest were the logical consequence
of attitudinal formation and decision-making in a colonial economy
dominated by European interests. A familiar argument connecting

v iolence at an intrinsic level to the operation of the colonial state pos-
its that colonizers threatened or used violence to compel indigenous
subjects into acceptance of social, economic or cultural changes alien
to their way of life. In addition to army garrisons, strategic networks
of interior communications and Draconian police powers, colonial
security forces therefore resorted to occasional exemplary communal
punishment to overawe majority populations with little or no vested
interest in the socio-political status quo.15 Thereafter, the psychological
violence of threatened punishment and the physical violence of coer-
cive policing became habitual as imperial authorities upheld iniquitous
colonial social structures that privileged Europeans over their colo-
nial subjects.16 The following sections assess protest policing to show
whether Jamaica fits this model.
Rethinking strategies of repression in

Jamaica after the First World War
Colonial governments in the British West Indies responded enthusias-
tically to Walter Long’s November 1918 call for fundamental review of
police responses to civil unrest.17 There was much in the recent past on
which to reflect. When war broke out in August 1914 Sir Walter Egerton,
Governor of British Guiana, had been arguing with the Colonial Office
over the costs of police protection for estate managers following riots
on two local sugar estates in 1913. Between March and May police
were deployed to prevent any renewed estate disorders, but plantation
owners refused to defray the extra government expenditure incurred.18
Egerton, like his fellow Caribbean Governors was reluctant to counten-
ance any privatization of police protection work and was therefore loath
to pursue estate bosses for payment. But the Colonial Office was less
sure, rightly anticipating further such calls on police time.19 The issue
remained unresolved when the war ended, although, by then, short-
term Caribbean security concerns had shifted. Kingston saw its first
substantial rioting in six years in September 1918 when Chinese trad-
ers’ premises were attacked by crowds protesting over allegedly unfair
price hikes.20 Similar ethnically targeted attacks recurred in later years.
There were also signs of unrest within the BWIR. The regiment’s war
experience was shaped by the blatant racial discrimination its troops
faced during campaigning in Cameroon and the Middle East, and when
consigned as labour battalions rather than fighting units on the Western
Front.21 In December 1918 troops awaiting repatriation from Italy were
assigned to clean the latrines of dockworkers at Taranto. This latest
humiliation was the final straw: the BWIR’s 9th battalion mutinied.22
Tensions between the West Indian troops, Italian labourers and local
Carabinieri had simmered for months, the first BWIR labour battalions
having arrived in the port twelve months earlier.23 For soldier returnees
and wider Caribbean society the racial discrimination epitomized by
the BWIR’s sorry end to the war acquired greater significance when a
Jamaican police strike threatened some months later in 1920.24
These events help explain why Jamaica’s government took its time
in formulating ideas for post-war ‘emergency policing’. Among the
last to submit its proposals, these, when finally completed, were par-
ticularly fulsome. What emerged from King’s House, the Governor’s
Kingston residence, was an entirely new ‘scheme for dealing with
disturbances’ filed in 1920 by a three-man committee consisting of
E. St John Branch, the island’s Attorney-General, his deputy, Major
T. B. Nicholson and W. E. Clark, the capital’s Inspector of Police. 25
The committee’s demands for police reinforcement, the provision of
a mounted police detachment to clear the streets of urban rioters and
comprehensive adoption of paramilitary equipment, including steel
helmets, automatic weapons and an armoured car chimed with rec-
ommendations received from most other colonial administrations.26
More interesting was the clear focus on the prevention of looting and
inter-communal riots in urban neighbourhoods, both forms of col-
lective violence linked to acute colonial poverty. Recent street dis-
turbances in Kingston, in October 1919 and, again, in January 1920
quickly descended into widespread looting, with Chinese traders
once more singled out for attack. Meanwhile, episodic communal vio-
lence in Jamaica’s rural parishes, often linked to disturbances among
workers on the island’s major sugar plantations, led to the appoint-
ment of Special Constables to be deployed in the event of renewed
disorder. But what was a colonial ‘riot’ and why was it considered so
threatening?
Political scientist Donald Horowitz describes the related phenom-
enon of the inter-ethnic riot in the following terms:
A recurring cross-national feature of ethnic riots is their bizarre fusion of
coherence and frenzy. The riot is not an unstructured mêlée, in which it is
impossible to distinguish attackers from their victims. Rather, the ethnic riot
consists of a series of discernible actions, identifiable initiators and targets,
attacks and (rarely) counterattacks. Riots spring from highly patterned occur-
rences and conditions, and they reflect clear-cut structures of ethnic-group
relations. Communities do not generally slip gradually or imperceptibly – or
randomly – into ethnic violence. Moreover, after the event, participants typic-
ally exhibit an utter lack of remorse for their conduct.27
Jamaica fitted this pattern of worsening inter-communal friction and

remorseless violence; but why? Jamaica’s police, like their counterparts
across the British Caribbean, were trained as an armed gendarmerie.
Their white officers placed strong emphasis on weapons training, drill
and life in barracks, separate from the local population. Coercive social
control, not community service, still defined Jamaican policing between
the wars.28 This fairly typical colonial approach to street gatherings
provides a useful guide to police operations. As discussed in Chapter 3,
British colonial subjects were consistently denied any right of assembly.
Groups of three or more people dallying in the street could be legally
defined as riotous assemblies, particularly if the authorities could prove
that those involved had a ‘common purpose’ that they intended to
accomplish by force or threat of violence. In such circumstances, the
infamous ‘reading of the Riot Act’ demanding immediate dispersal of
the group under penalty of police intervention could take place. There
was, notionally, an hour’s grace for dispersal before a felony was deemed
to have occurred and the use of security forces became legitimate. Such
an orderly, sequential procedure was rarely followed in practice. Police
or troops instead sought to break up disturbances – actual or potential –
whenever the moment seemed most opportune.
The determining factor here was the ability to apprehend or shoot
those identified as the organizers of protest. Lethal force was more evi-
dent in colonial situations because police and military officers were
under strict instruction neither to use blank ammunition nor to fire
over the heads of demonstrators. Once it became clear that a group
would not disperse, security force commanders were, instead, to shoot
‘ringleaders’, ideally, wounding rather than killing them by firing at the
lower part of the body. The obvious point was that neither events nor
human reactions were so predictable. ‘Ringleaders’ was a loose con-
cept. As the chapter’s opening quote suggests, identifying such individ-
uals was difficult and open to abuse. Strict ‘fire discipline’ sometimes
broke down, and the original illegal gathering could be both more
spontaneous and less seditious than presumed. Put simply, the crucial
escalatory factor in colonial violence was frequently the security forces
themselves.
To study colonial policing in the British Caribbean is to study para-
dox. On the one hand, to judge from the events in Jamaica and its island
neighbours during the 1930s, putting down strikes, riots and other
civil emergencies connoted the end of ‘normal’ policing and resort to
desperate and violent expedients. On the other hand, repressive meas-
ures and police brutality were routine, part of the everyday in colonial
Jamaica. Recourse to violence was neither unusual, nor unexpected.
Any analysis of protest policing must begin with the acknowledge-

ment that it was not violence per se, but rather the qualitative changes
in that violence – its form, its function and its extent (what Benjamin
Brower in another colonial context describes as ‘multiple logic of vio-
lence’29) – that marked out periods of acute colonial crisis across the
British Caribbean.
In the years 1935–8 colonial police forces confronting organized pro-
test in British Guiana, in the towns and oilfields of Trinidad and, above
all, in Jamaica proved unable to cope. Their responses – practical and
procedural – to civil disorder were inadequate, sometimes dispropor-
tionate. Police actions frequently degenerated into live firing, more often
out of panic than as part of a planned escalation of coercive force. Once
police lines were broken and uniformed constables injured or killed,
colonial authorities turned to the military or, as was more geographically
feasible, to the Royal Navy. Detachments of troops, marines and sailors
intervened repeatedly. They stifled protests, enforced curfews, patrolled
the streets and guarded government installations and business prem-
ises. There appeared to be no intermediate point between the low-level
violence integral to civil policing of industrial disputes or political dem-
onstrations and the high-level violence of armed force repression in con-
ditions analogous to martial law. This was not the whole story, however.
Underlying these security measures were more profound social and
cultural divisions visible in the antipathies across Jamaica’s ethnic divide.
The geographical isolation of island territories and the shortage of locally
available police or military forces sharpened the governing elite’s intense
distrust of the black majority population. Mixed with this fear was a pre-
vailing disdain for Jamaicans’ capacity for self-restraint or the discipline
of labour. A poisonous cocktail of racism and nightmarish anxiety esca-
lated into ‘black peril’-type fear of racial violence, physical and sexual, in
periods of maximum economic distress. Equally problematic, political
cultures in the British Caribbean were warped by the institutional mem-
ory of slavery and the inability of colonial governments to overcome eth-
nic divisions that the slave economy had first put in place.30
Abiding racial tension and the acute inequalities that pervaded these
former slave colonies deepened the rift between whites and non-whites
once protests began. Fears of a general uprising, of racially motivated
killing and of sexual violence against the white minority nurtured the
sense of embattlement and shared interest between colonial officials,
white estate managers and business owners. One consequence was that
white settlers, managers and other employees took up arms as police
auxiliaries and vigilantes whenever industrial unrest erupted. Thus,
into the mix of civil police and naval squadrons we must add the white
irregulars prepared to use force to defend homes, businesses, plantations

and other commercial interests against what was typically depicted as
mob violence. As Nigel Bolland makes plain, Jamaica’s long-entwined
histories of colonialism, slavery and labour coercion bred permissive-
ness to casual violence across races and socio-economic sectors of the
island’s population.31
The assumption prevalent within Jamaica’s ruling elites that gov-
ernment existed to promote more efficient exploitation of labour and
extraction of material resources helped entrench this authoritarian style
of colonial governance.32 Bitter experience of such coercive behaviour
had acculturated the island’s black majority to expect violent responses
from employers, police and government whenever demands were made
for basic improvements in working conditions or living standards.
Protesters were under no illusions that employers or police would treat
such claims neutrally. The combination of workplace discrimination
and quotidian violence, compounded by the colonial state’s authori-
tarian impulse, also determined police deployments and behaviour.
Drawing on the work of C. L. R. James and Hegelian political thought,
Bolland uses dialectics as an explanatory device to account for the high
incidence of state violence in the Caribbean:
What greater tension could there be than between ‘the desire for liberty,’ which
[C. L. R.] James identified as the dominant fact of Caribbean history, and
the oppressive social arrangements of colonialism and slavery, that were so
extraordinarily pervasive and persistent in the region? The dialectic between
the aspiration for freedom, as an ideal, and the brutal reality of colonialism
and slavery, which was the experience of everyday life, constitutes the central
dynamic of Caribbean history and political culture.33
Riot and reprisal in the Jamaican prison system

In late 1926 the prevalence of institutionalized violence in Jamaica’s
police and prison system became impossible for Whitehall officials to
ignore. In the last days of July 1926 over one hundred inmates of Jamaica’s
largest colonial prison, Kingston’s infamous General Penitentiary (GP),
were marched into its central courtyard and flogged. The whippings,
and the additional terms of imprisonment imposed on the prisoners,
were reported without comment by The Times some two months later.34
The floggings were imposed as punishment for a prison riot on 26 July.
The disorder was of sufficient duration and intensity to require police
and army intervention to quell it. Prison administrators considered
harsh exemplary action the only deterrent against further disturbances.
Public flogging had long been out of favour in most British colonies
(although still used in colonial regiments).35 But it persisted in Jamaica.

Indeed, the whipping of juvenile offenders was on the increase. With no
reformatory schools or borstals for young offenders, prison overcrowd-
ing in Jamaica, as elsewhere, led magistrates to favour physical repri-
mand as an instant alternative to custodial sentences for adolescents
under sixteen.36 At least it kept them out of the GP. When Alexander
Paterson, His Majesty’s Commissioner for Prisons, toured facilities in
the British West Indies a decade later, he singled out Kingston’s main
prison for criticism. Or rather, he singled out the society that tolerated
its severity:
Each country gets in the end the prison administration for which it is prepared
to pay, and that administration is in turn decided by the degree to which the
interest of the average citizen in the matter has been aroused. In these Colonies
of the West there is little or no trace of any sustained or intelligent interest in
the treatment of the offender … There is commonly no attempt to think out
the purpose served by a prison, and certainly no conscious desire to co-operate
with the authorities in the rehabilitation of the prisoner. On the part of the
uneducated public there is bland unquestioning indifference to the whole sub-
ject. The village lad gazing idly at prisoners in the field thinks no more deeply
than to reflect: ‘He’s inside the fence and I’m outside’.
Vaguely there is an underlying idea that prison is a place of punishment and
a means of deterrence, and when there is some rumour of shower-baths or
electric light or ventilation being introduced into the local gaol, the common
reaction is a fear lest the prison authorities are weakening in the performance
of their duty. It is only the negative side of prison life that is understood. This
attitude is reflected by the position of the Prison Department as the Cinderella
of the public services. In the supply of transport, the issue of paint, the allow-
ance made for incidental expenses it comes last in the departmental race for
the Estimates Stakes.37
Paterson rightly connected prison abuses with inadequate funding and

the absence of a civil society free enough to articulate public opposition
to maladministration. But he stopped short of linking these problems to
the structures of colonial rule.38
Hardly surprising that, in July 1926, the prison administration did
not anticipate censure from Whitehall. The whippings meted out then
also had two grim echoes, one recent; the other less so.39 First was
General Dyer’s April 1919 instruction that six local boys suspected (but
not convicted) of having beaten an Englishwoman, Marcella Sherwood,
manager of the city’s Mission School, three days before the Amritsar
massacre should be tied to a triangular whipping post and publicly
flogged.40 Second was the popular identification of whipping with both
Jamaican slavery and the massive retribution after the Morant Bay
uprising. Flogging inmates in the GP courtyard was not only cruel, it
was provocative.41 It was also ineffective. Prison disorders continued

throughout August, with three further riots breaking out.42 Yet these
were just a prelude.
At 4.55 p.m. on 3 September 1926 a Mr Hearns, Kingston prison’s
clerk, arrived by car at the city’s Central Police Station. He ran into the
charge room asking that a police detachment be sent immediately to
the GP where a break-out was underway. An armed party under sub-
inspector Harvey Clark consisting of one sergeant major and fifty-four
sub-officers and men set out in the station’s patrol wagon and other
available vehicles. After this first armed party departed, Sub-Inspector
Smith paraded a further reserve party of thirty-seven men. Fifteen
were equipped with firearms, the rest with batons. At 5.10 p.m. charge
room officers received a telephone message from the Kingston ice fac-
tory suggesting that prisoners were running amok in Harbour Street
where stone throwing and violent assaults were taking place. A baton
party of one sergeant and ten men left in two cars to restore order to
the affected area. Meanwhile, the police party from the central station
in conjunction with a similar detachment from Kingston’s main police
depot joined forces at the GP. Prisoners were thrown back in their cells;
a lockdown imposed by armed patrols. Police search parties combed the
city hunting for escapees. Several were recaptured during the evening
but some remained undiscovered. Sentries were posted outside prison
officials’ offices during the night of 3 September.43
There would be no public floggings on this occasion. Rather, two
prisoners were already dead, shot by police. Another was mortally
wounded and sixteen others were hospitalized with gunshot wounds.
It was a far cry from the orderly riot control procedures laid out by
the police reform committee six years earlier. Back in London, the
Colonial Office, still struggling to obtain basic information about the
earlier August disturbances, covered its embarrassment by instituting a
commission of inquiry into the state of Jamaica’s prison system.44 The
results were devastating – and revealing. Colonial Office comments
on the report’s descriptions of systematic abuse, appalling sanitation
and chronic disease among inmates captured its incendiary qual-
ity. Describing its findings as ‘scandalous’ and indicative of ‘grievous
inhumanity’, officials predicted a ‘first class storm’ in Parliament and
the British press when the report’s findings became public.45
The commission met over fifteen days between 20 September and
15 October 1926, visiting the GP, the St Catherine District Prison and
the Falmouth lock-up. Commission members agreed unanimously
that flagrant malpractice explained collapses in prison discipline. They
went on to blame the colonial government, which, in passing Law 21 of
1917, made provision for the prolonged detention of habitual criminals

without ensuring that such inmates were separately held and regulated.
Overcrowding had become chronic. Long-term prisoners were con-
fined alongside petty offenders, normally three to a cell. Casual vio-
lence, organized criminal activity and male rape were endemic.46 Prison
diet and hygiene were appalling. Inmates could spend a week, often in
soiled clothing, without access to washing. Prison visits and cell inspec-
tions were nugatory. Conditions in the GP’s adjoining women’s prison
were marginally better, although female prisoners, too, suffered from
the combination of overcrowding and an absence of organized work or
adequate exercise.47 Perhaps most relevant to this chapter, Jamaica’s
prison service was the dumping ground for policemen dismissed from
the Constabulary because of misconduct or ill-health, a sinecure for the
inept, the corrupt or the unfit.48
The inquiry report had far-reaching consequences, aside from an
overhaul of Jamaica’s prison system. One was that the Colonial Office
instituted an empire-wide survey of prison conditions. The other was
to expose the injustice inherent in the practice of ‘preventive detention’,
which enabled colonial magistrates and prison authorities to detain
repeat offenders indefinitely without a fixed prison term or realistic
prospect of release.49 The exposure of Jamaica’s dreadful prison regime
also cast a spotlight on what underpinned it: a reactionary Legislative
Council rooted in the white plantation oligarchy. It was the Council that
blocked previous reform proposals and denied funding for the welfare
of prisoners and the destitute poor more widely.50
Guided by administrative expediency and ideologically torn between
laissez-faire impulses and the crying need for stronger interventionism,
the Colonial Office never resolved the contradiction between its general
support for more representative government and its inability to impose
constitutional reforms in the face of opposition from planters and other
sectarian interests entrenched in the Legislative Councils of the British
West Indies. The need to raise investment capital to make socio-eco-
nomic reforms a reality added to the problem.
As Brian Moore and Michele Johnson suggest, Jamaicans lived ‘in
the shadow of Morant Bay’ well into the twentieth century. The rebel-
lion triggered the introduction of full colonial government, with a
Westminster-appointed Governor, in 1866, but it left the foundations
of white settler hegemony intact. Planter domination of the island’s
Assembly was reflected in income and property qualifications for vot-
ers, restricted access to freehold land, a low wage economy and a fis-
cal system predicated on indirect taxation of essential goods that all
Jamaicans had to buy.51 An extremely limited Jamaican franchise was
gradually introduced in Jamaica after 1884. But reforms to land policy,

the magistracy and the Draconian criminal code only began in earnest
in the early 1900s. They made slow progress. The consolidation of old
plantations into larger, corporate-owned estates had transformed the
pattern of large-scale landholding, but vestiges of the old ‘plantocracy’
could still be found after 1918, not least within the Legislative Council
and in police priorities.52 The impending downturn in Jamaica’s eco-
nomic fortunes would make this starkly apparent.
Policing and plantation violence

The Kingston government worked fitfully in the 1920s to stimulate
Jamaican industrial growth and agricultural diversification. Tentative
plans were made to modernize sugar refining with the construction of
a large state-owned factory in St Thomas parish on the island’s south-
eastern edge. Its facilities were opened to nearby estates and other local
growers as a co-operative venture. The aim was to reduce production
costs, enhancing competitiveness with Cuba’s sugar exporters.53 The
plan came to nothing. As in Cuba, Jamaica’s small-scale sugar grow-
ers instead relied on company-owned estates to grind and refine their
cane. Rural dependency on the few large sugar companies with estates
big enough to warrant their own factory refineries was inevitable.54
Diversification schemes were similarly fruitless despite two collapses in
sugar revenues, the first immediately after the First World War and the
second between 1930 and 1934.
The need to grind harvested cane quickly in order to extract the raw
sugar juice before it was degraded by oxidization and fermentation made
rigid labour discipline a feature of colonial sugar estates throughout the
tropical colonial zones in which it was cultivated.55 Falling prices also
imposed exacting standards on the quality of sugar brought to market.
America’s turn to prohibition and the consequent contraction in the US
market for Caribbean rum (at least on the open market) made matters
worse. Even so, beyond the expanding presence of America’s United
Fruit Company, which towered over local banana production, Jamaica’s
inter-war economy was still dominated by the production and refining
of sugarcane for export. Greater availability of cheap refined sugar on
global markets and huge increases in sugar beet production to meet
European demand made Caribbean sugar production commercially
unprofitable for much of the 1930s. From 1932, imperial preference,
backed by British subsidy of Jamaican sugar prices, kept the industry
afloat, with Canada playing the crucial role as a reserved market.56 The
fact remained that the sugar economies of the British Caribbean islands
were in deep trouble, their subsidization by the British Treasury barely

sufficient to stave off outright collapse. Jamaica’s long-term economic
crisis was primarily a sugar crisis.
Plantation owners and larger foreign-owned commercial concerns
shaved production costs to the bone.57 They also fought hard to resist
global restriction schemes, akin to those in the rubber industry. Although
designed to stabilize prices by preventing over-production, sugar produ-
cers saw restriction as a kick in the teeth sure to disbar them from regaining
market share, particularly in the British and Canadian markets reserved
to them by imperial preference.58 The prospect of restriction made cost-
cutting on estates still more imperative for sugar companies pushed
towards bankruptcy in the depression by high estate charges (most estates
were held on long-term lease) and falling incomes from crop sales.59
In a foretaste of future events in Jamaica, in February 1930
Georgetown, capital of the Latin American enclave of British Guiana,
was paralysed by demonstrations. Unrest began after the colony’s three
largest sugar businesses laid off workers and put others on short time,
thereby reducing their combined company wage bill by $300,000. The
government’s decision to slash its public works budget augmented
the numbers of unemployed who took to the streets. According to the
Governor, jobless workers without any welfare net to catch them now
constituted the major threat to public order.60 In Jamaica, too, lay-offs,
greater reliance on part-time, piece-rate labour and declining real wages
characterized the rural economy of the early 1930s.61
In an industry as labour intensive as sugar cultivation, cutbacks were
bound to hit field workers hardest. Poverty among landless labourer
families, already endemic, became extreme. Sharecroppers and small-
holders could stave off hunger with food grown for family consump-
tion. For the landless majority, the situation was desperate. Options
were few. Rising unemployment in Kingston and elsewhere made
internal economic migration infeasible. The traditional economic
safety-valves of inter-island migration or longer-term relocation to the
United States were virtually shut off by 1932. Indeed, rural destitution
was aggravated by the return migration of Jamaicans, particularly from
Cuba, Barbados, Trinidad and Costa Rica, territories where employ-
ment opportunities were similarly diminished. Some returnees came
equipped with knowledge of labour organization and protest acquired
during their time away.62 But a stronger cultural impact was registered
by the fact that the depression simply lasted longer than any previous
downturns in the collective memory of rural communities. Signs of
recovery evident in Europe’s industrial economies by 1936 remained
stubbornly absent from Jamaica.
Economic stagnation was matched by the intransigence of Jamaica’s

vested interests. The island’s political structure, its judicial system
and distribution of financial and resource wealth retained a strongly
nineteenth-century flavour, unchanged despite the best efforts of succes-
sive inquiry commissions and a notably reformist pre-First World War
Governor, Lord Sydney Olivier. He figured among a growing number
of colonial officials and British politicians determined to change mat-
ters. Olivier was a Fabian and a close associate of Sidney Webb (Lord
Passfield) who became Colonial Secretary in Ramsay MacDonald’s
second Labour Government in 1929. Over the next decade, Olivier in
the House of Lords and Passfield, first in Cabinet and later, alongside
Olivier on the Lords’ benches, became the parliamentary conscience
of Britain’s liberal left, reminding ministers and public of the grinding
poverty in the British West Indies.63 Harsh political and economic real-
ities sometimes got in their way. Olivier was the bane of Jamaica’s reac-
tionary Legislative Council and the plantation interests it defended,
but he still backed estate owners’ demands for additional governmental
support to tide them through the depression. British subsidies for the
ailing sugar industry, limited recognition of workers’ organizations and
political parties and conflicts over access to land, wage levels and taxes
were the primary causes of Jamaican political conflict by the early 1930s.
Each contributed to sharper class awareness and racial consciousness
among the island’s black majority.64 Despite these portents, state bail-
outs came with few strings, allowing the socio-economic hierarchies of
the plantation economy to endure.
Jamaicans’ anger was stoked further in late 1935 by the British
Government’s reluctance to impose punitive sanctions on fascist Italy
after its 3 October invasion of Haile Selassie I’s Ethiopia. The emperor’s
cultural and religious status as an iconic black African leader resonated
strongly with the African Diaspora throughout the Caribbean. Police
linked the timing of strikes on six sugar estates in British Guiana in late
October to public fury at Britain’s spinelessness.65 And racial antagon-
ism towards the colonial authorities acquired a keener edge in Jamaica
and Trinidad where Ethiopia’s fate was held to prove British imperi-
alism’s hypocritical self-interest.66 The outcry over abandonment of
Ethiopia did not precipitate fundamental changes to police priorities,
however. These were attendant on the spread of strikes and other pro-
tests across the Caribbean in the three years before war broke out in
1939. Unremitting poverty, lack of employment protection for estate
labourers and accompanying demands for unionization motivated
Jamaica’s workplace demonstrations from 1936 onwards. Once again,
there were parallels with British Guiana where nine of the colony’s
sugar estates saw strike actions that year. The same plantations faced
additional stoppages in 1937 and 1938. On these occasions the destruc-
tion of estate property, plus the alleged intimidation of management
staff and non-striking workers necessitated a larger police presence and
the intervention of government labour controllers.67
British Guiana’s plantation strikes peaked between June and October
1938. By the latter point thirty-two separate actions had taken place
involving an estimated 12,251 workers, or approximately half of the
colony’s sugar estate workforce of 24,000.68 Police were repeatedly
called out in response to owners’ requests for protection.69 This was
self-defeating. Connections between indentured estate workers and day
labourers were cemented by police victimization of those accused of
involvement in earlier stoppages.70 Damage to the estate factory at plan-
tation Albion, vandalism of the railway line feeding Port Mourant and
the destruction of management offices at plantation Friends portended
the Jamaican plantation protests described below. Guyanese strikers
also clashed with the police on two other estates, leading to 177 con-
victions for public disorder, assault or malicious damage. Guyanese
wage rates and living costs stabilized after 1936, suggesting that inten-
sifying workforce violence in late 1938 reflected their growing politi-
cization. Strikers’ efforts to establish an agricultural workers’ union in
defiance of the colony’s Sugar Producers’ Association became the cen-
tral issue facing Governor Jackson’s colonial government and a micro-
cosm of the wider labour rebellions in other, larger British West Indian
territories.71
Events in British Guiana point to the transnational inter-relatedness
of the British Caribbean’s labour revolts. News of labour disputes and
trade union demands in one territory shaped events in others. Jamaica
stood out as the pathfinder in this respect. Legislation passed on 25
October 1919 legalized trade union activity, albeit within narrow
parameters. Organizers faced liability for members’ breaches of con-
tract or any damages incurred during disputes. These legal restrictions
alone ensured that the police would always be closely involved in indus-
trial disputes.72 To illustrate the role played by the police in the cycle
of strikes, protests and repression, the next section analyses the micro-
history of two plantation disputes central to Jamaica’s labour rebellion.
Labour rebellion and the police

During 1938 simmering unrest among Jamaica’s plantation labourers
boiled over. Trouble began in January at the Serge Island sugar estate
in St Thomas parish on Jamaica’s southeast tip. In what was becoming
a familiar pattern, the colonial administration blamed both the work

stoppages and the ensuing violence at Serge Island on outside agitators
among the newly formed cane-cutters union. Police and local officials
made much of the estate manager’s unpopularity with his workers; their
hostility towards him intensified because the plantation owner sat on
the Legislative Council. Still, it allegedly took outside agents to trig-
ger protests. According to police accounts, disorder in the St Thomas
region originated in estate bosses’ recruitment of day cutters from out-
side the parish – mostly from nearby Kingston. These new arrivals were
blamed for militancy previously unseen among field workers.73
The police also sought to prove that their intervention would not
have the devastating consequences seen a decade earlier in the 1926
prison disturbances. The first Constabulary deployments against the
strikers followed the minimum force precepts delineated after Walter
Long’s survey of protest policing. Local Special Constables equipped
with batons worked alongside regular officers whose job it was to iden-
tify ringleaders and extract them from the crowd. Once these individ-
uals were arrested, the disturbance at the Serge Island estate lost focus
and was quickly contained without use of firearms. Some idea of its
scale is apparent in the fact that sixty-three demonstrators appeared
before magistrates within a fortnight. Three alleged ringleaders were
sentenced to one month’s hard labour, but the bulk of those detained
were discharged with a warning. These relatively lenient punishments
reflected the fact that Governor Sir Edward Denham’s administration
was, at the time, less concerned to prosecute striking workers than to
persuade estate managers throughout the island to agree increases in
piece rates. The Governor even expressed the hope that the threat of
renewed stoppages would push employers into collective bargaining,
avoiding any need for state intervention to compel them to do so, a rea-
sonable expectation soon disappointed. Few employers showed much
sign of yielding to the upsurge in rural unrest.74
Strike actions resumed in the first week of May 1938. They centred
this time on the Frome estate in Westmoreland parish at the oppos-
ite, western end of the island. The plantation was one of the largest in
Jamaica. Owned by the British sugar giant, Tate & Lyle, it was operated
by its subsidiary, the West Indies Sugar Company, which also owned
a further seven estates, most of them nearby. Plans were under way
at Frome to consolidate the company’s sugar processing and refining
in one central factory. New housing and other facilities for workers,
including schools and an infirmary, were promised.75 Several hundred
construction workers were employed at the estate building additional
factory plant – a transient workforce that the police viewed suspiciously
in much the same way as the Kingston incomers at Serge Island.76

Longer-term employees at Frome estate were of two sorts. First were
the existing factory personnel. They were employed on labour contracts
that offered some guarantee of long-term employment. Second were
the estate’s field labourers. They had no such job security or assured
minimum conditions. Frome’s cane-cutters, like those at Serge Island,
were day labourers whose piece rates had fallen in real terms despite
the gradual recovery in sugar prices. Even the most efficient cutters,
capable of harvesting between five and six tons of cane each day, rarely
earned more than five shillings for doing so. Payment of one shilling
per ton had been conceded following the Serge Island unrest. But a
five shilling payment required super-human effort. Cane-cutting was
extremely arduous, and numerous field workers still took home only
three to four shillings per day, depending on the volumes of cane cut.77
With its larger, heterogeneous workforce, protests on the Frome
estate were protracted, more intimidating and violent than those at
Serge Island five months earlier.78 Confrontation between estate labour-
ers and Tate & Lyle staff began on Friday 29 April after workers were
kept waiting several hours for their pay. The long wait, combined with
higher than normal company ‘deductions’ from labourers’ pay packets,
created a poisonous atmosphere. These compulsory contributions were
used to subsidize basic on-site facilities. But this was rarely explained
to estate workers for whom such deductions seemed a device to reduce
take-home pay. Barely had angry cutters and builders finished opening
their pay packets than estate office windows were smashed. The pay
clerks inside, who, significantly, were already armed, fired in the air to
scare off the protesters.79 The next day at least two-thirds of the site’s
six hundred construction workers began a strike, blocking access to the
estate for factory personnel willing to work. With no Tate & Lyle rep-
resentative with whom to negotiate, cane-cutters who joined this initial
work stoppage relayed their demands to Inspector O’Donoghue, the
police officer in charge of containing the strikers. Their demands were
conventional: explanation of the company’s deductions policy, a min-
imum daily payment of four shillings and urgent improvements to hous-
ing. Still, O’Donoghue was in an awkward dual position: intermediary
between strikers and estate management and the officer responsible for
riot control.80 Anticipating worse disorder, and fearing an overnight
arson attack on the factory, he posted guards around estate build-
ings. A contingent of fifty-eight additional police led by Inspector S.
V. Higgins, was drafted in from Kingston central station. They arrived
at Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland’s parish capital, at 5.30 p.m. on
Sunday 1 May.81
The explosion came the next morning, Monday 2 May. An estimated

3,000 protesters, some construction workers, others cane-cutters, still
others unemployed youths, converged on the Old Frome estate com-
pound, which housed the main offices and factory. The first police on
the scene, a party of 100 sub-officers, arrived some hours earlier at 5.30
a.m. They met no violence at first, and even mingled among the gather-
ing crowd, listening to strikers who reiterated their demand for a four-
shilling minimum daily wage. According to O’Donoghue and Higgins
the situation deteriorated sometime around 9 a.m., by which time the
number of demonstrators had mushroomed.82
Despite the increasingly tense atmosphere at the main estate com-
pound, at approximately 9.15 a.m. the main police party and its two
commanding officers briefly left the scene after being told that another
crowd was attacking the homes and vehicles of company staff in Old
Frome village about one mile distant. The destruction encountered
by the police in and around Old Frome village was highly symbolic.
Additional company-owned buildings were damaged, estate trucks and
cars destroyed and personnel files ransacked. ‘Fontabella’, the home
of Tate & Lyle’s plantation attorney, the estate manager’s closest col-
league, was vandalized, its occupants having fled after being threat-
ened with violence in the preceding week.83 The police had little time
to restore order in the village. It became obvious within a matter of
minutes that the situation back at the compound went from bad to
worse after their departure. Company personnel were assaulted, the
main office wrecked.84
Still the senior officer on the scene, Inspector O’Donoghue commanded
the police party that returned to the estate compound soon afterwards.
Bricks and stones were thrown and three constables fell hurt.85 Why
had the crowd become so infuriated with the police? One reason was
that O’Donoghue ordered his men to fix bayonets in readiness for a rifle
charge at the demonstrators. Another was that, after both O’Donoghue
and Higgins issued final verbal warnings ordering the crowd to disperse,
the former officer reorganized a party of sixty police into two lines and
gave the order to shoot. The demonstrators, in other words, were con-
fronted with organized volley fire, something not seen in Jamaica before.
Walter Long’s post-war reforms of protest policing had come full circle:
the butcher’s bill was to be paid. The front rank of police fired two separ-
ate volleys into the crowd. Four demonstrators, three men and a woman,
were killed by gunshots. Nine more were hospitalized.86 Panicked, the
crowd scattered. Many fled into the estate’s cane fields from where they
reverted to a more traditional form of sugar workers’ protest. Fires were
started, setting ninety acres of cane ablaze.87 Only a torrential afternoon

downpour saved the crop from destruction.88
Work resumed amidst the clear-up at the Frome estate on 6 May.
Additional police reinforcements from Kingston were posted at Tate &
Lyle facilities and plantation entrances within a ten mile radius of the
original disturbances. By this point, over one hundred protesters were in
custody and police energies were split between guarding the surrounding
estates and tracking down the few alleged ringleaders still at large.89
Interpreting and punishing disorder

Official readings of the violence at Frome were less forgiving than
those of the Serge Island disturbances in January. All sides in the dis-
pute attached greater importance to the vast Frome estate, exemplar of
British corporate investment in Jamaica. Frome was widely renowned,
its on-site factory, medical facilities and worker housing seen either
as a model of capitalist modernization or of domineering big busi-
ness. The embodiment of all that was good (or bad) about Jamaican
sugar production, the fact that Frome estate was almost wiped off
the map caused profound shock at King’s House and in Kingston’s
Legislative Council. It was easy enough to rationalize violent protest
as a by-product of inflated expectations among the migrant workers
that flocked to Westmoreland believing that Tate & Lyle were paying
day rates in excess of those on smaller plantations. But the evidence
of coordinated strike activity, ransacked properties and crop-burning
pointed to an existential threat to colonial society. Huge economic
losses were also sustained in a matter of hours. Police had stuck by
the declared tenets of protest policing: parleying, issuing warnings
and attempting a charge before firing. For all that, they had killed
unarmed strikers. The magnitude of these disorders, their orches-
trated destruction and the level of violence used to contain them
reverberated throughout the island.
Owen Wright, the long-serving Inspector-general of Police, was con-
vinced that his senior officers, O’Donoghue and Higgins, had acted
with restraint in the face of intense provocation.90 Confident that police
action would be vindicated, Wright pushed for severe punishment
of those found guilty of disorder. Under police pressure to make an
example of the rioters at Old Frome, the colonial authorities recom-
mended that a special tribunal be established to try those accused of
coordinating the violence.91 There was recent precedent for this. In
May 1935 a Crown prosecutor was brought in to expedite the trial of
striking wharf labourers detained after clashes with police detachments

in the Jamaican port of Falmouth.92
Indeed, the labour rebellion began at Falmouth, on Jamaica’s
north coast, on 20 May 1935 with joint protests by banana workers in
Oracabessa and local dockworkers. When a grower brought in labourers
from another parish to replace strikers seeking improved wage rates, the
local banana workers made common cause with Falmouth’s stevedores.
They faced a similar situation after the port management brought in
strike-breakers under police protection to replace dock labourers strik-
ing for higher wages who refused to load a vessel shipping bananas for
Delgado Brothers. Between five and six hundred strikers clashed with
police on 20 May and armed reinforcements were brought in a day later.
During renewed clashes police fired on the crowd killing a 37-year-old
striker, Sidney Black. Police then cleared the outlying streets with bay-
onet charges and the boat was eventually loaded on 22 May. Local Custos
insisted that the strike was well orchestrated and long planned, a claim
supported by evidence that dock workers in Kingston and Port Antonio
were pushing for equivalent wage increases. But no specific trade union
or party political group emerged from the 1935 disorders.
Governor Denham duly secured Colonial Office approval for the
appointment of another inquiry commission, this one comprised of
Sir Henry Brown, Sir Charles Doorly and H. E. Allen, a Legislative
Council member. Brown and Doorly were already members of a sep-
arate commission investigating labour conditions across the island.
Denham wanted to harness their expertise to ensure that the Frome
inquiry would range beyond the estate killings to focus on the under-
lying economic causes of protest. The Governor’s shift in emphasis
away from criminal investigation towards levels of poverty in the rural
economy counteracted the pressure from the police and judiciary for
harsher repression. While disclaiming any wish to prejudge the inquiry’s
outcome, Denham pointedly stressed that police accounts indicated
that a hardcore of Frome construction workers were at fault, bullying
cane-cutters and factory employees into joining the strike action. Most
of these building labourers were migrant workers, a handful allegedly
known to the police as members of Kingston’s ‘criminal element’. For
the rest, persistent rumours of exceptionally high wages at the Frome
estate had just generated false hopes. Undue aspirations led irrevocably
to the demand for unsustainable pay increases. The unrealistic, if inno-
cent, expectations of the many escalated into violence because of the
malevolent intent of a few. Denham’s rewriting of the events achieved
his desired result. It depoliticized the strike action and, stranger still,
disassociated it from the plantation sector in which it originated.93
Having delegitimized the strike, Denham showed scant recognition

of the protesters’ restraint throughout the estate disputes. None of the
assaults on managers and overseers, policemen and paramilitary auxil-
iaries, were fatal. Destruction of estate buildings and processing plants
was not matched by the most obvious form of economic protest: burn-
ing cane. The fires lit in the fields at Frome were the exception, not
the rule. The absence of crop destruction was remarkable. Setting fire
to cane-fields was a relatively easy and anonymous way to reverse the
imbalances of power on sugar estates. It demonstrated the limitations
of colonial authority, affirming the capacity of workers to disrupt pro-
duction and so challenge the established hierarchies of wealth, race and
politics in the Jamaican interior. There were also well-known prece-
dents for it, notably the Cuban Revolution of the late 1890s.94 Crucially,
however, crop burning was also self-destructive. It not only destroyed
estate owners’ profits, but the future earnings of cane-cutters depend-
ent on piece-rate labour. Powerfully evocative and materially decisive,
setting the cane ablaze also destroyed workers’ livelihoods. It was a
luxury the protesters simply could not afford.
If Denham’s inclination was to defuse the crisis over the Frome
estate by treating it as an aberrant act of criminal vandalism, one of
his predecessors was doing the reverse. Former Governor Lord Olivier
took issue with the official interpretation of gullible, but loyal, field
workers manipulated by delinquents from the city. During a House of
Lords debate on the West Indies situation and in correspondence with
senior Colonial Office officials, Lord Olivier depicted Jamaica as an
island driven to the brink of social breakdown by unrestrained capital-
ism.95 He said the same thing in correspondence with company chief,
Sir Leonard Lyle.96 Still Jamaica’s most revered colonial ‘old hand’,
Olivier revelled in his self-appointed role as guardian of Westminster’s
moral authority over West Indian affairs. He secured his reputation in
1930, chairing the West Indian sugar commission, yet another official
inquiry, this one ordered by the second Labour Government. Its task
was to assess the impact of collapsing prices on the region’s agricultural
economy. The commission’s findings revealed the depth of suffering
already evident at the outset of the depression and made the case for tax
relief and increased ‘special preferences’ to keep the plantation sector
afloat.97 Eight years later, the labour rebellion gave Olivier the lever-
age necessary to ramp up the pressure on the National Government by
exposing the structural foundations of Jamaican poverty.
Denham, a less outspoken governor, was not insensitive to his pre-
decessor’s social conscience, especially with regard to rural living
conditions. But, as we have seen, he had no equivalent sympathy for
Kingston’s urban underclass, already pinpointed by the administration

as Frome’s real culprits. The threat of a general strike in the capital
in late May also shifted attention away from unrest in the plantation
economy and back to civil strife in the capital.98 In this connection,
the colonial authorities and municipal police proved equally intoler-
ant. W. Alexander Bustamante was immediately arrested and interned.
The former treasurer of the Jamaican Workers’ and Tradesmen’s Union
(JWTU), he had recently founded a more cohesive group, the eponym-
ously named Bustamante Industrial Trades Union (BITU).99 Strike
organizers were accused of manipulating naive workers who lacked
any experience of collective bargaining. Insisting that demonstrations
lacked either economic or political justification, Denham’s government
once more ascribed violent disorder among Kingston’s labouring popu-
lation to a vicious criminal minority. Strikers’ demands for improved
pay and conditions were dismissed as mere pretext for looting and the
settling of scores with employers and the police; hence the clampdown
against the initial wave of wildcat strikes and other spontaneous work
stoppages in the early summer of 1938.100 Yet this administrative rigid-
ity soon eased, and for this Denham’s administration deserves credit.
The Governor and his deputy, Jamaica’s Colonial Secretary, Charles
Woolley, were never sympathetic to the strikers’ methods. But they
were not ill-informed about living conditions in the capital’s slum dis-
tricts and the crying need for municipal development.101 Both men were
alive to the poverty prevalent among the capital’s working population.
Indeed, many of the lowest paid workers were employed near the seat
of government, as day labourers for the Public Works Department in
Kingston’s Corporate Area. There was already a whiff of comprom-
ise in King’s House when Denham died suddenly on 2 June. Woolley,
who took over the reins of government while the commission conducted
its inquiry, accelerated the process.102 He continued the combination
of repression and conciliation, but added notable concessions. On 5
June he announced £500,000 in government funding for a Jamaican
‘New Deal’ land settlement scheme.103 This put the Governor’s Office
on a collision course with Jamaica’s Legislative Council, where planter
interest reigned supreme. With government and legislature divided and
with Kingston’s unemployment levels approaching 50 per cent, spor-
adic wildcat strikes quickly escalated into outright labour rebellion.
The immediate obstacle to any improvement in the situation was
one of political, and not economic, structures. The colonial authorities
lacked the institutional mechanisms necessary to deal with the latest
wave of industrial disputes. The unionization of labour aroused intense
suspicion. The Legislative Council derided arbitration with union
representatives as opening a backdoor to socialist-inspired sedition and

untrammelled anti-colonial protest against the dominance of Jamaica’s
white minority.104 With the strikers denied a voice inside the Council
chambers, accusations about their opportunism, criminality and
‘senseless violence’ went unchallenged within Legislative Council dis-
cussions. Jamaica’s legislators may have shown no wish to meet striking
workers half-way but even their harrumphing could not conceal the fact
that reliance on police to enforce order in the workplace was as unten-
able as it was unjustifiable. Depression conditions thereby provoked the
very outcome they wished to avoid, catalysing an unexpectedly rapid
transition towards a recognizably modern system of industrial concili-
ation between employers and labour. Whether the colonial adminis-
tration was temperamentally inclined to drive this process forward or
simply saw no alternative to it remains a moot point. Much clearer is
that the settlement of public sector wage claims in May and June 1938
provided a model for subsequent pay settlements between Jamaica’s pri-
vate sector employers and their workers.
The key agent in this transformation was a government-appointed
Board of Conciliation, put in place to arbitrate settlements of the prin-
cipal strike actions that brought Kingston to a standstill in the final
week of May.105 The board was an offshoot of two special commissions
that Denham appointed weeks before his death. The first, established
on 24 March 1938, investigated wage rates and living standards among
Jamaica’s lowest paid workers. The second, created on 6 May, exam-
ined the causes of the violence at the Frome estate. The new board’s
preoccupation with the connections between extreme economic dis-
tress and social disorder was, therefore, already apparent in the earlier
work of its leading members, Sir Charles Doorly and Sir Henry Brown
who, as we saw earlier, sat on these special commissions.106 But the
moving forces in the Board of Conciliation were Jamaican, not British.
Successful transformation of the board into an industrial arbitration
agency reflected the tireless efforts of two people: Norman Manley,
the young lawyer soon to achieve greater prominence as founder of the
People’s National Party, and Alexander Bustamante, the left-leaning
organizer of Jamaica’s first mass trade unions. Only their willingness
to fill the void left by the lack of official worker representatives enabled
the board to function. Their stature as spokesmen rested, in turn, on
their status as respected figures able to vouchsafe for the workers whose
claims they advanced.107
What did this mean for policing? Government dependence on local
elite auxiliaries to defuse potentially revolutionary unrest in Kingston
and its outlying rural parishes marked a watershed, confirming the
authorities’ inability to enforce order through legal sanction and police

intervention. Just as Jamaica’s labour relations had to change, so, too,
using police to silence workers’ demands was no longer feasible. As
matters stood, British garrison troops and ‘Special Constable’ irreg-
ulars were needed to contain plantation unrest and persistent rioting
in downtown Kingston. Unschooled in minimum force policing, their
deployments accounted for the labour rebellion’s most lethal violence.
The ‘Specials’ were largely drawn from the settler community, their
numbers supplemented by other ‘light complexioned people’ whose
loyal service as strike-breakers was presumed. The consequences of
deploying troops with armoured cars on the streets of Kingston and
vigilantes dressed up as police auxiliaries on the estates were tragic-
ally predictable.108 With a campaign of ‘rolling strikes’ continuing and
the capital paralysed, a bayonet charge and four strikers shot dead at
Islington estate on 4 June marked the worst loss of life and the high-
point of Jamaica’s unrest.109
If not quite destroyed, the tripartite relationship between government,
big business and police was irrevocably weakened. Acting in Denham’s
stead, Charles Woolley was ready to break with the past. His injection
of new cash to relieve unemployment, plus the Board of Conciliation’s
steady progress in negotiating an end to individual strikes proved
decisive. Admittedly, clashes between strikers, protesters and security
forces continued for several days, peaking on 6 June in the parishes of
Manchester, Clarendon, St Ann, St Mary and Portland. But, by 11 June
the estate strikes were spent and an uneasy calm returned to Kingston.110
The situation’s irony was clear. Far from policing being consumed by
anti-colonial nationalism, leading figures within Jamaica’s nationalist
movement saved a police force overwhelmed by its central task of labour
control. It would be much harder in future to mobilize police resources
to block overdue political reforms and remedial economic measures.
Whitehall reactions to the labour rebellion

The Colonial Office was not unhappy at this outcome. But the National
Government set narrow limits to permissible reform. On 25 May 1938
Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet discussed the mounting disorder in
the British West Indies. The violence spoke for itself. According to the
subsequent Commission of Inquiry eight civilians died during protest
clashes with police, in addition to the four killed at Frome. Another
thirty-two received gunshot wounds and a further 139 were treated for
other injuries. Some of them were hospitalized alongside the 109 secur-
ity force personnel wounded during the disturbances. Prosecutions
were launched against 745 individuals, resulting in 480 convictions.

Ministers did not yet have these figures to hand, but their surprise at
the scale, intensity and duration of the unrest was apparent nonethe-
less.111 It fell to Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore to explain
what had gone so wrong throughout the British Caribbean. His conclu-
sions were straightforward. Popular dissent was economic, not polit-
ical, in origin:
Social unrest, and disturbances involving loss of life, are no new thing in the
history of the West Indies, but the rapid succession of outbreaks which have
occurred in a number of these Colonies during the past year is unprecedented
and, in my view, symptomatic of more than purely local and temporary dis-
content … It is abundantly clear from the reports of the Commissions which
have already investigated the outbreaks in the various colonies affected, that,
whatever agencies may have been at work the primary cause underlying this
unrest is the very low standard of economic and social conditions among the
coloured communities; and that this in turn can be traced to the depressed
state of agriculture in those Colonies. In the main, the Colonies in the West
Indian area are essentially agricultural. It is true that Trinidad has valuable oil
reserves, and that bauxite, gold and diamonds are worked to a certain extent
in British Guiana, but these industries offer limited opportunities for employ-
ment even at present.112
The solution, according to Ormsby-Gore, was to gear administra-
tions to improving agricultural living standards as their first priority.
Island treasuries were in such deficit that local administration relied on
British subsidy to function at all. Jamaica’s limited franchise entrenched
the power of reactionary landowners, industrialists and white elitists.
Administrative personnel throughout the British Caribbean were, at
best, well intentioned but amateurish; at worst, complacent and hope-
lessly inefficient. Ormsby-Gore’s recommendations seemed radical:
What is required is a long-term policy of reconstruction in the West Indian
Colonies. This should cover a wide field and include such matters as the
improvement of labour and housing conditions, and of medical services, etc.
But its two main objectives should be to improve as far as possible the economic
conditions of the agricultural industries on which the well-being of the islands
mainly depends, and where possible to find additional means of livelihood for
the peoples of these colonies e.g. the development of schemes of small holdings
designed to increase the production of foodstuffs for local consumption.113
But the intent was not matched by deeds. The Colonial Secretary
took refuge in the time-honoured device of a Royal Commission to
investigate policy options, obviating the need for immediate action. He
also steered clear of tackling the dominance of the British sugar indus-
try, Jamaica’s major export companies and the island’s settler elite.
This was not mere timidity, however. Ormsby-Gore’s preference for
structural economic change also reflected emerging concepts of devel-

opment gaining ground in the Colonial Office, with their accent on
socio-economic improvement, technocracy and professionalization of
imperial administration. The cumulative evidence from the British
West Indies that economic distress sparked disorder, soon confirmed
by Lord Moyne’s Commission of Inquiry into the region’s long-term
future, ignited Colonial Office reformism.
Further pressure came from the British trade union movement. More
so than the voices of dissent on the left of the Labour Party, British trade
unionists’ ties to Jamaica’s new labour organizations made it impossible for
Chamberlain’s government to ignore the depth of inequality in the West
Indies.114 Among the economic problems identified as requiring urgent
redress were urban unemployment, the settler oligarchy’s hold on prime
agricultural land and government failure to diversify crop production.
After the labour rebellion peaked in June 1938 the British govern-
ment listened more closely to reformist voices inside the Colonial Office
and, somewhat reluctantly, acknowledged the immeasurable contribu-
tion of Jamaica’s emerging generation of political leaders in steering
their compatriots away from revolutionary confrontation. The police
and, even more so, the soldiers and Special Constables who suppressed
plantation protests and urban rioting were discredited as defenders of
the economic and political status quo. Public works spending increased
as part of broader efforts to reduce unemployment. But the extent of
reform should not be exaggerated. Jamaica remained a colony domi-
nated by plantation agriculture. And the viability of plantations, it was
assumed, depended on cheap labour. Keeping the wages of public sec-
tor workers low was still fundamental to an economic model based on
piece rates and minimal labour costs. Having police detachments ready
to corral strike-breakers across picket lines remained vital in preventing
rural workers from breaking free of this low wage trap. Nigel Bolland
gets to the heart of the problem: ‘The contradictions of the economy
were therefore forcing the colonial government into becoming a cut-
rate employer at the same time that it maintained its role as the police-
man of labour for private capitalists.’115 Colonial officials in Kingston
and London knew this, and were deeply uneasy about it. But with war
looming, the reformist impetus inevitably slowed. The Caribbean’s
pre-war problems would have to await post-war solutions.
Conclusion
Donald Horowitz began his encyclopaedic examination of inter-ethnic
riots as a sociological phenomenon with the following contention: ‘The
ethnic riot has a structure and a natural history. In fact, violent events in
general are structured by implicit rules governing provocation, initiation,
choice of targets, intensity of violence, and termination. As a patterned
event, the ethnic riot has meaning.’116 He developed his argument thus:
The incidence and magnitude of ethnic violence are governed, in part, by the
sheer structure of opportunities for violence (such as the availability of targets),
by logistics, by the organization of participants and the nature of leadership,
by police behaviour, by the respect commanded by authority and how it is
employed, by tactical imperatives common to all fighting, and by the presence
of criminals eager to take advantage of a violent situation.117
All of these preconditions were evident in Jamaica’s labour rebel-

lion and the way it was policed. Yet, such was the frequency of police
coercion in the British West Indies that it is hard to find a dividing
line between colonial policing and the maintenance of white racial and
economic dominance through coercion – a straightforward ‘violence-
as-power’ equation. In times of civil unrest, the two were one and the
same. What unites them is a distinct political economy of origin. The
point may be extended to cover all communities in colonial Jamaica.
Collective dissent and state repression were rooted in the economic
structures of an island labour system geared to high-volume export
whose defining features – low wages, insecurity of employment and
dependence on day labour at large, foreign-owned premises – mirrored
the rigidities of racial hierarchy in the colony.118
Seasoned observers realised this at the time. Dr Harold Moody, presi-
dent of the League of Coloured Peoples told Malcolm MacDonald,
Ormsby-Gore’s more reform-minded successor, on 26 May 1938 that
rioting and protest policing were part of a vicious economic circle that
would repeat itself until the de facto alliance between government, set-
tlers and major corporations was broken.119 Moody’s more radical col-
league, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement
Association, was blunter still. British supremacy in Jamaica rested more
squarely on repression than ever more. But protests were bound to con-
tinue unless the colonial government made ‘some humane effort’ to
alleviate Jamaica’s chronic living standards.120 Moody identified the
correlation between iniquitous economic system and ossified racial
hierarchy. It was this that determined the forms of popular protest,
their targets and their objectives. Equally, as Garvey pointed out, it was
the colonial government’s refusal to redress this fundamental socio-
economic imbalance that made repressive policing imperative. All too
often minimum force tenets gave way to mass arrests and lethality.
Changes were coming, but they would be cut short by the impending
world war.
Reflecting on the inevitable curtailment of reforms caused by the

war, in November 1939 Denham’s long-term replacement as Governor,
Sir Arthur Richards made the following assessment:
I do not know on what lines the recommendations of the West India Royal
Commission may proceed but the object of this Despatch is to precipitate the
cloudy aspirations of reformers into a deposit of pounds, shillings and pence.
Jamaica is at present an Imperial liability and I am only concerned to state the
cost of converting it into an Imperial asset. I am not dealing with the reasons
for its present condition nor would it be profitable to try and allocate the blame.
I do not think that Jamaica can, unaided, extricate herself from her unstable
position, or cure the growing problems of unemployment, poverty, sickness
and discontent. Nor am I so optimistic as to think that contentment would
follow at once upon any form of assistance however generously planned. In my
opinion the next twenty years of Jamaica will be difficult years of political and
economic ferment. If it were possible to handle the situation firmly, to select
[colonial and police] officers with the greatest care and to energise them with
the necessary financial resources, triumph might yet be snatched from the dis-
aster which a thoughtful student must now foretell.121
These were portentous remarks highlighting the collapse in official con-

fidence precipitated by the labour rebellion and the violence of protest
policing. By the end of the inter-war period Jamaica was a colony whose
economic injustice and police repression had been laid bare.
9 Oil and order: Repressive violence
in Trinidad’s oilfields
20 June 1937. Following telegram has been sent from Governor of Trinidad,
Port of Spain, to Commander-in-Chief, Bermuda. Begins. There is serious
rioting in oil field. Request you send a cruiser immediately. Ends.1
Eight days after Trinidad’s Governor Sir Murchison Fletcher sent this
rather panicky telegram, a Royal Navy seaplane took off from Trinidad’s
harbour capital, Port of Spain, to make the short hop northeastwards
from the Gulf of Paria to the colony’s sister island, Tobago. There it
dropped thousands of leaflets containing two messages for the islanders
below. One was a warning. Any intimidation of workers by the organiz-
ers of a planned general strike would be severely punished by police and
magistrates. The other was a promise. Labour conditions on the island
would be investigated by a three-man team headed by Fletcher’s Acting
Colonial Secretary in Port of Spain, Howard Nankivell.2
We have already seen this combination of coercion and coaxing, of
legal sanction and retrospective official inquiry, in Jamaica, and it was a
pattern repeated across Britain’s Caribbean territories in the 1930s. But
in Trinidad, where strikes and other workplace protests culminated over
six turbulent weeks in June and July 1937, matters went further. Tubal
Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler, a Grenada-born trade union activist identified by
Fletcher’s government as the principal ‘agitator’ responsible for the kill-
ings of two policemen on 25 June, was charged with incitement to mur-
der. Reportedly protected by armed guards and moved between safe
houses by his supporters, he became the object of a police manhunt.3
With every day that he remained free, the pressure on Governor Fletcher
from settlers, business leaders and Whitehall officials mounted. On
9 July the embattled Governor told a packed Legislative Council in Port
of Spain that Butler’s only defence was his alleged mental instability.4
By the end of the year, it would be Fletcher’s and not Butler’s san-
ity that was called into question. Members of Trinidad’s Chamber of
Commerce, many of them island ‘old hands’ with Colonial Office con-
tacts, joined a consortium of oil company executives and sugar estate
owners in petitioning Ormsby-Gore to sack the Governor. Fletcher,
235
they claimed, was indecisive, administratively incompetent and in thrall

to his Acting Colonial Secretary. And Nankivell, they insisted, was a
communist fifth columnist.5 Instead of prosecuting troublemakers like
Butler and restoring order on the oilfields and plantations of south-
ern Trinidad, the two senior colonial officials were accused of a naive
sympathy for the strikers. The Governor indulged their grievances; his
Colonial Secretary dared to suggest that employers’ greed provoked the
unrest.6 Port of Spain’s small-town colonial politics had got interesting.
And London took notice.
Ormsby-Gore acceded to the petitioners’ demands, singling out
Fletcher’s vacillation over the policing of violent workplace demonstra-
tions as justification for his dismissal.7 For his part, Sir John Campbell,
chief economic adviser at the Colonial Office, reflected in late May 1938
on the case for a Royal Commission to investigate the situation in the
British West Indies, where, he acknowledged, things were ‘not going
very well’. Strikes and riots were now general and recurrent, usually
ending in violent clashes with police or troops. But what was there to
stop them, other than security force intervention? The export staples on
which Caribbean economies relied did not generate enough revenue to
fund substantial welfare projects. And disorders elsewhere in the empire,
most notably in Mandate Palestine where an Arab revolt had entered its
second bloody phase, added to the impression that Britain faced a more
fundamental crisis of imperial control. Campbell, though, drew comfort
from the specifics. Social unrest stemmed from local grievances and
missed opportunities to address them. Fault lay in two areas above all.
One was the reactionary conservatism of white elites: absentee land-
lords who controlled local land markets; planters who dominated the
islands’ legislatures and conserved the nineteenth-century privileges
of a plantocracy. The second problem was institutional. The Colonial
Office lacked the constitutional authority to impose reform in Caribbean
Crown Colonies. Its appointed governors were equally hidebound.
They lacked the direct powers needed to overcome obstacles placed in
their way by Legislative Councils and other vested interests. Impasse
resulted. This political inertia was compounded by lacklustre admin-
istrative staffs whose low pay and minimal achievements reflected the
underlying bureaucratic lethargy that had gripped the West Indian col-
onies for decades. Not only was local taxation punitively high, it was
largely consumed by personnel costs. Campbell kept his economist’s
hat on to divine the core issue: the need for development. The planter
oligarchy had to be displaced, if only to make cheap farmland available
to foster the growth of a self-reliant peasantry. The islands’ debt burden
cried out for structural readjustment to enable governments to invest in
Oil and order 237
economic growth rather than servicing their deficits.8 And Whitehall

had to promote inward investment – and not just extractive export
industries – to end the West Indies’ reliance on a narrow range of com-
modities, the profits from which never stayed in the islands where they
were produced.9
Campbell was preaching to the converted inside the Colonial Office
where development ideas were the coming trend. But their timing was
not propitious. A mounting defence burden and a worsening inter-
national crisis over Czechoslovakia left no room to convert blue skies
thinking into firm policy pledges. For all that, as Campbell stressed,
one region stood apart: Trinidad and Tobago had oil wealth and the
industrial investment that came with it.10 Ever since the first commer-
cial extraction began in 1911 oil seemed to herald a wealthier future for
Trinidad next to the other territories of the British West Indies.11
Was Trinidad very different? If so, did the oil industry presence
explain it? This chapter considers these questions in light of the disor-
ders and consequent police interventions that shaped Trinidad’s labour
unrest in the late 1930s. As with Jamaica, investigating protest policing
after the depression requires me to step back to pre-depression con-
ditions and the nature of colonial law enforcement in Trinidad (and,
to a lesser extent, Tobago) in the aftermath of the First World War.
After the conflict, Trinidadian soldiers, like their Jamaican counter-
parts, returned home to islands gripped by recession. Strike actions
in March 1917 against two of Trinidad’s largest industrial employers,
United British Oilfields and the US-owned Trinidad Lake Asphalt
Company, highlighted the potential for wider disruption. The stop-
pages were coordinated. Workers in the oilfields and asphalt works of
southern Trinidad shared common affiliations through the Trinidad
Workingmen’s Association established twenty years earlier in 1897.12
By 1919 there was acute unemployment and destitution in Trinidad’s
capital Port of Spain. The combination of disgruntled returnees of the
BWIR’s 8th battalion and rising labour militancy in the oilfields and
the capital brought the island close to insurrection by December.13
Former Trinidadian servicemen organized themselves into a Returned
Soldiers and Sailors Council, whose nomenclature and preference
for direct action had alarming Soviet overtones. Veterans angered at
the discrimination they had suffered in uniform and resentful about
unfulfilled governmental promises of jobs and cheap land made com-
mon cause with railwaymen, tramcar drivers and stevedores in Port of
Spain. Mutual interest in Garveyism and its vision of black empower-
ment cemented the cooperation between them.14 Taking the ex-service-
men’s use of Garvey’s rhetoric as their cue, Trinidad’s then Governor,
Sir John Chancellor and his Inspector-general of Police rehearsed the

familiar argument that otherwise loyal colonial subjects were becoming
indoctrinated by foreign ideas and outside agitators, in this case the local
representatives of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association
and African Communities League. Senior police officers warned that
Trinidad’s most influential white voices were less sanguine. They
depicted the black community in fearsome terms as latently malevolent
and inherently violent.15 Memories of pre-war disorders in Port of Spain,
particularly the ‘Water Riots’ of 1903 during which the Governor’s
residence went up in flames and police killed sixteen protesters, were
inscribed on the official mind of Trinidad’s governing elite.16
Added into the mix was the administration’s concern that Trinidad’s
large population of Indian indentured labourers, in many ways the worst
victims of racial discrimination and chronically low wages, might become
more politicized, in their turn forming an unstoppable rural mass of
‘Creole coolies’.17 The practice of indentured immigration had only ended
two years earlier, in 1917, by which point established Indian labourer
communities were considered the most politically inaccessible elem-
ents of Trinidad’s multi-cultural society.18 Numbering well over 110,000
among a total registered population of 312,790 at the date of Trinidad’s
last pre-war census in 1911, the trend among Indian indentured labour-
ers was to establish village settlements on the fringes of the plantations
on which many worked.19 These new rural communities were minimally
policed; their value systems and emerging civil society little known to the
colonial authorities.20 As Walton Look Lai, an accomplished historian of
Indian migrants to the British West Indies puts it:
The marginality of the Indians up to the beginning of the new century was
reflected in the manner of their intervention and participation in public life.
Despite the fact that their presence had been generating the most intense
internal debates within Creole plantation society throughout the period of
immigration [after 1838], they themselves had remained on the outside of
these debates, expressing their autonomy against colonialism in their own work
environment, utilizing their own inner resources of wit and grit in the battle
for survival, and relying on their traditional communal wisdom to resolve their
own inner problems among themselves. Their links with the world of official
society had generally never extended beyond the authority of the Immigration
Department.21
Here was another subaltern community whose threatening potential
seemed to be growing.22 Official anxiety about an inscrutable Indian
community persisted throughout the inter-war period. Governor
Fletcher found high levels of malnutrition and consequently high rates
of morbidity among Indian sugar workers the most distressing feature
Oil and order 239
of Trinidadian society.23 Applying crudely deterministic racial profiling

and Orientalist stereotypes, Prisons Commissioner Alexander Paterson
also singled out Indian immigrant workers as peculiarly alienated. In
his comprehensive review of the British West Indies prison system, con-
ducted less than three years before the start of the Second World War,
Paterson wrote the following:
Physical hunger and the fever of sex become dominant facts in a [psychological]
framework that has had little chance to acquire inhibition or practice control.
It is of interest to note that while in England offences against the person are
barely five per cent, in some of the Colonies they reach sixty per cent of the full
total. Among other factors accounting for this weakness of inhibitive control
is the position of the East Indian, who abandoned his caste system when he
left India, and has now almost discarded his religion, without setting anything
deep and directive in their place.24
Decades before Paterson conducted his review armed force was repeat-
edly used to suppress protests by Indian plantation workers elsewhere
in the British-ruled southern Caribbean. Some of these stoppages were
over pay or contracts; others arose out of maltreatment or sexual exploit-
ation of women workers by managers and overseers. British Guiana
was a case in point. Close cousin culturally and politically to Trinidad,
transnational links between the two colonies’ workforces being espe-
cially strong, Guiana was the scene of five major disturbances on its lar-
ger estates between 1872 and 1913. All were put down with loss of life
among Indian indentured labourers.25 By 1914 the Guyanese author-
ities were in discussion with the Colonial Office over the inclusion of
permanent police protection for sugar estate managers within British
Guiana’s annual budget.26 Strike actions were also commonplace, typ-
ically coming in waves during periods of acute economic distress and
at particular moments in the cane cultivation cycle. With strikers an
obvious target for police and plantation guards, burning cane became
a favoured – and anonymous – form of protest action.27 Might some-
thing similar become endemic on Trinidad’s sugar estates, where the
Indian workforce was concentrated, or perhaps in its heavy industries –
oil and asphalt – in which black workers predominated? White estate
owners, leading figures in Port of Spain’s commercial community, and
Americans employed in southern Trinidad’s oilfields and asphalt works
thought so. They demanded a stronger, permanent military presence to
deter an imminent ‘race war’.28
Uncertain that Trinidad’s predominantly black constabulary force
could police a protracted general strike, Governor Chancellor pushed
Port of Spain’s dockyard managers into conceding substantial pay
increases in early December.29
The labour unrest in late 1919 had three more lasting consequences
relevant to us here. First was the assumption that Trinidad’s resident
police force was neither large enough nor reliable enough to contain
major strike action. Arising from this, the white business commu-
nity redoubled its pressure for a standing garrison force to defend
their interests. This was in addition to the ships of the Royal Navy’s
Caribbean squadron whose sailors and marines provided a floating
reserve of gunboat gendarmes in cases of island disorder. Finally, in
addition to bowing to the dockworkers’ pay demands, Chancellor
made another, more dangerous concession, agreeing to arm white
vigilantes linked to the island’s major export industries. From 1919
onwards, groups such as the ‘Mounted Volunteers of Trinidad’, the
‘Colonial Vigilantes’ and US oil and asphalt workers armed by their
company managers were prepared to man the gates whenever ser-
ious industrial unrest broke out.30 These were dangerous precedents.
The expectation that Trinidad’s police would crack under the weight
of sustained labour protest nourished the belief among the island’s
business leaders, several of them members of the Legislative Council,
that it fell to them to lend backbone to weak-kneed officials tempera-
mentally inclined to cave in to strikers’ demands. Crucially, employ-
ers were now authorized to protect their staff and premises through
vigilantism.
The depression and unrest resumed

Depression conditions from 1930 onwards raised the temperature of
Trinidad’s simmering economic, class and racial antagonisms. Unlike
Jamaica, the underlying structural problems were less a matter of
land hunger and consequent rural unemployment than of wages fall-
ing behind the cost of living. Employers’ demands on workers, both
in terms of productivity and hours worked, rose inexorably as export
revenues declined. The economics of Trinidad’s oil and sugar indus-
tries, the racial stratification between managers and labourers and the
political culture of colonialism formed a more combustible mix as work-
ing conditions deteriorated.31 Worsening poverty among Trinidad’s
labouring population made the ethnic segmentation and class division
between affluent whites and poor non-whites starker and, it seems,
more intolerable. Separating out these causal factors is something of an
artificial exercise not just because they were mutually reinforcing but
also because they were different facets of the same problem.32
With unemployment for the first time becoming a major structural
problem and wage rates failing to keep pace either with retail prices or
Oil and order 241
the rental charges demanded of workers housed in plantation lines and

oil installation barracks, between 1933 and 1935 the face of Trinidadian
left-wing politics changed dramatically. Again, there were strong paral-
lels with the situation in British Guiana, where destitution in the capital
Bridgetown stirred popular protests led by activists who formed part of
a Caribbean transnational network inspired by Garveyism and an emer-
ging rhetoric of leftist anti-colonialism.33 In 1934 the Trinidad Labour
Party (TLP) emerged from the ashes of the Trinidad Workingmen’s
Association under the leadership of Captain Arthur Cipriani, a French
Creole of Corsican descent. His extensive international contacts and
trans-Caribbean networks were tracked by British security officers in
London and Port of Spain. The TLP offered a constitutionalist alter-
native to the new trade unions and other associational groups that
opted for demonstrations, hunger marches and sit-down strikes to
advance their claims. Foremost among these organizations were the
Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association (NWCSA) and the
National Unemployed Movement (NUM), formed by Jim Barrette,
Elma Francois and Jim Headley.34 The NWCSA built its reputation for
militant action during protests on five large sugar estates in July 1934
during which confrontations with the police led to the firing of live
ammunition but no fatalities.35
The focal point of industrial strife shifted to the oil industry and the
island’s largest producer, Apex Oilfields, in March 1935. It was here
that Fletcher’s nemesis, Uriah Butler came to the fore. Along with John
Rojas, his fellow TLP organizer in the main oilfield town of Fyzabad,
Butler coordinated a strikers’ hunger march to the capital. A dormitory
settlement for oilfield workers, Fyzabad had a reputation for seediness
and tough public order policing; its poor housing and lack of amen-
ities inversely matched by the large numbers of unemployed labourers,
prostitutes and street hawkers that, according to Fletcher, cluttered its
streets.36 The appearance of hard-bitten demonstrators from the lawless
south making common cause with Port of Spain’s slum dwellers caused
horror among the capital’s better-heeled residents.37 Not so among the
city’s poor. Butler’s march, redolent of the NWCSA’s preference for
street protest, won him popular support beyond the confines of the
oilfields. And it pointed the way to a radicalization of the TLP under
the impetus of its oil worker activists. They derived their ideological
inspiration from a young Indian professional, Adrian Cola Rienzi (born
Krishna Deonarine), dubbed Trinidad’s primary seditionist by the colo-
nial authorities.38 Trained as a lawyer in London, with cosmopolitan
links to several anti-imperialist groups, and fond of Marxist rhetoric,
according to police and MI5 intelligence reports, Rienzi became the deus
ex machina pulling the strings of labour unrest following his return to

Trinidad in 1934. Tellingly, the evidence against him was compiled not
by the police, but by an oil company manager at Trinidad Leaseholds.39
Trinidad’s depression, like Jamaica’s, refused to lift as the 1930s pro-
gressed. By 1937 workers in the oil and sugar industries were strug-
gling to put food on the table.40 Reviewing the decade as a whole, the
Moyne Commission’s evidence indicated that from the largest estates
to the smallest, cane-cutters’ average wage rates remained below their
1930 level in 1936. The variability of seasonal employment in the sugar
industry, lower pay rates for female workers, plus the arduousness of
plantation labour tipped thousands of families into malnutrition and ill
health. Fewer in number, oil workers fared better, earning an average
of 72 cents per day for a forty-six hour week in 1936, more than double
the aggregate wage of a cane-cutter, who also worked longer hours.41
But the oilfields were comparatively expensive places to live, their
Spartan, barrack-style accommodation increasingly unaffordable.42
After years of reduced profitability, by 1937 oil company share-
holders were rewarded handsomely; Apex Oilfields, the largest oil-
field corporation, registered a 45 per cent dividend on the London
stock market. Oil workers’ experiences of racial discrimination and
unfair treatment proved more incendiary than news of soaring prof-
its.43 Taking an instrumental view, Fletcher explained workers’ griev-
ances thus: a worsening gap between income and prices, the extent of
oil company dividends, racial discrimination in the workplace, collusion
between employers over wages and dismissals, anger over the Ethiopian
War and the influence of cinema newsreels reporting successful indus-
trial actions in the United States.
Trinidad Leaseholds, one of the major sites of the impending labour
rebellion, seemed particularly culpable. Its managerial staff, some of
them white South Africans, used demeaning language, much of it
overtly racist, when addressing employees. Managers were accused
of favouring inexperienced white job applicants over more seasoned
black or Indian personnel.44 Trinidad Leaseholds may have been an
exception and not the rule, but in one respect all the oil companies
followed similar practice. Personnel service records held on each oil
installation in so-called ‘red books’ were shared between employers,
meaning that workers involved in past strike actions or found to have
incurred workplace fines for breakages, slackness or other minor mis-
demeanours were unlikely to find work on other oilfield sites with
different companies.45 Reviewing labour relations in the oilfields,
the commission of inquiry into the impending disorders singled out
the hated ‘red books’ and associated claims that companies colluded
in denying work to alleged troublemakers as undermining trust and
Oil and order 243
mutual respect between management and workforce.46 Butler, Rienzi

and their supporters could draw upon an ample fund of oil workers’
grievances from pay rates to discrimination and accusations of unfair
dismissal as the summer of 1937 approached.
The Governor besieged: the June 1937 oilfield strikes

A southern oilfield strike planned for 2 June 1937 was delayed for a
couple of weeks once it became clear that the police would try to block it.
On 17 June Inspector W. E. Power, senior police officer in the southern
oilfields region, relayed police intelligence about imminent strike dis-
ruption to Government House. So alarming were Power’s predictions of
violent disorder that he was called to Port of Spain for discussions with
the Chief Inspector of Police. The following day the two police chiefs
toured the oilfields, deciding to allocate all available forces to contain
the anticipated walkout.47 At midnight on 18 June workers at Trinidad
Leaseholds, in Forest Reserve and Fyzabad began sit-in strikes, adopt-
ing Uriah Butler’s preferred protest tactic, which he copied from stop-
pages in the US automotive industry. Police reinforcements were sent
to San Fernando, the island’s southwestern commercial capital situated
thirteen kilometres from Fyzabad, as soon as strike action began at
the Apex Oilfields plant.48 Physical occupation of oil company property
hastened police intervention as company managers contacted local gov-
ernment officials to request that the striking workers be removed from
their premises.
The pattern of protest at Fyzabad unfolded in remarkably similar
fashion to events on Jamaica’s Frome sugar estate described in the pre-
vious chapter. What began as a peaceful demonstration escalated, first
into apparently random scuffles, then into more orchestrated violence
when colonial police units were called in to evict protesters from the
oilfield plant. Police efforts to arrest Uriah Butler on 19 June provoked
anarchic scenes as hundreds of workers fought to protect him and fel-
low strike organizers. The subsequent Whitehall inquiry, while exon-
erating the police for the bloodshed that occurred, would, yet again,
criticize constabulary officers for their reluctance to shoot identifiable
ringleaders in order to deter attacks on police lines. When the police
did fire on demonstrators it was in the midst of rioting already taking
place – first at the San Fernando telephone exchange where three strik-
ers from the United British Oilfields installation were shot dead on 22
June, and then at nearby Rio Claro the following day where the police
killed four rioters, part of a group that allegedly opened fire first.49
The oilfield protests were in other respects more distinctive. The
worst clashes between police and protesters in Jamaica occurred near
Kingston or within its city limits. Ferrying police reinforcements was

relatively straightforward when compared with Trinidad’s oilfields,
which were less accessible. Without locally available police manpower
Governor Fletcher could not provide adequate support to existing
detachments in the oilfields. He was also terrified of denuding Port of
Spain of its protection against mob violence.50 As if to prove his point,
strikers cut telephone and telegraph lines and built roadblocks in an
attempt to disrupt communications. Little wonder that the colonial
authorities struggled to keep up as the disorders worsened, leaving oil-
field managers and their families fearing attack inside their homes. The
first incident reports to reach the Governor’s residence, the Red House,
suggested that the strikers’ economic grievances were subsumed within
a visceral antagonism against their privileged overseers. These animos-
ities were sharpened by continuing fury over the fate of Ethiopia, inte-
gral to the NWCSA’s allegations that colonialism was part of a wider
international system that held down the black man.51 The Ethiopian
crisis mobilized popular opposition to British rule by uniting differing
strands of party political, religious and worker-based groups, each of
which drew particular lessons from the abandonment of Haile Selassie’s
Empire to Italian fascism.52 For his part, Fletcher accused ‘Buzz’ Butler
and his press mouthpiece, The People, of exploiting public sympathy for
Ethiopia to foment racial hatred.53
Much-feared black peril-style assaults on the domestic space of the
white elite never occurred, but the attacks on a chronically outnum-
bered local constabulary force at Fyzabad were brutal. Several officers
were badly beaten following Butler’s arrival at Fyzabad to address a
crowd of strikers. The Chief Inspector of police issued instructions for
Butler’s arrest on charges of incitement to violence and the local police
commander obtained the necessary warrant on the afternoon of 19
June. Things went badly wrong for the police soon afterwards. Asked by
Butler to read out the arrest warrant, the police party was surrounded
by strikers. Lacking sufficient manpower either to disperse the crowd
or to detain Butler safely, individual officers took matters into their own
hands. One, Superintendent-Sergeant Belfon was attacked after trying
to seize Butler during his speech. Another, Corporal Charlie King tried
to detain the strike-leader as he was being ushered away by his support-
ers.54 With a running riot now underway, Corporal King was chased
and thrown from a shop window, breaking his leg on landing.55 Lying
helpless, he was doused in paraffin and burned alive.56 Protesters had
greater access to firearms in Trinidad than in Jamaica, and possession
of shotguns, licensed or otherwise, was widespread. Another police-
man, Sub-Inspector Bradburn, part of the reinforcements to arrive at
Oil and order 245
Fyzabad after the death of Corporal King, was killed when his men
came under fire later that evening.
The spectre of armed black strikers shooting down ill-equipped
police inverted the asymmetries of firepower that usually characterized
colonial workplace protest.57 Such fundamental transgression of the
codes of confrontation between protesters and police was exploited to
fullest effect after the June disturbances when Trinidad’s white settler
elite reiterated its demands for a permanent military garrison to prevent
any recurrence of insurrectionist violence. On Saturday 3 July a depu-
tation of Legislative Council members, oil company directors and lead-
ing landowners secured a meeting with Ormsby-Gore at the Colonial
Office. In their eyes, workers’ use of shotguns against policemen not
only confirmed the need for a permanent naval garrison, but also indi-
cated that the protection of settlers and oil supplies were synonymous.58
Once again, the connected challenges of policing and labour control
precipitated an existential challenge to colonial rule.
Governor Fletcher’s most pressing problem was to allay oil industry
concerns over their white managerial staff by convincing them that the
colonial authorities could provide meaningful security.59 Shocked at the
deaths of the two policemen, exasperated by the failure to capture Butler
(who was whisked into hiding) and facing outrage among Trinidad’s
white community, Fletcher chose a hard line. As dusk descended on 19
June, he ordered the mobilization of the Trinidad Light Horse, actually
a motorized paramilitary unit comprised of white volunteers. Equipped
with armoured vehicles, the Light Horse supplemented and ultimately
supplanted the police on the frontline of the oilfield strikes. As the strike-
wave spread to sugar estates around San Fernando and Ste Madelaine,
Light Horse volunteers, including oil company and sugar estate man-
agers, conducted house-to-house searches in the worst-affected dis-
tricts, confiscating weapons and making summary arrests.60
Fletcher, meanwhile, called upon the resources of the Royal Navy’s
West Indies squadron, issuing the telegram appeal cited at the head of
this chapter on 20 June. With one cruiser, HMS Ajax, and its accom-
panying Royal Marine detachment on the way, Fletcher requested
another, Ajax’s sister ship, HMS Exeter, a day later. Members of the
Trinidad Light Infantry were also called out to contain dissent on the
sugar estates around San Fernando. By the time the two ships’ com-
panies were deployed from 23 June onwards, Trinidad’s police force –
about 1,000 strong, white officered, but largely comprised of black
police constables – were outnumbered more than two-to-one by mem-
bers of the British armed forces. Platoons of seamen from the two cruis-
ers were posted at the oilfields and refineries of Trinidad Leaseholds,
Apex Oilfields and the United British Oilfields.61 Naval detachments

worked in conjunction with the local police commanders and their
NCOs, providing armed support to police raids, arrests of identified
ringleaders and guarding of oil company installations.62 Additional
units were sent to the more remote Trinidad Petroleum Development
Company site after its managing director pleaded directly to Ormsby-
Gore on 23 June.63
What had started as an oilfield strike with specific local grievances
to be addressed had escalated into an island-wide general strike built
on the three pillars of Trinidad’s export trade: oil workers, plantation
labourers and Port of Spain’s dockyard personnel.64 Significantly, the
naval commander overseeing the deployment of the ships’ security
platoons told his Admiralty superiors that their tasks were these: to
prevent urban rioting, to protect managerial staff in the oilfields, and
to release police patrols to track down ‘ringleaders’.65 Fletcher’s declar-
ation of a state of emergency on 26 June paved the way for dawn raids
by troops on the homes of suspected strike organizers in the southern
oilfields. The police took similar measures to break the strike actions on
sugar estates and in the capital’s dockyard. With the glaring exception
of Uriah Butler, by the end of the month the strike movement’s leading
figures were behind bars, although rigorous censorship concealed the
crackdown’s full extent. A $500 reward was offered for any information
leading to the arrest of those ‘agitators’ still sought by the police.66
By the time the two cruisers departed the island on 5 July Trinidad’s
labour rebellion had claimed fourteen lives, most of them lost in
clashes with police. Hundreds more were in jail awaiting trial on sedi-
tion charges.67 Profoundly uneasy over the scale of the repression con-
ducted in his name, Governor Fletcher tried to sweeten the pill by
appointing his deputy, Howard Nankivell to head a government arbi-
tration commission.68 Fletcher also told his Colonial Office masters
that the strikers were neither irresponsible nor ideologically motivated,
but driven by basic economic need. The colonial administration, he
claimed, was not merely reacting to events but working to improve real
wages: ‘With the cordial agreement of the Legislative Council I have
taken the opportunity of this unrest to fix a minimum Government
wage only a fraction higher than that of the pre-depression years and to
establish an eight hour day which is the most that people of enfeebled
physique should be called upon to work.’ There was, he insisted, ‘no
question whatever of Government being stampeded. The men have
legitimate grievances which require full investigation, and I am thank-
ful to have had this opportunity to give the very poor a remedy which
is long overdue.’69
Oil and order 247
In the circumstances prevailing after 22 June employers and strike

leaders would never sit down together under Nankivell’s direction to
agree a compromise solution. The heavy hand of protest policing and
Nankivell’s unbridled attacks on oil industry practices had seen to that.70
It is crucial here to distinguish between the southern oilfields where
militancy was strongest and Port of Spain where the government had
generally retained control. The capital’s dockworkers and government
clerks reached negotiated pay deals, thanks in part to Fletcher’s inter-
vention with their leaders. By contrast, in the rebellion’s oil and sugar
industry heartlands neither Cipriani, nor Rienzi, nor Butler was in any
position to assume the role played by Norman Manley and Alexander
Bustamente in Jamaica. Trinidad’s iconic nationalist leader and future
prime minister, Eric Williams, was, at the time, far removed from his
home island, making his name as an outstanding student at Oxford.71
In the absence of such authoritative voices to articulate strikers’ griev-
ances and restrain their more extreme demands, Fletcher’s isolation
deepened.
Despite his recent actions, the Governor was ‘far from stereotypically
authoritarian’, his deputy even less so.72 Nankivell maintained infor-
mal contact with Cipriani, Rienzi and others throughout the crisis. His
Dutch-born wife Florence, a practising Quaker, shared his reformist
sympathies and, like her husband, remained an outsider in the cosseted
social circles of Government House staff. She worked with women’s
groups in the capital to publicize the grim conditions in the city’s slums
and on the island’s plantation ‘lines’.73 Fletcher stuck to his view that
the labour rebellion was economically inspired and demanded compre-
hensive pay increases. Nankivell was blunter. He castigated the oil and
sugar companies for paying starvation wages, for valuing their workers
less than their machinery and for repatriating their profits. It is hard
to find a comparable inter-war example of two British colonial officials
speaking out as strongly.74
Their defiance was not to last. Their careers careening towards the
rocks, they were wrecked on the issue of policing. The Governor was
under immense pressure from a hostile Legislative Council, an unsym-
pathetic Secretary of State, and the barrister Sir John Forster, chair of
the Colonial Office inquiry commission. Fletcher sacrificed his associate,
Nankivell, in an effort to deflect criticism about the lack of firm official
direction to the police.75 He turned Judas once the commission began
gathering evidence in September about the labour rebellion’s signal
events. Facing dismissal, Fletcher recycled the rumours about Nankivell’s
fellow-travelling with the ‘Communist’ Rienzi.76 The Governor also for-
got his earlier sympathy for Trinidad’s labouring population. Rather than
sticking to a pattern of economic causation as the Commission findings

eventually would, the Governor sought refuge in the familiar theme of
outside extremists manipulating the politically naive:
I have recorded my anxiety regarding the activity of agitators. Trinidad is, gen-
erally speaking, devoid of any sense of discipline, and it affords fertile ground
for the mischief maker. The wildest rumours go from mouth to mouth and
from end to end of the Colony, and dangerous suggestions find a receptive
audience. The Colony at large is volubly predicting the wholesale burning of
canes as soon as the dry season commences. Stringent orders have been given
to disperse meetings in public places and to arrest all persons who attempt to
stir up trouble.77
Strategy and self-interest: appeasement

and oil protection
A blow-by-blow account of Trinidad’s labour rebellion tells us quite a
bit about the prevailing social conditions, the trans-Caribbean cultural
cross-currents and the inter-ethnic frictions that propelled labour pro-
tests and police interventions in the 1930s. It also reveals the short-term
administrative shortcomings and oil company obduracy that prevented
a negotiated settlement to the strikes. But we need to explore the pol-
itical economy of pre-war empire more deeply to grasp why the police
acted as they did, and why it was judged essential for them to react even
more forcefully against any recurrence of dissent.
During the summer of 1937 the National Government’s twin-track
strategy of seeking a negotiated settlement to Germany’s territorial
claims while rearming intensively was underwritten by Chancellor of
the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain’s elevation to the post of prime
minister. Reassuringly stoical in his wing collar, Chamberlain personi-
fied the combination of appeasement and massive defence spending, of
hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.78 Among his first pri-
orities was a defence review, conducted at his behest by a recent Cabinet
arrival: Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Coordination of Defence.79
Inskip’s review, steered through Whitehall’s civil-military bureaucracy
over the winter of 1937–8, reiterated the chiefs of staff’s accepted stra-
tegic wisdom. Imperial defence requirements ranked below protection
of the British Isles, near neighbours France and Belgium and the arter-
ial Mediterranean sea route upon which British trade and vital commu-
nications to India, Southeast Asia and Australasia depended.80 While
this left ample scope for argument between ministries and defence
planners over spending priorities, the need to equip a large contin-
ental army and the feasibility of sending a battleship fleet to garrison
Singapore against a fast-increasing Japanese threat, hardly a word was
Oil and order 249
said about Caribbean territory.81 Internal disorders in the West Indies

were unquestionably serious but they were eclipsed in the minds of
Britain’s global strategists by the concurrent rebellion in Palestine and
the urgent requirement to secure an Anglo-Egyptian treaty to guaran-
tee unfettered use of the Suez Canal.82 Remote from European, Middle
Eastern and East Asian trouble-spots and sheltered under the protect-
ive wing of the United States, the British West Indies looked at first
glance like a strategic backwater and a safe refuge. Yet this was not
quite the case.83
Personality clashes within the Cabinet and basic issues of military
logistics and supply afforded Trinidad a unique importance within
British strategic policy-making. Both had ramifications for the policing
of dissent in the oilfields. By the time that Governor Fletcher’s handling
of the 1937 riots came under scrutiny, Secretary of State for Colonies
William Ormsby-Gore cut a lonely figure amongst his ministerial
colleagues. The Colonial Office was, in recent political memory, the
launching pad for ambitious Conservative Party careerists from Joseph
Chamberlain to Winston Churchill and Leo Amery. But the unpre-
cedented financial pressures and altered strategic landscape of the
1930s diminished the scope for innovation, expenditure or policy ini-
tiative, tending instead to marginalize their depression-era successors.
Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister (Viscount Swinton), at the Colonial Office
between November 1931 and June 1935, was a safe pair of hands, but
he struggled to influence colleagues or public from his seat in the House
of Lords.84 As we saw in Chapter 1, the ill-starred Jimmy Thomas,
a Ramsay MacDonald Labour loyalist, never mastered his economic
brief. Yet he was twice selected as a caretaker appointment, first in
1931 and then from November 1935 until he was forced to resign after
leaking details of the 1936 budget six months later. MacDonald’s son
Malcolm, another two-time National Labour appointee to the Colonial
Office, first as precursor to Thomas in 1935 and then for two years
from May 1938, was full of energy but short of clout within an increas-
ingly Conservative-dominated government in thrall to Chamberlain.
All of which leaves us with Ormsby-Gore. He took over from the
disgraced Jimmy Thomas in May 1936 and remained at the Colonial
Office until replaced by MacDonald two years later. At this point
Ormsby-Gore surrendered his parliamentary seat for Stafford and
entered the House of Lords as the 4th Baron Harlech. He was the
scion of a Shropshire family with strong City connections cultivated as
key figures in Midlands banking during the industrial revolution. But
William Ormsby-Gore’s interest was always imperial affairs.85 He dis-
tinguished himself as British representative to the League of Nations’
newly established Permanent Mandates Commission in 1921 and then

served as Leo Amery’s deputy at the Colonial Office during Stanley
Baldwin’s first Government between 1924 and 1929. When he returned
in 1936, Ormsby-Gore could justifiably claim to be an empire special-
ist, a qualification later confirmed by his appointment as Britain’s war-
time High Commissioner to South Africa in 1941. But he never got on
with Neville Chamberlain, and this was his undoing.
At the source of their disagreement lay the clash between the real-
politik calculations of appeasement and the responsibilities of imperial
trusteeship. Once Chamberlain took office the argument crystallized
around the issue of ‘colonial restitution’. Ormsby-Gore opposed using
colonial transfers to entice the Berlin government into comprehensive
talks. Often, he was the lone voice in Cabinet to do so.86 The idea that
the Nazi appetite for territorial expansion might be satiated by restitu-
tion of Germany’s former African colonial domains appears ludicrous
in hindsight, but the cession of (preferably French) colonial territory
as a cheap price for peace in Europe gained remarkable traction within
government during 1937 especially.87 Drawing on his past experience
at the Mandates Commission, whose purview included Cameroon and
Togoland, the two territories integral to any colonial deal with Hitler,
Ormsby-Gore put the case against with real authority. It was not music
to the ears of ministers casting around for some means to revitalize an
appeasement process stalled by frictions over German rearmament, the
creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis and fascist intervention in Spain’s
Civil War. The Colonial Secretary’s propensity to raise objections –
strategic, economic, political and, most irritating of all, moral – to pla-
cing colonial subjects under Nazi rule put him at odds with the new
prime minister.88 When he finally knuckled under in December 1937,
he did so reluctantly.89
The oilfield unrest began seven months earlier, just as Chamberlain
took over the reins at Number 10. The new prime minister was deter-
mined to make the offer of colonies to coax Hitler into negotiations for
a ‘general settlement’ of outstanding territorial differences in Europe.
Ormsby-Gore was, at this point, hostile to the entire idea. There was
no room for weakness if he was to avoid losing his job and win the
argument against colonial appeasement inside the Cabinet Room. The
Colonial Secretary was thus disinclined to indulge Fletcher’s indeci-
siveness; quite the reverse: Ormsby-Gore’s status as a minister rested
on his reputation as staunch defender of Britain’s less glamorous colo-
nial possessions. From the tiny colony of The Gambia in West Africa,
the one territory liable to feature in a three-way colonial ‘swap’ between
Britain, France and Germany, to the strike-bound islands of the West
Oil and order 251
Indies, Ormsby-Gore claimed to represent the firm but fair hand of

British imperial guidance. Decisive action in defence of British oil
exporters would also assume unprecedented importance as the Inskip
defence review unfolded.
The nub of Inskip’s reassessment of how Britain should allocate
defence expenditure in the immediate future was the shift towards
strategic air defence. Royal Air Force requirements triumphed above
those of the other two fighting services. More money, factory plant and
skilled labour were allocated to construction of fighter planes to protect
home skies at the expense of long-range bombers designed to attack
German industry and urban centres. Usually interpreted as a victory for
Chamberlain, Inskip’s review laid the foundations for eventual victory
in the Battle of Britain.90 Alongside the improvements in aerodynam-
ics and manoeuvrability, air speed and firepower that marked out the
new generation of fighter planes set to roll off British production lines
in 1938–40 went the requirement for higher performance fuel. High
octane levels in petroleum spirit enhanced the capacity of aero-engines
to maintain speed at high altitude. So improvements in octane content
became part of the wider competition between rival powers to achieve
competitive technological advantage in the aircraft arms race between
them. Trinidad was a vital British source of this high-grade fuel. Not
only that, but Trinidad’s oil supply, along with that from refineries in
Venezuela and Dutch Curacao, was critical to the diesel engines of
Britain’s Royal Navy and its merchant fleet.91
None of this is to claim that oil politics explains the repression of
strikes in the Trinidad oilfields.92 It is, rather, to state that Britain’s
changing strategic priorities meshed with wider Colonial Office con-
cerns about lawlessness in the British West Indies and Ormsby-Gore’s
need to deflect hostile prime ministerial criticism. British colonial pol-
icy, in other words, amalgamated the authoritarian impulse to restore
order immediately – as evinced by the frustration with Fletcher and
the support for naval intervention – with a growing recognition that
the Caribbean’s acute imbalance in wealth distribution and the sever-
ity of its racial discrimination demanded fundamental redress. In part,
this interest in socio-economic reform mirrored transnational changes
in the running of European empires – the emergence of more influ-
ential labour inspectorates in French West Africa and Indochina for
instance.93 In part, it marked the birth-pangs of development, the
stronger appetite for surveys and policy reviews, and the technocratic
turn in British colonial bureaucracy that became more apparent after
1945.94 Suffice to say that in the eighteen months before Europe erupted
into war official interest in the policing of Caribbean labour redoubled
just as steps were taken to admit local political parties and, more par-
ticularly, trade unions to decision-making over pay scales, employment
contracts and the settlement of industrial disputes.95 The oilfield unrest
of 1937 marked both the high point and, to a degree, an end point in a
style of repressive colonial policing whose precepts could be traced back
to Walter Long’s 1918 review of riot control procedures.
Three weeks after the two policemen died in the rioting at Fyzabad,
and still fuming over Governor Fletcher’s dilatory behaviour, Ormsby-
Gore revealed his concerns in a letter to Walter Citrine, General
Secretary of the Trade Union Congress (TUC). The letter exemplified
the order-plus-reform aspect to Colonial Office thinking but was also
emblematic of the government’s efforts to involve trade unionists along-
side private arms manufacturers in Britain’s rearmament effort.96 So
the minister’s comments bear quoting:
No doubt you’ve seen in the papers the accounts of the recent trades dis-
putes in Trinidad, about which there have been some questions in Parliament.
The trouble originated among workers in the oil industry and spread to other
industries and was accompanied by a good deal of violence including deaths.
The strike is now over and the men are back at work, but I have special reasons
for desiring that such unfortunate incidents should not recur. The Trinidad
oil field is one of the few Empire oil fields on which the Admiralty and Air
Ministry will have to rely in time of war. Already there are large Admiralty
and Air Force contracts for the supply of different types of oil fuel which are
got and refined in Trinidad, including arrangements for the putting up of a
new ¾ million pound plant to produce a special spirit of the highest grade for
our fast fighter aeroplanes for the defence of London. Oil wells and refineries
with their complicated machinery are singularly vulnerable to sabotage, and
if fires started millions of pounds worth of damage can be done. It therefore
behoves Government in the interest of the State, even more than in those of
property, to take all such steps as are humanly possible to prevent the causes –
and especially the legitimate causes – of trouble arising.97
Ormsby-Gore was anxious to exploit British trade unionists’ con-
tacts with colonial labour leaders, aware of their support for Trinidad’s
oil workers. Ernie Bevin recalled the Trinidad crisis in his presiden-
tial address to the TUC in late 1937, a signal that West Indian labour
conditions would move centre stage in British labour movement state-
ments on colonial affairs. Arthur Creech Jones, a prominent Labour
Party spokesman on imperial policy even called for nationalization of
Trinidad’s oil industry. And the Caribbean labour rebellions were sure
to feature in the TUC’s regular dialogue with ILO representatives in
Geneva. These were powerful inducements for Ormsby-Gore to court
Citrine.98 He tempted him with the offer to legalize collective bargain-
ing rights in Trinidad.99
Oil and order 253
Once assured of the TUC’s moderating influence, the barrier was

lifted to unionization in Trinidad. A fortnight after the Ormsby-Gore–
Citrine exchange, the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) was
launched, led by its secretary-general, the Fyzabad union-organizer,
Elbert Redvers Blades.100 In total, six trade unions were legalized by
December 1937, embracing workers from the main wage-earning
groups caught up in the earlier unrest: oilfield workers, plantation
labourers, stevedores and government employees. Citrine ensured
that they came under the aegis of the TUC, fulfilling the bargain that
Ormsby-Gore struck with him a few months before.101 By the end of
1938 there were ten registered trade unions on the island. The rapidity
of this unionization process outpaced anything similar elsewhere in the
British Caribbean, something Nigel Bolland ascribes to the importance
of Trinidad’s oil supplies to Britain.102 Strategy, Cabinet politics and the
manifest failings of repressive policing had produced a sea-change in
the methods of colonial labour control.
What, then, of Governor Fletcher and Nankivell, his Colonial
Secretary? As we saw earlier, both men faced vilification within the
Legislative Council, among the close-knit community of wealthy land-
owners and large-scale employers and from oil company management.
Fletcher’s flip-flopping over the presence of troops to back up the police
persuaded Ormsby-Gore that he had to go.103 His chosen replacement,
Sir Hubert Young, arrived with a reputation for firm police action
against colonial strikers having been Governor of Northern Rhodesia
during the copperbelt strikes of 1935.104 As for Nankivell, it was Forster’s
Commission of Inquiry that sealed his fate. The commissioners could
not forgive Nankivell for his incendiary speech to the Legislative
Council on 9 July in which he accused government and industry of col-
luding in profit-driven exploitation.105 Nankivell’s intemperate attack
on the oil industry’s callous neglect of its workforce was one thing, but
suggesting that colonial authorities were complicit in the process was
quite another.106 The errant Colonial Secretary was packed off to the
job of colonial treasurer in Cyprus.107
Ironically, the commission’s final report, published in February 1938,
conceded that low wages and workplace discrimination fuelled the ini-
tial strike actions. In line with Nankivell’s preferences, Forster and his
colleagues recommended that a Labour Department be established to
arbitrate in any future industrial disputes. It all chimed with Ormsby-
Gore’s approaches to Citrine and the growth of legalized trade union-
ism. Indeed, the Colonial Office anticipated the commission’s findings,
having decided a month earlier to create a new position of Assistant
Colonial Secretary for Labour Affairs, an exact job description of what
Nankivell had done over the preceding three years.108 But on matters
of public order the commissioners were less accommodating. They
criticized the police for not firing directly on the Fyzabad crowd on
the evening of 19 June to excise ‘ringleaders’. And they endorsed the
extension of anti-sedition laws to disbar wildcat strikes and large pub-
lic meetings of the sort that Butler addressed at the start of the June
disturbances. A Summary Jurisdiction Ordinance requiring a magis-
trate’s authorization for any public assemblies of more than ten people
remained in force. Trinidad’s major employers duly applauded what
they called a ‘Law and Order report’.109 Yet, despite its firm tone, the
Commission of Inquiry rejected a permanent garrison for Trinidad,
pointing out that provision of adequate civil policing to protect a local
community was a yardstick of governance. To rule a colony by military
force was to admit several things at once: administrative incompetence,
breakdown in the rule of law, lack of legitimacy … defeat.110
Conclusion
In 1939 the copiously named Sir Granville St John Orde-Browne
embarked on a detailed survey of labour conditions in the British West
Indies, building on his expertise in studying the phenomenon of ‘detrib-
alization’ in East and Southern Africa.111 Like the Colonial Office man-
darins who appointed him to study the socio-economic meltdown in
the British Caribbean, Orde-Brown began with three presumptions, all
dubious if not totally fallacious. One was that Halcyon Days of commu-
nal harmony prevailed in the decades of relative social peace preceding
the disruptive impact of the Great War. Another was that long-standing
black and Indian labourers’ grievances about racial discrimination would
have remained dormant were it not for the poisonous cocktail of work-
place maltreatment and extraneous political influences – among which
Garveyism, Socialism and Gandhian nationalism figured largest. His
third working hypothesis was less a presumption, than a conviction.
Colonial government was exonerated because it remained above the
inter-ethnic tensions around it; more an observer of events than control-
ler of them. By extension, he considered the police to be victims of the
unrest rather than catalysts for it.112
In fact, the administration and the police lost their way because they
could not navigate between the conflicting demands of an economic
elite, an industrial workforce with power to halt export production
and a Colonial Office increasingly convinced that the old ways of rul-
ing the British West Indies made little sense. At the apex of colonial
Oil and order 255
government, Governor Fletcher and Secretary Nankivell tried to steer

a line between recognition of strikers’ pay demands and conservation
of the workplace hierarchies that underpinned colonial difference in
Trinidad. Nigel Bolland gets it right:
Rather than characterising these colonial officials as either champions of the

working class or deceitful hypocrites, they are best understood as genuine lib-
erals, suffering from the contradictions of liberalism in a polarising situation.
As the two senior representatives of colonialism in Trinidad, they did take their
‘trusteeship’ role seriously, but that meant that they would ruthlessly suppress
disorder while at the same time seeking to reform the situation that they under-
stood to have given rise to it.113
Fletcher was the wrong person in the wrong job at the wrong time.
Southern Trinidad’s police units were too scattered and too few to cope
alone. The increasing strategic importance attached to Trinidad’s oil as
the threat of war loomed larger coincided with the new mood of reform-
ist pragmatism in Colonial Office circles.
Ultimately, though, Trinidad’s long hot summer of labour unrest
should be recognized on its own terms for stimulating fundamental
changes in industrial relations and policing, contrary to the expecta-
tions of employers after publication of the Forster Commission report
in February 1938. Neither the Colonial Office nor the commissioners
were willing to endorse any introduction of garrison forces or martial
law-type rule. And while police and magistrates’ legal powers to arrest
and lock up strikers and other protesters were strengthened, British
officials were under no illusions that repressive police actions in support
of the island’s major exporters could be sustained. These were import-
ant victories for Trinidad’s disenfranchised majority, landmark events
often read in terms of black consciousness and nationalist sentiment.114
The result was an unprecedented readiness to rethink policing methods
and labour control practices if not the basic tenets of colonial rule.
10 Profits, privatization and police: The birth
of Sierra Leone’s diamond industry
From the Caribbean to West Africa now, and the politics of crime in the British
colony of Sierra Leone.
Since the abolition of Headmen, there has been total unrest in the Rural
Areas. Several cases of murder, rape, wounding and manslaughter have come
to light and one wonders what is going to happen as the District Commissioner
has now migrated to the Urban Area. Is this the better administration of the
Rural Areas? Headmen abolished. The District Commissioner, now President
of the Rural Areas Council, migrated. The Constabulary Force an apology.
The bridges and culverts and streets and roads a ridicule to us. Burglary daily
increasing.1
These comments appeared within an article in Freetown’s Daily
Guardian written by a local dignitary prominent in the municipal polit-
ics of Sierra Leone’s capital city. They date from September 1938, when
British eyes were focused on the climax of the Czechoslovakian crisis.
But the remarks caused indignation in Government House matched
by the consternation expressed by officials of the Colonial Office West
Africa Department. How could a Freetown notable who had previ-
ously worked with the colonial authorities misjudge the situation so
badly? Was he merely ingratiating himself with the West African Youth
League, the dynamic new oppositional force in Freetown politics?2
What did Freetown’s more affluent residents know about conditions in
the rural interior anyway? Where and what was the unrest to which the
author referred? And how would it be policed?
Well-intentioned British colonial officials, their comments laced with
religious metaphor, were apt to hold up African press commentaries like
this as prime examples of the ignorance and ingratitude that so disap-
pointed them on the eve of the Second World War. Maybe we’re dealing
here with nothing more than a storm in an evidential teacup; a disgrun-
tled Freetown burgher sounding off and prickly colonial bureaucrats
responding in kind. Perhaps so, but reviewing the piece and the angry
marginalia it inspired from a post-imperial perspective, the problems of
evaluation multiply. Sierra Leone’s ‘official’ crime figures for 1938 do
256
Profits, privatization and police 257
not bear out the claims of worsening criminality, including lethal vio-
lence and sexual assault. Yet the language of European traders, district
officers and colonial staffers in Freetown was suffused with an expect-
ation of African violence, of a thin veneer of colonial order beneath
which lurked incipient anarchy.
The idea that colonial authority held society together was peculiar.
Villages and agricultural communities were largely self-regulating.
Indeed, it was precisely this to which Odetumi Crowther was referring
in his lament for the local headmen. Viewed from the other side of this
politico-racial divide, one reason why Crowther’s remarks aroused hos-
tile comment was because he appeared to be defending an indirect rule
system that had grown flabby and corrupt.3 Reserving juridical and fis-
cal powers to reliable African clients had opened the way to petty abuses,
which recent reforms had sought to correct.4 So neither the Freetown
government nor the Colonial Office was persuaded that there was a
case to answer. Ironically, the part of the above article that interests me
most drew the least comment: the alleged inadequacy of Sierra Leone’s
police. What, if anything, is implied by this silence? Was it that, unlike
the article’s other accusations, there was no point in refuting criticisms
of the Constabulary force? Were such criticisms self-evidently justified?
Or were colonial officials less interested in police matters? Whichever
the case, they point to the same conclusion: something had gone awry
with policing in Sierra Leone in the 1930s. It is this something that the
chapter explores.
The impact of the depression goes furthest in explaining this shift. It
does so, first, in terms of the catastrophic general decline in commodity
prices and the greater relative importance of those precious commod-
ities whose values held firm – namely, gold, diamonds and oil. It does
so, second, in terms of the trend towards heightened investment in –
and protection of – those colonial export industries that led economic
recovery as prices and trade volumes recovered from 1934 onwards.
Viewed through the prism of political economy, the effect of these dual,
converging pressures was to heighten state interest in core industries,
increasing colonial government’s readiness to devote greater resources
to security of supply. Trading companies and mining consortia with
commercial investments across West Africa thereby became better
integrated with government economic strategy in the inter-war years
than they had been in the earlier period of colonial consolidation before
1914. Mining remained a high risk enterprise, even so. Prospecting for
new deposits and requests for mine concessions received fitful backing
from colonial administrations. Business failures were commonplace.
Larger, integrated companies coped best.
Witness, for example, the pre-1914 collapse of the Nigeria Bitumen

Corporation whose pioneering oil exploration activities in Nigeria were
later pursued with greater success by Royal Dutch/Shell and the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Company between the wars.5 In Sierra Leone, as in other
British African territories such as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the few
consortia that survived consolidated their local dominance, forging closer
working relationships with colonial authorities in the process.6 The most
powerful of these, such as the Elder Dempster shipping conglomerate
founded by Sir Alfred Jones between 1884 and 1891, retained monopoly
rights, whether for mineral extraction and fuel provision, carriage and
shipping, or banking and credit facilities.7 The residual strength of these
multi-layered businesses meant that the Sierra Leonean and Nigerian
colonial police forces became defenders of overlapping state and cor-
porate interest. Police units were not the servants of business, but, more
modestly, a growing part of their work was to guard those industries on
which these colonies’ commercial value to Britain depended.
Sierra Leone: mineral policing

The protectorate and colony of Sierra Leone was no model of imper-
ial development. Despite possessing an impressive deep-water harbour
in Freetown, until the early 1920s Sierra Leone remained fairly typ-
ical of West African colonies shown in Map 10.1, whose attractions
for British bank investors, trading companies and industrial consortia
lay in a narrow range of exportable agricultural commodities: in this
case, palm oil, palm kernels, kola nuts and timber.8 By other stand-
ards, however, it stood apart. One was its centuries-long attachment
to Britain, not unique among former slave settlements, but distinctive
even so. Another was its importance both as a coaling station for steam-
ers on passage to and from the Cape and as a hub of intra-West African
trade.9 More unusual was the status of its capital, Freetown, as an early
experiment in African colonization by ‘free blacks’ from London, loyal-
ist African-Americans from Nova Scotia, Maroons from Jamaica and,
from 1807, freed slaves whose trans-Atlantic passage westward from
Africa was intercepted by ships of Britain’s anti-slavery squadron.10
Commercial networks – local and international – were always
c ritical to Freetown’s survival as a market centre.11 Perhaps most
striking, though, was the colony’s forbidding reputation among
colonial bureaucrats, traders and military personnel. After the for-
mal imposition of colonial rule in 1896 Sierra Leone never shook
off its reputation as the epitome of the ‘white man’s grave’ in West
Africa.12 Between the wars annual colonial medical reports still gave
Map 10.1 Map of West Africa prepared for the British Bank of West Africa
prominence to mortality rates among British and African officials and

traders. These statistics revealed the persistence of exceptionally high
morbidity rates (in other words, recurrent bouts of chronic sickness),
often resulting from epidemics.13 The results did little to encourage
any influx of company staff or administrative personnel. Death rates
among sections of the wider African population were higher still.14
While Freetown expanded as an entrepôt for cash crop exports and two
railway lines were carved into the heart of the colony between 1895
and 1908, the interior of this small territory of less than 28,000 square
miles remained neglected and feared by British colonists.15
Finding white police officers to supervise locally raised cadres in
Sierra Leone’s uplands proved impossible in the late Victorian era of the
Sierra Leone protectorate and extremely difficult thereafter. Yet British
administrators considered this an essential prerequisite of ‘progressive’
colonial policing. Whether due to the absence of gazetted officers or
not, police abuses were already endemic by the turn of the century.16
This stagnation was evident elsewhere. Commercial farming was still
largely controlled by trading companies that bought commodities
cheaply and sold them on at a profit without investing in new produc-
tion methods or farming technologies. The agricultural sector set the
trend: Sierra Leone suffered from chronic under-investment, under-
development and, from the Colonial Office perspective, administrative
under-achievement. Neglect remained the watchword of colonialism in
Sierra Leone until the profitability of the colony’s diamond and iron ore
fields, as well as its smaller deposits of platinum, chromium and, above
all, gold became apparent to British mining conglomerates from the late
1920s.17 For hard-pressed officials, the promise of a bonanza in mining
profits could not come too soon. The territory attracted unprecedented
commercial and governmental interest as a potentially rich resource just
as prices of agricultural exports – hitherto, the linchpin of the colony’s
budget – collapsed.18 For Sierra Leone, the depression marked an eco-
nomic watershed that seemed to herald a brighter industrial future.
The economic crisis was less significant in other respects, though.
Patterns of anti-government protest coalesced in the preceding decade.
By 1920 a Freetown branch of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) was already in operation. Popular
among the city’s African traders, Freetown’s UNIA members were
attracted by the unfettered commercial opportunities presented by
Garvey’s plan for an African-controlled shipping venture, the Black
Star Line.19 More confrontational protests emanated from Freetown’s
poorer workers. Post-war food riots and well-orchestrated railway
strikes in 1919 and 1926 demonstrated the limits to popular tolerance
of increased rice prices. Public anger was intensified by the administra-

tion’s broken promises of basic state protection against famine, long-
term unemployment and the alleged stranglehold exerted by Lebanese
traders over the local foodstuff market.20 Suppression of these strike
actions also illustrated the hand-in-glove relationship between the
colonial authorities and West Africa’s leading British-owned trading
companies, particularly the Elder Dempster consortia. Unremittingly
hostile to African trade unionism throughout the late colonial period,
Elder Dempster awarded an engraved glass bowl to Freetown’s mayor
in 1921 for his uncompromising opposition to the previous two years’
strike actions. With its fingers in so many pies – not just shipping, but
railways, fuel supply, palm oil extraction, cotton cultivation and West
African banking – Elder Dempster’s investments might be endangered
by renewed industrial strife. Company representatives made this plain
to the colonial administration. To their relief, Sierra Leone’s most suc-
cessful workers’ association, the Railway Skilled Artisans’ Union, was
outlawed following the January 1926 rail strike.21
The ban on the railway workers’ union heralded a new governmental
resolve to restrict opportunities for labour organization and collective
bargaining that would endure until colonial policy took a more reform-
ist turn in 1938. In the intervening years, police involvement in the sup-
pression of workplace unrest grew in tandem with this intolerance of
dissent among industrial labourers.22 Faced with declining opportun-
ities to register their demands once mineral extraction began in earnest,
hostility to the colonial administration among Freetown’s established
Krio elite (called Creoles at the time) and the colony’s growing popu-
lation of mineworkers quickly intensified. The former saw their status,
and that of their city, diminishing in the altered economic structure of
a mining colony.23 And this, after decades in which the cultural revival-
ism and vibrancy of Krio civil society in Freetown had posed the most
vocal challenge to colonial rule.24 The latter, mainly former peasant
smallholders and landless agricultural labourers resident in the mining
areas, contended with dreadful working conditions, low pay and little
security of tenure as employees of the mining companies. In the decade
after 1929, the working population of Sierra Leonean miners rose to an
estimated 16,506, a figure that should be treated cautiously given high
rates of absenteeism and lack of formal contracts of employment.25
Mineworkers were typically employed in small gangs as ‘tributors’.
The term connoted a job description and an entire labour system in
which groups of five to ten miners worked for a headman. He sold the
diamonds or gold they extracted to the mine’s licence-holder, usually
for less than half their market value. ‘Tributing’ conferred two advan-
tages for employers. First, reliance on headmen induced tributors to
work as hard as possible to maximize their income. Second, it relieved

the mine-owner of the problem of paying wages. In the diamond mines
especially, during the 1930s tributing expanded into a gang-master
system in which mine-owners recruited labourers through an overseer
who took a share of the profits from the sale of diamonds extracted by
the tributors under their control.26 Some tributors were former artisans
whose skilled labour was under-appreciated by their new employers;
others were local villagers who neither wanted nor needed housing in the
mine compounds. Not surprisingly, mineworkers often moved between
sites looking for a better deal.27 A by-product of the mining system, this
labour migration alarmed British officials who worried that it would
facilitate theft and illicit sale of rough diamonds and small quantities of
gold among a workforce whose labour was chronically under-valued.
These two problems – unregulated movement of labour and a black
market in precious minerals – converged in the two British industrial
corporations awarded government concessions to exploit Sierra Leone’s
minefields in 1930–4. Much was expected of them. The administration
hoped the new arrivals would transform the colony’s budgetary returns as
well as its industrial infrastructure and internal labour market. Tributing
was supposed to give way to regular wage-earning by miners working
under contract who would be housed in sanitary, purpose-built concrete
lines.28 The first of these two new ventures, the Sierra Leone Development
Company (Delco), was a Scottish-owned consortium of the Northern
Mercantile Corporation and the United Africa Company. Delco benefited
from generous concession terms. It also received the lion’s share of the pub-
lic spending invested in the colony through the Colonial Development Act
passed by Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government in 1929. In
return for this administrative largesse, the new company pledged to build
a fifty-two-mile railway from its Marampa iron ore works to the port of
Pepel, from which the ore would be shipped onward to Freetown.29 Under
its impetus, iron ore extraction soon overtook gold mining as second only
to diamonds in the hierarchy of mineral earnings from Sierra Leone. Even
so, once its preparatory construction work was completed in 1933, Delco’s
effort to exceed production targets of 500,000 tons per annum depended
as much on the ready supply of cheap local labour, supplemented by a
steady flow of migrant workers, as on easy shipment of iron ore.30 Pursued
with singular zeal, Delco’s 500,000-ton annual production target was
finally achieved in 1936, raising Sierra Leone’s production to some 10
per cent of British imported iron ore.31 Cutting labour costs presented
the obvious means to reduce the company’s shortfall in anticipated profit-
ability in the meantime. Co-option of chiefs, village headmen and district
commissioners in mine-working areas proved vital to this, enabling the
company to add or subtract workers as need arose.32
Finding it easy to replace workers, particularly unskilled labourers,

Delco spent little on decent line accommodation, medical facilities or
compensation for miners injured at work. Housing at Lunsar, where a
large part of the company’s workers were concentrated, was especially
bad, a problem ignored by the colonial administration’s Medical and
Health Department until the eve of the Second World War. Before this,
the pressure for change came from below. Workplace anger over liv-
ing conditions increased because district officers and Delco managers
allowed local chiefs to rent out huts to labourers at whatever price they
chose. Because demand for housing far exceeded supply, rents became
unaffordable. The shortage of habitable accommodation, plus the exist-
ence of a hut tax levied on individual dwellings drove poorly paid work-
ers to cram into as few huts as possible to minimize their proportion
of rental and tax payments. Never harmonious, labour relations dete-
riorated as the decade wore on. Acts of individual worker protest such
as absenteeism, swapping of miner’s identification cards and refusal to
reside in the lines was eventually supplanted by well-organized strike
actions at Marampa in June 1935 and at Pepel in January 1938.33
Instances of ‘everyday’ resistance – sufficient to register opposition
but not to incur violent reprimand – became entrenched in Sierra
Leone’s mining sector during the mid-1930s.34 And even before the
strikes, mineworkers and dockyard labourers pressed other demands
more openly. Aside from their annoyance over squalid living conditions,
miners wanted curbs on overseers’ powers, especially the practice of
flogging alleged slackers. They reiterated these claims during the strike
actions, alongside the demand for small increases in daily wage rates
(from nine pence to a shilling, demanded in both strikes). The workers’
requests were not unreasonable, nor were they the stuff of revolution; if
anything, quite the reverse. The Pepel labourers’ insistence that work-
place contracts should be legally binding on their employers exemplified
their grasp of the civic responsibility advocated by government labour
inspectors. In their concern for basic welfare and support for collective
bargaining, the mineworkers anticipated the developmental reformism
that came into vogue on the eve of the war. Yet, during both the 1936
and 1938 stoppages, police, in the shape of court messenger squadrons,
were deployed to bring the strikers to heel.35
Although the strikers’ claims went unfulfilled, in another sense their
actions achieved some success. West Africa Department officials were
shocked by the connivance between Delco managers and the district
officers who called in the police during the January 1938 strike action.
Calls from London for a new approach to labour relations in Sierra
Leone intensified in subsequent months.36 Better days ahead perhaps.
Yet the fact remained that, after the depression, colonial police were
still used to suppress industrial protests made endemic by grim working
practices and mine-owners’ short-term quest for profitability. If African
court messengers were the strong arm of British corporate interest in
the iron ore industry, police involvement in the diamond mines was of
a different order altogether.
Policing the diamond mines

With its trading company origins, Delco remained a more conventional
colonial business than the second concessionary company established
in the colony: the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a subsidiary
of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty’s London-based mining conglomerate, the
Selection Trust.37 SLST developed as an offshoot of the Consolidated
African Selection Trust (CAST), the African arm of the Selection
Trust empire.38 Diamonds were discovered in Sierra Leone by the colo-
nial geological survey during the field seasons of 1929–30 at two points
in the protectorate. The first was on the G’Bobora near Fotingaiya in
the Kono District; the second on the Kenji River, a tributary of the Moa
River, near Hangha.39
Publication of these discoveries led to prospecting by locally estab-
lished companies, but no further discoveries were made until a first
party of seven CAST mining engineers began more systematic inves-
tigations in April 1931. A month later CAST representative D. K. T.
MacLachlan met Sierra Leone’s recently arrived colonial governor, Sir
Arnold Hodson, in Freetown. MacLachlan wanted approval for the
importation of trained Gold Coast mines staff to assist the hunt for
diamonds. He was also determined to secure Exclusive Prospecting
Licences (EPLs) to halt further prospecting by potential commercial
rivals.40 Hodson was happy to oblige. Fortified by MacLachlan’s earl-
ier successes, on 1 December 1931 William Hildred, head of CAST’s
nascent Sierra Leone operations, pressed the Freetown government
to enact a Diamond Protection Ordinance, based on its Gold Coast
equivalent.41 Again, the authorities complied. This blanket legislation
instituted punishments for unauthorized prospecting, for the theft of
diamonds and for making false claims about diamond discoveries.42
Legal restriction and the policing of finds thus entered the equation
before any mine-works were constructed.
In August 1932 the Sierra Leone government also reached a prelim-
inary agreement with CAST negotiators, conferring exclusive mining
rights in exchange for a profit-sharing deal with the colonial authorities.
Colonial Office lawyers finalized a more formal accord during 1933–4
that confirmed monopoly rights for Selection Trust’s diamond opera-

tions in the territory. Similar arrangements were made between the
CAST board and the Lagos government after the August 1934 discov-
ery of Nigeria’s first diamond field in the Birnin Gwari district south
of Sokoto.43 But Sierra Leone remained CAST’s primary West African
operation in spite of optimistic projections regarding Nigeria’s dia-
mond mining potential.44 It was on this basis that the Selection Trust
decided to create a dedicated subsidiary company in the territory.45
CAST prospecting continued apace meanwhile, slowing only briefly
following a smallpox epidemic in autumn 1933.46 Formally incorpo-
rated on 20 April 1934 as a subsidiary of its larger CAST cousin, the
Sierra Leone Selection Trust secured a ninety-nine year monopoly over
diamond mining in the country.47 Colonial Office legal advisers, sen-
sitive to the exploitative connotations of the word ‘concession’, a term
redolent of turn-of-the-century trading company abuses in the Congo
Free State, adopted the more neutral descriptor ‘exclusive licence’ to
describe the agreement reached.48 Governor Hodson was less wary. He
advised a long-standing Colonial Office confidant, assistant secretary
Alex Fiddian, that only two things needed fixing: the precise boundar-
ies of the SLST mining area and ‘how we can protect the diamonds in
the country from being worked or disposed of by others’.49
Finding workers was expected to be straightforward. With tacit gov-
ernment consent, the company would reward local notables for their help
in provisioning the mines with cheap labour. This expedient clashed with
Hodson’s declared resolve to fight petty corruption among certain para-
mount chiefs accused of doing precisely the same thing.50 The Governor
was agitated by something else entirely, however. The cosy arrangements
with the SLST were threatened by the underground trade in diamonds
and, to a lesser extent, gold, much of which were sold on via Syrian and
Lebanese traders in Freetown and elsewhere. The problem of illicit deal-
ing seemed likely to be made worse by the sheer size of the SLST’s desig-
nated mining area, which covered some 1,500 square miles in the eastern
part of the colony’s Southern Province, much of it adjacent to the frontiers
with French Guinea and Liberia. SLST managers were quick to turn the
associated problems of diamond smuggling and the SLST’s extensive min-
ing zone to their advantage in talks with the government. For one thing,
it strengthened their claim for an Exclusive Prospecting Licence (EPL)
that would exclude all competition from the Southern Province region.
For another, it suggested that intensive, South African-style policing of
mining areas and the mineworkers coming and going within them was
vital to SLST operations.51 Exaggerating the problem of illicit trading and
the inadequacy of existing police resources to cope with it made the case
for more rigorous policing appear self-evident.52 SLST manager William

Hildred conjured up a picture of an otherwise efficient business crip-
pled by a combination of diamond thefts and government inertia. On 24
September 1934 he fired off a letter to the Southern Province commis-
sioner that captured this image of frustrated dynamism:
The point is that I can do nothing at present without contravening the Law; but if
a ‘round-up’ at Panguma [the alleged centre of illicit trading, remote from SLST
operations] could be made I am pretty certain that it would produce something
very interesting. The Law Officers do not appear to be in any hurry to be help-
ful in any of the matters now in their hands: 1. our local powers of search, 2. the
E.P.L. over the Southern Province, and 3. our agreement with Government. In
the meantime, I[llicit] D[iamond] B[uying] is a flourishing business.53
Hildred was being economical with the truth. It soon transpired
that very few rough diamonds had yet been sold in Freetown and that
the city’s court messenger force maintained a close watch over sus-
pect t raders.54 Although its designated mining area was unquestion-
ably large, in practice SLST operations were initially confined to two
mine-works only twenty-five miles apart. The irony was that this dense
concentration of mining in a particular locale encouraged the colonial
administration and CAST’s senior managers to believe that the bat-
tle against underhand selling could be engaged and won.55 Smuggling,
then, was not quite the scourge presented by mine-owners or feared by
the Governor. But the effort to prevent its escalation underpinned the
transformation of Sierra Leone’s police force in the 1930s. Not quite
the familiar story of colonial police as agents of labour discipline, the
consolidation of a mines protection force was driven less by the colonial
requirement to sustain labour supply and worker productivity than by
inflated anxiety over profits lost through a supposedly burgeoning black
market in precious minerals.
The idea of a mines protection force was first discussed in the weeks
preceding SLST’s incorporation in the spring of 1934. G. R. Nicolaus,
manager of the Consolidated African Selection Trust, mooted the idea
with Sierra Leone’s colonial secretary, C. E. Cookson, and the Southern
Province commissioner, A. H. Stocks. Both officials responded positively,
perhaps worn down by Hildred’s haranguing about the smuggling prob-
lem. More to the point, CAST was willing to pay for the envisaged force of
between fifty and seventy-five men.56 Nicolaus, Cookson and Stocks fur-
ther agreed that the constitutional peculiarities of Sierra Leone’s divided
status as part protectorate and part colony, plus the ethnic mix of existing
police units throughout the territory made a dedicated force of mines
police essential. Although the mining area was in the colony where sep-
arate police units existed, the larger and better-funded protectorate force
of court messengers was largely comprised of ex-servicemen recruited

principally from the Kono, Kissi and Mendi tribes in whose territories
the mines were situated. Moreover, only with the passage of an enabling
act in December 1936 was the police force of Sierra Leone colony per-
mitted to serve in the adjacent protectorate. The Ordinance also gave
the Governor discretionary power to place such detachments under the
orders of a district commissioner or assistant commissioner of court mes-
sengers, particularly in the case of civil disturbances. But in early 1934
these administrative changes were still more than two years away, and
CAST wanted immediate action.57
Aware of Selection Trust expectations, Nicolaus pushed for a discreet
mines protection police of fifty men supervised by an experienced white
police officer seconded from the Gold Coast and paid a generous annual
salary of up to £1,000. Two African police personnel trained in finger-
print techniques and criminal investigation work were also brought in
alongside the new force commander, Captain C. E. Wingrove.58 By 10
May 1934 both Governor Hodson and his deputy, Acting Governor
G. A. S. Northcote, had come out in favour of a dedicated mines police.59
The new force operated separately from existing court messengers and,
although an adjunct of the Sierra Leone colonial police, was perman-
ently seconded to the SLST, whose parent company, CAST, paid for
the mines protection force in its entirety.60
The next step was to codify force duties. According to SLST staff, the
Selection Trust’s Roan Antelope mines on Northern Rhodesia’s cop-
per-belt, as well as the larger De Beers diamond mining compounds in
Portuguese Angola and South Africa offered suitable precedents.61 On
3 November De Beers forwarded details of the labour regime and anti-
smuggling measures within its South African and Angolan diamond
mines.62 The use of trucks and motorized conveyers above head height
minimized the opportunities for workers to steal rough diamonds dur-
ing the initial sorting processes after excavation. Daily searches, close
surveillance of mineworkers by vetted white employees and, above all,
so-called ‘close compounding’ of workers for up to three months were
also recommended. Entry and exit to mining areas was carefully moni-
tored and employees were not advised ahead of time of rest days or
dismissal dates to prevent them from collecting any stones in antici-
pation of departure. SLST planned to do the same. Mineworkers,
once on site, would be denied freedom of movement, confined to com-
pany premises day and night.63 Endorsed by the Selection Trust dir-
ectors, these recommendations were forwarded to Governor Hodson,
Secretary Cookson and Captain Wingrove in early February 1935 as
part of wider SLST proposals for Draconian legislation to enforce strict
labour control in its compounds.64 Following the spirit of De Beers’

practices in Angola, mines protection units split their time between
patrolling the mining areas, tracking down illicit sales and preventive
work, including the finger-printing of all miners and regular, some-
times intimate, body searches when workers came off shift.65 The
authorities in Freetown were less concerned about the treatment of the
workforce than about the precise delimitation of the SLST’s mining
zone.66 Once Hildred provided assurances that compounds would be
fenced off and restricted areas clearly marked, Hodson’s replacement
as Governor, Sir Henry Moore signed off an amendment to the 1927
Minerals Ordinance (a catch-all law covering mining exploration) that
gave legal sanction to SLST’s sweeping powers over its workers.67
The political implications of the force’s creation were crystal clear
even if the financial and working arrangements of the mines protection
force were unusual. The largest, best equipped and generously funded
element of the Sierra Leone police was suborned to a private company,
serving its interests to the exclusion of other duties. Nervous Colonial
Office clerks did their best to gloss over these arrangements, insist-
ing that, while the new force was in the pay of CAST, it was legally
responsible to the Governor in Freetown, to whom the force com-
mander would submit periodic reports. But there was no disguising
the real situation. Much to Colonial Office disappointment, the Home
Office legal adviser could find no equivalent British precedent on which
they could fall back. While British county constabulary police were
occasionally seconded to protect commercial property, it was incon-
ceivable that they should do so to the exclusion of all other policing
duties. Desperate to find some useful analogy, West Africa Department
clerks scoured the policing records of other dependencies. They came
up with the case of sugar estate owners in the South American colony
of British Guiana who paid for special police protection.68 Considering
this too insubstantial a cover, the Colonial Office and Moore’s deputy,
Acting Governor Rowland in Freetown opted instead for subterfuge.
First, the mines protection force’s wage costs would be paid by the colo-
nial government, the sum then quietly reimbursed to the authorities
by CAST. Second, on 5 December 1934 the force was expanded from
the diamond fields to cover gold mining areas as well. Smuggling, they
noted, transcended industry boundaries, and frequently involved the
same people. Gold mining companies, particularly the Sierra Leone
Goldfield Limited and Maroc Gold Mining, were asked to pay £2,000
of the estimated £5,000 annual cost of a joint ‘Mobile Mines Force’ to
protect both industries.69 These payments – or, rather, repayments to
the Freetown government – were to remain suitably discreet. Evidently,
different rules applied for police protection in the empire.70
From its December 1934 inception until the outbreak of war, the
Mobile Mines Force gradually expanded, becoming the dominant elem-
ent of the police in the colony of Sierra Leone. Its strength contrasted
with the dilapidation of the colony’s police force, which included only
four full-time officers among its total effectives in Freetown and its hin-
terland.71 Indeed, as the Mobile Mines Force took shape, the Colonial
Office was debating whether to retrench the Freetown police force even
further.72 Meanwhile, corporate financing for the Mines Force became
more important as its costs repeatedly overran, thanks, in large part, to
the greater incidence of gold and diamond smuggling as production lev-
els increased.73 The Colonial Office retained control in three areas. The
assistant district commissioner of Southern Province oversaw policing
in the mine zones. The Freetown authorities deputized court mes-
sengers to the ‘Diamond Protection Force’ element. And the second-
ment of Captain Wingrove, the force commander, from the Gold Coast
police, was conducted with Colonial Office approval.74
These were important caveats, but the central issue was that a colonial
police force had been specially created to serve business and not pub-
lic interest. The ever-restless West Africa Department knew as much
and still wrestled with the principles at stake. They conflated corporate
interest in preventing loss of earnings through smuggling with govern-
ment interest in maximizing export revenue from the mining industry.
And officials stressed that crime was crime. It was easily recognizable
as such and deserved punishment whatever the agency that dealt with
it. Thefts and assaults had to be tackled, whether by official policemen
or something resembling a private security firm. Lastly, it was pointed
out that the existence of a mines protection force freed up court mes-
sengers and white colonial police officers to pursue other matters.75
There was an alternative interpretation. Set against the welcome release
of police resources made possible by the Mobile Mines Force was the
uncomfortable fact that Sierra Leone’s prisons quickly filled with mine-
workers, traders and other intermediaries arrested by mines protection
personnel. The costs of their incarceration not only fell upon the colo-
nial state but advertised the relative ineffectiveness of the wider police
force and the existing Circuit Courts in apprehending and trying law-
breakers.76 In a confidential July 1935 letter to Alex Fiddian, by now the
West Africa Department’s moving force, Governor Moore acknowledged
that the Circuit Courts’ inefficiency, typified by the leniency of recent
sentences, undermined the standing of the colonial judiciary. Wanting
stronger action, mining company staff inevitably took matters into their
own hands. This made the Governor uneasy. Like the mine managers,
district commissioners were also losing confidence in Circuit Courts and
were instead trying more and more criminal cases themselves. These
trends were bound to react on wider native opinion. Moore summed up

the problem: ‘What … has disturbed me is that quite apart from the spe-
cial question of mining sentences or Creole opinion, the Administrative
Service in the protectorate appears to be becoming increasingly distrust-
ful of the Circuit Court, and instead of the Circuit Court bringing justice
to the doors of the people, it is functioning less and less.’77
The Freetown government might sound the alarm about blurring of
boundaries between civil administrative, judicial and corporate respon-
sibility, but Colonial Office staff suspected darker designs. In highlight-
ing the need for the Circuit Courts to restore lost prestige by imposing
harsher sentences for theft and other property crime, the new Governor
appeared to be siding with the mining companies and provincial admin-
istrators insensitive to local opinion. Viewed from Whitehall, it looked as
if Moore wanted Kenya-style justice – rigorous sentencing of all crimes
against Europeans or their possessions – regardless of the social conse-
quences.78 Still unacknowledged, however, was that the Mobile Mines
Force was not simply a tool to suppress thefts and smuggling but a means
to enforce social control in the diamond and gold mines of Sierra Leone.
More fundamental than the question of legal authority was that of colo-
nial power. As matters stood, the Mobile Mines Force tracked down
workers who fled and enforced discipline in the lines. Its presence as
reinforcement to the regular police also prevented industrial stoppages
comparable to those experienced in the nearby iron ore mines.79
The force also accrued wider powers as a tax collection agency. A
1933 Protectorate Ordinance made mining managers liable for collect-
ing the hut tax – effectively a poll tax – from all occupants of company
housing. This legislation was extended in 1937 to encompass all male
employees ‘of marriageable age’ living in company property.80 SLST
managers delegated hut tax work to the Mobile Mines Force while
turning a blind eye to the practice of workers congregating in one line
block to make a single collective tax payment for that property. In mid-
November 1939 the Freetown government even conceded that this ruse
could continue – for now, provided that a flat hut tax payment for each
line block at SLST’s largest mining compound at Yengama was paid
on time.81 Having allowed their workers to pay a lower individual hut
tax, managers were in a stronger bargaining position when marginal
increases to wage rates came up for review. Simply put, the creation of a
dedicated mines police helped the mining companies keep wages down
and productivity high throughout the late 1930s. The colonial govern-
ment was complicit in this process, but never controlled it, at least until
thoughts of reform, including the establishment of a labour inspectorate
in the mining sector, once more altered the balance of power between
business and state on the eve of the Second World War.
Did any of this matter, except, of course, for those directly involved?
Sierra Leone was small, its colonial budget tiny. It also ranked among
that group of mineral producers, including Northern Rhodesia and
Malaya, less severely affected by the economic crisis. Using price con-
trol schemes and restrictions on output, these colonies kept the ratio
between government debt and export revenue under control. In January
1939, reviewing Sierra Leone’s economic fortunes over the preceding
decade, one West Africa Department official explained the position:
Sierra Leone, like a number of the poorer colonies, has for many years strug-
gled along the borderline of solvency, with sometimes a small deficit and some-
times a small surplus, but never, until recently, with ever a penny to spare. To
meet the slump which began in 1929, a belt which was always rather strained
had to be tightened to the limit, and at the end of 1934 the territory was left
with only £100,000 to its credit, and with no reserves.
In 1935, however, there began what was for Sierra Leone a period of perhaps
unprecedented prosperity. The rise in the price of agricultural products coin-
cided with the exploitation of the mineral deposits of the protectorate, so that,
at the end of 1937, Sierra Leone found itself with a cash balance, investments
and reserves totalling approximately £680,000, and Government was able to
look forward to the provision of those social services and development works
of which the territory stands so urgently in need. By that time, unfortunately,
the peak of prosperity was in the past, and 1938 saw a continuing recession. In
the event, after having provided for small increases in expenditure on agricul-
ture, education, medical and health facilities and for a considerable increase in
expenditure on Extraordinary Public Works, it is anticipated that revenue and
expenditure in 1938 will more or less balance.82
As these comments indicate, the sums involved for Sierra Leone were
comparatively small. The colony emerged from depression in relatively
rude budgetary health as the figures below indicate:
YEAR REVENUE (£) EXPENDITURE BALANCE
1934 598,839 603,208 −4,369

1935 678,978 585,574 +93,404
1936 969,668 879,370 +90,298
1937 1,025,709 919,266 +106,443
1938
(revised est.) 869,250 947,125 −77,875
1939
(estimate) 809,438 939,564 −130,126
Source: TNA, CO 267/664/2, despatch 728, 30 November 1938, enclosure IV, memo-
randum on the Sierra Leone estimates, year ending 31 December 1939. The relatively
large predicted deficit for 1939 arose from changes in Colonial Office accounting rules,
which meant that £68,500, expended in previous years and during the current year on
stores and loans, would be charged to expenditure.
Alongside these economic indicators is the fact that the mines police
never numbered more than one hundred men before 1940. Are we deal-
ing, then, merely with small-scale operations in a backwater colony, rele-
vant to its people certainly, but without broader significance? An answer
perhaps lies in reversing the lens through which these facts are viewed.
In so small a territory, the mine protection force stood out as the lar-
gest, most repressive element of the colonial security apparatus. It was,
moreover, the paucity of the colony’s budget – less than £129,000 in
house tax and customs revenue from the entire Southern Province in the
trough of depression in 1932, for instance – that lent mining companies
the opportunity to wield decisive influence in the allocation of police
resources.83 For the workforce in Sierra Leone’s mining industry, the
presence of armed police overseers employed by the companies involved
with governmental approval confirmed several inextricable connections:
between state and industry, between corporations and taxes, between
colonialism and poverty in an economy geared to the supply of cheap
wage labour.84 By late 1936 the mining areas were even segregated into
a special administrative region, designated Tonkolili District, whose rai-
son d’être was to facilitate the provision and regulation of mineworkers
in conjunction with the diamond protection force.85
The adverse consequences of this prioritization were quickly felt.
Governor Moore conceded, after touring the mining areas in February
1937, that company demands for more workers had caused an agri-
cultural labour shortage. Rice cultivation declined, resulting in acute
shortages of Sierra Leone’s staple foodstuff crop. SLST’s senior man-
ager, W. D. Davidson acknowledged the problem, but viewed it differ-
ently. He was concerned that mineworkers might return to farming in
large numbers, whether to feed their families or to grow palm kernels
which were then trading at a high price. Moreover, alongside its pro-
vision of line accommodation and basic medical facilities, an assured
daily rice ration helped the company justify a low wage rate of 8 to 9d
per day. This figure was lower than that paid to workers in the gold
mining sector and was less than farmers might earn through the sale
of palm kernels.86 SLST was therefore determined to acquire rice sup-
plies in bulk in order to keep its workers in situ. This course of action
required government consent owing to the introduction of price con-
trols on Freetown’s rice market. SLST’s plan to buy fifty tons of rice
threatened to distort the market and, more serious, denude the cap-
ital’s population of essential food.87 Here, too, Governor Moore proved
receptive to SLST’s arguments. Eager to safeguard export revenues,
both sides ruled out any limits on the recruitment of men and boys to
work in the mines. Moore instructed the Director of Agriculture to
order in stockpiles of rice from neighbouring territories instead.88 As in

policing, so in matters of wider political economy: mining exports held
absolute priority. Faced with these pressures, SLST managers insisted
that intrusive policing on the South African model remained vital in
maintaining productivity and preventing thefts.89 The coercive labour
control characteristic of Sierra Leone’s diamond and gold mines in the
1930s was, in this sense, consistent with the harsh regulatory regimes
of the South African Rand or the Northern Rhodesian copper-belt; of a
piece with the policing of mineworkers across British Africa.90
So central were mining profits to Sierra Leone that they transformed
the territory’s economic fortunes over the course of the 1930s. The
combined income of its Gold Coast and Sierra Leone operations under-
pinned the healthy net returns posted by CAST from 1933 to 1940.
SLST’s contribution peaked in 1937, after which falling global demand
led the Selection Trust to cut back diamond production in the following
year.91 It was no coincidence that, after running deficits throughout the
depression years, the government recorded net surpluses of between
£93,404 and £106,443 from 1935 to 1937. The Freetown authorities
repaid outstanding government loans in 1938 and 1939, secure in the
knowledge that the profits tax from the diamond industry alone would
yield at least £147,000. With state spending on the police force and the
colony’s prisons in 1938 and 1939 running at an average of £22,000
and £9,000 respectively, long-term investment in the security of the
mining industry was paying rich dividends as Sierra Leone entered the
Second World War.92
Confronting these statistics, Colonial Office bureaucrats found it
hard not to excuse labour coercion in the mining industry as a short-
term necessity that would make colonial development a tangible reality
in the longer term. An additional benefit from the colonial govern-
ment’s perspective was to alter the balance of wealth generation within
Sierra Leone away from the trading companies whose long-standing
influence several colonial officials found overbearing. Mining’s grow-
ing importance also weighed heavily in the scales of political power,
diminishing the relative economic influence of the more established
colony, and Freetown’s irksome Krio at its heart. Conversely, because
of the mining zones, the protectorate’s poor interior became central to
government planning.
The rise of the Sierra Leone section of the West African Youth League
under Isaac Wallace-Johnson was thus closely tied to efforts among
Freetown’s leading Krios and its industrial labour force to recover lost
influence with government.93 Wallace-Johnson was a Sierra Leonean
by birth and a cosmopolitan leftist agitator. Along with his friend Jomo
Kenyatta, he studied at Moscow’s Kutvu Institute, better known as the

University of the Toilers of the East. But Wallace-Johnson’s return to
Freetown was circumstantial. It followed his expulsion from Nigeria
and the Gold Coast for organizing an African Workers’ Union in the
former and defying the anti-sedition legislation of the latter.94 The
sequence of removals began when police raided his Lagos office in
October 1933, seizing diaries, notebooks and other ‘seditious material’.
Neither the police nor the Lagos government pressed for any prosecu-
tion: they wanted to induce Wallace-Johnson into leaving Nigeria rather
than to incarcerate him. Powerful opposition voices in Britain, includ-
ing the TUC, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the League against
Imperialism regarded Wallace-Johnson as a weathervane in colonial
government treatment of West African trade unionism. So police, mag-
istrates and colonial officials shunted him from one territory to the next
to avoid criticism of their labour policies.95 All were convinced of his
true ideological colours.
By 1937 Wallace-Johnson was loathed by British colonial authorities
throughout West Africa, his proudest creation, the West African Youth
League, considered little more than a communist front organization.
Official suspicions deepened in August 1938 when Wallace-Johnson
leaked details of Governor Sir Douglas Jardine’s correspondence with
the Youth League leadership regarding local labour conditions.96 In
the Governor’s words, Wallace-Johnson’s movement had crossed the
Rubicon from legitimate defence of workers’ rights to sponsorship of
sedition.97 Police repression became inevitable. There were more prac-
tical aspects to this decision, too. The Youth League seemed intent
on loosening the foundations of Sierra Leone’s colonial economy. Its
opposition to administration plans to curb village headmen’s power
(in order to make hut tax collection more efficient) threatened a key
pillar of the colonial revenue system. Its attack on mining company
practices threatened the income stream from the protectorate’s mineral
exports.98
Mining profits and popular protest collided again on the eve of war.
In January 1939 the official inquiry into the Youth League’s earlier leak-
age of Jardine’s correspondence about abysmal living conditions in the
diamond mines released its findings. Far from discrediting Wallace-
Johnson, as the Governor had hoped, the inquiry echoed Youth League
concerns. It highlighted the dreadful working conditions in the dia-
mond industry and the unsavoury connection between government and
business in extracting taxes from the workforce. As we have seen, the
colonial administration delegated tax collection to SLST managers who
thereby avoided closer oversight of mining compounds by the colony’s
labour inspectorate. Moreover, housing conditions in mine compounds
were worsened by the chronic overcrowding that resulted from workers’

tendency to congregate under one roof to escape payment of separate
hut taxes for each residence inhabited.99 This was grist to the mill of a
movement that saw increasing government stringency in hut tax collec-
tion as affirmation that the rhetoric of development masked the ruthless
exploitation of Sierra Leoneans as labourers and tax-payers.100
A further strike at the Delco iron mines at Marampa and Lunsar
in April and May 1939 proved the point. Confidential military intelli-
gence about the dispute’s causes pointed to endemic workplace abuses
and chronically low wages paid by a company derisively described as
‘typical Clydeside employers’. Nonetheless, the Freetown government,
suspecting Youth League involvement in the stoppages, transferred a
company of Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF) troops from
the capital to coerce the strikers back to work.101 Vigorous repression
was underwritten during the final pre-war summer session of Sierra
Leone’s Legislative Council. It was then that what came to be popu-
larly known as ‘the Four Ordinances’ were passed. They built upon
a 31 January government proclamation that imposed sterner penalties
for civil disorder.102 A combination of new legislation and a codifica-
tion of other, existing legal provisions, the four ordinances prescribed
harsher punishments for sedition, incitement to riot and the publica-
tion or distribution of anti-colonial material.103 Policing of anti-colonial
opposition and the protection of profits in the mining areas were fused
into a single security strategy. What was already clear in fact was now
enshrined in law. Sierra Leone’s policing was inseparable from the
harsh labour regime of Sierra Leone’s mining industry as the territory
entered the Second World War.104
Conclusion
Sierra Leone was a small part of the British Empire. But the transform-
ation in the composition and activities of its police forces once com-
mercial mining took off illustrated much bigger problems of colonial
policing. The boundaries between state responsibility and corporate
interest could become blurred where a single industry dominated a
colonial economy and determined the export revenues drawn from it.105
Such was the case in Sierra Leone. This was less a matter of collusion
between colonial officials and company managers than a shared under-
standing of their mutual dependence.106 Depression conditions spurred
the marriage of convenience between the Sierra Leone administration
and the territory’s mining consortia. The prospect that collapsing agri-
cultural prices might be offset by the exploitation of mineral deposits
was understandably hard to ignore. Administrators in Freetown and
London recognized that mining investment was vital to see the colony
through the economic crisis. State backing was equally pivotal to facili-
tate mining operations on a large scale. When mining company suitors
sought preferential concession rights they found a receptive audience at
Government House. The need to sustain a cheap labour supply in the
minefields brought Sierra Leone’s police force into the equation. In the
event, both sides could agree that a discrete Mines Protection Force,
publicly appointed, but, in large part, privately funded should be part
of the dowry that the SLST brought to the wedding.
Securing Sierra Leone’s minefields, monitoring their workforce and
inhibiting black market trading occasioned more police work than any-
thing else during the 1930s, despite the ferment of proto-nationalist
opposition in Freetown. Other factors contributed to this growing
imbalance. Foremost among them was the arcane administrative div-
ision between Sierra Leone’s two territorial components – protector-
ate and colony. This meant that the Freetown police was technically
distinct from the court messengers and mines protection force in the
interior of the territory. Yet, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter,
administrative reorganization was highly contentious and was increas-
ingly bound up with the anti-colonial opinions articulated by the West
African Youth League among others. The fact remained that policing
in Sierra Leone was heavily skewed towards the interests of the mining
companies.
Only belatedly did Governor Jardine focus on Sierra Leone’s anom-
alous administrative structure to rectify things. Writing to Colonial
Secretary Malcolm MacDonald on 21 October 1939, Jardine observed:
On my arrival in Sierra Leone … it was generally appreciated that the chan-
ging conditions of the Protectorate, the tendency towards industrialisation in
the mining areas, and the increased sophistication of the natives in the lar-
ger towns were all combining to demand an increased standard of efficiency
in police work – a standard which the Court Messenger Force under present
conditions cannot hope to attain … I propose to move towards amalgamation
by a series of steps, the first of which is the establishment of a training depot at
which both recruits and members of the Force will receive a thorough training
in the detection of crime, in the protection of life and property in time of civil
disturbance, with particular reference to strike duties.107
True to his word, the Governor moved swiftly. The court messenger ser-
vice and colony police were incorporated into a single territory-wide police
force immediately after war broke out in autumn 1939. If only by implica-
tion, the size and role of the Mines Protection Force was bound to change
as the amalgamation took effect. It was the end of an era, one dominated
by the fallout from the depression. Policing in Sierra Leone would no
longer be suborned to the mining sector in quite the same way.108
11 Policing and politics in Nigeria: The political
economy of indirect rule, 1929–39
Africa’s most populous territory, Nigeria held over thirteen million

inhabitants within the nebulous borders optimistically delineated
by the British between 1893 and 1906.1 A far cry from tiny Sierra
Leone, Nigeria was formally unified only in 1914. The colony quickly
emerged as the proving ground for indirect rule practices, more accur-
ately described as ‘chieftaincy politics’. Indirect rule – a confusing,
sometimes contradictory accretion of local arrangements – took shape
before and after the First World War. Local ‘native administrations’
proliferated under the aegis of Nigeria’s most influential Governor,
Lord Frederick Lugard.2 Chieftaincy politics were unevenly practised;
a reflection of the ad hoc, regional variations in indirect rule and the
inevitable jurisdictional conflicts it produced.3
From its inception colonial Nigeria was bifurcated administratively,
culturally and economically between North and South. The British
political presence was stronger in the commercial heartland of Lagos
colony and the Oil Rivers Protectorate (renamed the Niger Coast
Protectorate in 1893), and, in 1906, these territories were merged into a
single regional grouping of ‘Southern Nigeria’. Colonial incursion into
the northern, predominantly Muslim interior was messier; incremental
and necessarily partial. Tellingly, the British government at first opted
out of the process. In 1886 it assigned nominal control over admin-
istration and policing to Sir George Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger
Company in return for which the company gained de facto monopoly con-
trol over commercial development in the Nigerian interior.4 Although
this smacked of Indian precedent, on closer inspection the Royal Niger
Company bore little comparison with its East India Company fore-
bear. It lacked the expertise, the administrative cadres and the finan-
cial wherewithal to impose effective dominion over Nigeria’s northern
peoples.5 In 1900, its royal charter was revoked, paving the way for a
decade of violent British land grabbing that culminated in a series of
deals with local emirates to secure their acquiescence in Britain’s ultim-
ate economic and strategic control.6
277
N I G E R Lake
Chad
Sokoto Nguru
Katsina
R.
Ni
Gusau
ge
Kano
r
Maiduguri
Bama
Zaria NORTHERN
Y
Kontagora
ME
CAMEROONS
KADUNA Bauchi (U.K. mandate)
DAHO
NORTHERN Gombe Mubi

Minna Jos
Jebba REGION
te)
Bida Yola
da
R.
an
Ilorin Ni
M
g er
ch
en
Oyo Lokoja NORTHERN
(Fr
Ife Makurdi CAMEROONS
NS
IBADAN Akure (U.K. mandate)
WESTERN
O
Abeokuta
O
Ijebu-Ode
REGION
ER
ENUGU Ogoja
Benin Onitsha
M
LAGOS
EASTERN
CA
Bamenda
Warri Umuahla
Owerri REGION SOUTHERN Federal capital
Aba Calabar CAMEROONS
Port (U.K. mandate) Regional capital
Harcourt
International boundary
BUEA Regional boundary
Victoria 0 100 200 300 km
G u l f o f G u i n e a
0 50 100 150 200 miles
Map 11.1 Colonial Nigeria
By the 1920s Nigeria was ostensibly pacified and neatly subdivided

into Northern and Southern Provinces, each with a British Resident,
plus the smaller hinterland of Lagos colony.7 Its administrative struc-
ture, although reconfigured on occasion, retained this essential north–
south split thereafter (see Map 11.1). This did not represent total
colonial victory; rather, Lugard’s system of Nigerian indirect rule origi-
nated in recognition of two things. One was British inability to impose
political dominance without elite co-option and the assistance of local
intermediaries.8 The other was the constant need to keep administra-
tive costs down in order to maximize the revenue from trade. Colonial
policing over subsequent years would illustrate each of these limita-
tions. Residents and District Officers performed more administrative
tasks in the south. Their counterparts in the north trod more warily,
notionally acting in an advisory capacity to local emirates and chief-
doms. The entire system was informed by a public school ethos of team
spirit, masculine endeavour and making do.9 Nigeria’s police forces
Policing and politics in Nigeria 279
followed a similar pattern. Their intervention in matters of crime pre-

vention and social control was less restrained in the Southern Provinces
than in their Northern equivalents.10 This chapter traces these regional
differences in Nigerian policing, tying them to inter-war administrative
changes and new social conflicts reflective of the political economy of
Britain’s largest West African colony.
Governing Nigeria
Developed in response to the colonial state’s inadequate political reach
and even more limited tax and loan-raising powers, indirect rule ceded
considerable local authority to those African intermediaries prepared,
as recent scholarship has noted, to enter the ‘bargain of collaboration’.
The argument runs thus: ‘Africans in the lower ranks of the colonial
bureaucracy often held positions that bestowed little official authority,
but in practice the occupants of these positions functioned, somewhat
paradoxically, as the hidden linchpins of colonial rule. African colo-
nial employees bridged the linguistic and cultural gaps that separated
European colonial officials from subject populations by managing the
collection and distribution of information, labor, and funds.’11 Martin
Klein and Fred Cooper, two of the sharpest analysts of colonial West
Africa, have also pointed to shifts in policy priorities early in the inter-
war period. As Klein comments, ‘With few European administrators
and few resources, European ardour to remake Africans into the wage
laborers envisioned in Europe waned in the 1920s. Meanwhile, “colonial
officials,” Cooper argues, “were convincing themselves that their policy
should be not to ‘civilize’ Africans, but to conserve African societies in
a colonizer’s image of sanitized tradition, slowly and selectively being
led toward evolution, while the empire profited from peasants’ crop
production or the output of mines and settler farms”.’12
Also critical here is Terence Ranger’s insight that indirect rule built
upon what colonial officials thought an ideal pre-colonial politics could –
or should – have been like. Administrators’ assessments of decision-
making processes, of cultural, legal and titular rights, represented the
invention of a usable pre-colonial past. Colonial governments thereby
harnessed ‘the invention of tradition’ to serve the needs of imperial
administrators, traditional elites and other sections of the local com-
munity that could derive advantage from the administrative hierarch-
ies thus created.13 Finally, we should take historian of Ghana, Richard
Rathbone’s admonition to heart: chieftaincy politics, he argues, can-
not be reduced to mere co-option; it was a significant political force
in its own right, the essence of government, of fiscal obligation and of
legal arbitration for most rural-dwelling Africans.14 The entire system

necessarily favoured those it privileged and marginalized those that it
did not.15 But indirect rule proceeded at differing rates and to vary-
ing extents that reflected the duration and form of the British colonial
presence in any particular locale. Thus, for example, the adaptation
of land holding and succession rights in the so-called ‘native state’ of
the southern Gold Coast looked very different to the forms of indir-
ect rule applied in Nigeria where the British presence was more recent
and unstable.16 Yet, in both colonies, as in other parts of British black
Africa, colonial officials defined the processes involved similarly: as
adaptive administration governed by respect for local competencies and
‘customary law’.17
Colin Newbury takes this point further, describing the system of
patron-client relations in Northern Nigeria under Lugard thus:
[Political] officers adopted a graded system throughout the northern prov-
inces – a kind of league table of competence and reliability that classified emir-
ates, emirate courts, and, not least, the political officers themselves according
to their experience … Accordingly, too, the role of political officers as advis-
ers, supervisors, and rulers in the hierarchy varied according to the ways in
which provincial emirs were judged as administrators and to the degree of
political organization in terms of councils, official posts and hereditary offices,
and district headmen … Nevertheless, gazetting ‘Native Authorities’ and their
employees established a new legitimacy with prescribed clientage and rules for
tax-collecting through fief holders.18
Nigeria, then, exemplified chieftaincy politics or indirect rule in action.
At the same time its idiosyncrasies became manifest as this politics
played out in the early twentieth century.
Turn-of-the-century investment impelled by Joseph Chamberlain’s
determination as Colonial Secretary to develop the economies of
Britain’s tropical colonies began to transform Nigeria’s infrastruc-
ture. By 1914 railway building was opening the Nigerian interior
to new forms of export agriculture and the importation of British
manufactured goods.19 On the back of these innovations, the value
of Nigeria’s exports more than tripled, rising from £1,887,000 in
1900 to £6,799,000 in 1913.20 Most colonial government income
derived from customs revenue, so heightened trade boosted the colo-
nial Treasury and facilitated spending on basic services. Additional
government borrowing from the City of London to finance larger,
longer-term projects also became easier.21 But behind this apparently
virtuous economic circle lay the profound social disruption caused by
the spread of commercialized farming, waged labour and imposition
of a colonial currency.
These trends continued in 1920s Nigeria. Focusing on labour inten-

sive groundnut farming and open-cast tin mining in Northern Nigeria,
Bob Shenton and Bill Freund identified this process as a transition to
‘peripheral capitalism’. Compelled to pay monetary taxes and requir-
ing cash for day-to-day transactions, Nigerians became adjuncts of an
export-oriented wage economy, whether as clerks, traders, artisans,
farmers or industrial workers.22 In some sectors the process was not
organic and gradual but organized and violent. The mining industry
exemplified this more abrupt transition. Northern Nigeria’s Jos Plateau
was, for instance, transformed through a highly coercive system that
combined population removal with forced labour to create a profitable
tin mining centre that dominated the local economy. Following the
indirect rule pattern, northern emirs were co-opted into labour recruit-
ment, tax collection and policing.23
For their part, mine-owners in the Nigerian Chamber of Mines
recognized that an increasing colonial tax burden helped ensure an
expanding labour supply even when real wages fell. Their representa-
tives lobbied insistently for tax increases on ‘the pagan’ that would com-
pel more Nigerians to work in the mines for longer periods.24 It would
be wrong, though, to imagine that the colonial administration colluded
with influential export producers. One consequence of Lugard’s prefer-
ence for minimal interference with the structures of Nigeria’s civil soci-
ety, chiefly rule in particular, was the colonial government’s consistent
refusal to sanction the transition to a European-owned plantation econ-
omy dedicated to large-scale production of oil palm for foreign markets.25
Chieftaincy politics, it seems, imposed limits on British commerce.26
Determined to prevent wholesale British commercial expropriation of
Nigeria’s prime agricultural land and the creation of a mass of landless
rural labourers to which such expropriation would inevitably lead, the
colonial authorities blocked William Lever’s efforts between 1906 and
1925 to purchase the estates necessary to begin modern industrial pro-
duction of oil palm in Nigeria and Sierra Leone on a scale comparable
with the plantations of the Dutch East Indies.27
Once again, regional difference played its part. Indirect rule went
furthest in the northern emirates where tax collection, judicial affairs
and local policing were substantially delegated to native administrations
‘advised’ by a British provincial Resident. By contrast, in the south of
the country, more heavily populated and mineral rich, colonial gov-
ernment, policing included, became more intrusive.28 Lugard’s indus-
trial prohibition did not extend to mining, oil extraction and forms of
export agriculture less regimented than plantation farming. Again, the
example of the Jos Plateau is instructive. Local tin production there was
rapidly supplanted once British-owned tin mining consortia moved in

during the early 1900s. Meeting the labour requirements of larger-scale
tin mining, smelting and transportation proved a more intractable prob-
lem than driving out African producers. Still, by the end of the First
World War a combination of labour coercion, greater use of workers
brought in by rail and the imposition of higher monetary taxes to induce
local farmers to switch to paid work in the mines took effect. The tin
mining workforce rose to over 12,000. On the Jos Plateau the colonial
state married elements of indirect rule thinking – namely ‘civilization’
through monetary integration and the phased introduction of waged
employment – with the commercial demands of colonial employers, in
this case, the Naraguta Tin Mining Company and its influential chief
engineer, H. W. Laws. Official rhetoric meanwhile elided the tensions
between administrative ideals and more ruthless economic extraction.
Lugard and other senior administrators were at pains to legitimize
coercive labour practices within a legal operative framework that con-
structed state repression as intrinsic to economic modernization and
social improvement. Put bluntly, the pain was worth it.29
Ethical considerations aside, this was a dangerous presumption.
Historian A. G. Hopkins was the first to tie the emergence of organized
anti-colonial opposition to the consolidation of export production of
this kind, which brought with it the proliferation of British-controlled
waged labour. These Nigerian workers were acutely vulnerable to loss
of real income once a long-term stagnation in the price of primary prod-
ucts set in after the intense, but short-lived depression in 1919–21.30
Another incisive economic analyst, Ayodeji Olukoju highlights the con-
nections between the early twentieth-century consolidation of trading
companies and the mobilization of business interests within Britain’s
largest Chambers of Commerce, British West Africa’s Legislative
Councils and the Association of West African Merchants, founded in
1916. Often acting in unison, these business lobbies never suborned the
colonial authorities to their interests, but they did expect government
to promote a secure and commercially advantageous environment that
would be conducive to increasing export volumes.31
In Nigeria especially, the years between Lugard’s departure from the
governorship in 1919 and the global crash ten years later marked the
emergence of business conglomerates such as the African and Eastern
Trade Corporation, founded in 1919, and its successor, the United Africa
Company, established in 1929. Intimately involved in every aspect of
commerce from point of production, through distribution and storage to
onward transportation and export, these multifaceted companies would
dominate the colony’s economy throughout the 1930s.32 Local traders
could not compete with the market strength of these giants, and were
increasingly confined to the lowest levels of the commercial pyramid.
Some traders adapted, finding a niche within the European firms’ supply
chains. Others were marginalized or pushed out of business entirely.33
Policing and political economy

Nigeria’s changing economic structure registered a major impact on
policing after Lugard left office. Recorded crimes in 1920s Nigeria
increased, first as European commercial penetration gathered momen-
tum, then as economic conditions deteriorated.34 By this point, Nigeria,
like Sierra Leone, was administratively subdivided into a small ‘col-
ony’ surrounding its commercial capital, Lagos, and much larger
‘Protectorates’: in this case, the Northern and Southern Provinces
(275,000 and 89,600 square miles respectively). As we saw in Chapter
2, police organization mirrored this juridical division, with a heavier
police presence in the south’s larger townships and mining areas. Their
legal footing rested on a series of statutory ordinances, which provided
for the preservation of law and order, the protection of property and
armed assistance to the colonial government in times of unrest. These
Native Administration Ordinances, like their equivalents in the Gold
Coast, were reconfigured in the inter-war years, the aim being to inte-
grate chiefly courts into the judicial structure of local colonial admin-
istration. Closer monitoring of chiefly judgements in cases of petty
crime, inheritance or family dispute, plus the right of appeal to district
commissioners’ courts collapsed the legal and jurisdictional boundaries
between customary law and British colonial criminal and civil law as
cultural interchange between them increased.35 This, in turn, made the
precise limits of colonial policing harder to specify. When, for instance,
was a regular colonial policeman required in place of a native court
messenger whose responsibilities were confined to criminal matters
dealt with by the chiefly courts? Whatever the jurisdictional confusion,
police powers expanded in the 1920s at the expense of the customary
authorities favoured in the Lugard era.36
Nigeria’s police also helped keep order in the British-ruled Cameroon
mandate, although local court messengers usually enforced punish-
ments imposed by native courts. The arrangement suited a Lagos
government disinclined to intervene in the belief that Cameroon’s more
‘primitive’ population was best dealt with by traditional community
justice.37 Armed police patrols only entered what were officially des-
ignated ‘unsettled areas’ in the Cameroon highlands in response to
attacks on local headmen or other local government representatives.
Such patrols were highly punitive, and involved burning the huts or seiz-
ing the livestock of those accused of dissent.38 In Nigeria, meanwhile,
district authorities in the Southern Provinces endorsed the adaptation
of traditional ‘hunter guard’ or ‘night guard’ systems of community
policing as early forms of local, state-sanctioned vigilantism to counter-
act rising levels of violent crime, particularly cases of armed robbery.39
A different solution was adopted in the Northern Provinces, notably
in those areas where the Colonial Office considered the spread of wage
labour most disruptive.40 Until the late 1920s policing in the north’s
native administration areas was substantially undertaken by appoint-
ees of local emirs and village headmen. No white officers were pre-
sent and regular police only entered these districts when called in to
lend assistance, typically after disorder had broken out. A governmental
conference of Nigeria’s provincial Residents held at Kaduna in 1928
rejected this model. Anticipating greater unrest as communications
improved and the British commercial presence grew, the Residents,
advised by the Northern Provinces Inspector-general of police per-
suaded the Lieutenant Governor that the native police forces in Kano,
Sokoto and Ilorin should receive formal training, and that they should
be armed. These were significant departures from the statutes regulat-
ing the terms of indirect rule, which stipulated that native administra-
tion police should be self-organizing and that under no circumstances
should they have firearms.41
The Kaduna conference confronted the tension between the delega-
tion of police powers to the northern native administrations and official
reluctance to provide weapons or training for the purpose. Underlying
this earlier refusal lurked government fears that armed police might
serve corrupt purposes or use lethal force in cases of inter-communal
violence to serve particular ethnic or religious groups. Striking an alarm-
ist tone that mirrored the sharper crystallization of colonial stereotypes
among British administrators, the officer administering the Lagos gov-
ernment confided his anxiety that a large body of armed men were now
answerable to the native chiefs ‘and practically all Mohammedans’.42
Official fear of anarchic inter-confessional violence in which local
security forces might conspire was hardly new and, by the late 1920s,
calmer heads were starting to prevail. Among them were Colonial Office
specialists who backed the Kaduna reforms. Advocates of an armed
native police in Northern Nigeria had not reckoned with Sidney Webb’s
June 1929 appointment as Colonial Secretary, however. The new minis-
ter’s advisers reassured him that the native police would only be armed
with the ‘Greener’, a smooth-bore shotgun capable of firing buckshot
rounds to a maximum range of sixty yards. These weapons would be
released from police armouries solely in ‘exceptional circumstances’. A

peppering of buckshot strictly used in response to collective violence
would, it was assumed, be politically salutary without actually killing
its intended targets. Webb, the illustrious Fabian by then elevated to the
title of Lord Passfield, was less sure. First, he talked things over with
Nigeria’s Governor, Sir Graeme Thompson. Then, still unconvinced,
he vetoed the entire scheme. Well aware that riot control was rarely so
predictable, Passfield dismissed the plan as an ‘uncalled for … future
danger’.43 His decision, and the debate that preceded it, said as much
about ingrained cultural, racial and religious prejudices as about the
nature of colonial policing. And they left unanswered the question of
how Nigeria’s Northern Provinces would be policed in a time of fun-
damental economic change. When Passfield rejected the training and
weapons plan in June 1929, the depression’s devastating impact was still
unforeseen. The urgent requirements of police reorganization would
resurface only months later as the collapse in Nigeria’s export economy
fed a dramatic upsurge of internal unrest.
Protest and policing: the Igbo disorders

Chapters 2 and 3 identified certain constants in British colonial
policing. Among them were protests triggered by threats to customary
agricultural and trading practices, as well as the paucity of colonial gov-
ernment funds that left short-handed police forces acutely exposed in
times of civil disturbance. These factors coalesced in one of the more
shocking episodes of inter-war colonial policing: the Igbo riots that
rocked southeastern Nigeria in December 1929.
Protests in the Southern Provinces of Calabar and Owerri that, in
1929–30, exposed the failings of the Nigeria police had a strong gen-
der dimension. Indeed, in Nigerian historiography the disorders are
recalled as the Ògù Umùnwaàyi, or ‘Igbo Women’s War’.44 Igbo, Opobo
and Ibibio women led anti-tax protests that escalated into broader
anti-government demonstrations. They confronted an exclusively male
police force that upheld a rigidly patriarchal colonial regime.45 As Chima
Korieh puts it, ‘The system of “Indirect Rule” recognized male author-
ity through the creation of male warrant chiefs and effectively excluded
women from all colonial state political structures. Men formed the core
of the colonial administration, acting as interpreters, court messengers,
police, army recruits, and representatives of the colonial administration
in the local areas. The warrant chiefs exercised powers unprecedented
in the traditional political system.’46 Colonial officials, police and sol-
diers struggled to come to terms with the fact that Igbo women were
autonomous political actors, capable of mobilizing without covert male

direction.47 The highly sexualized aspects of their protests were thus
doubly provocative. The stripping and ritual humiliation of warrant
chiefs and the singing of bawdy songs that mocked male authority fig-
ures’ sexual inadequacy challenged the gendered hierarchies of colonial
governance and policing.48
Although colonial officials were slow to acknowledge it, women in the
Igbo and Yoruba-dominated areas of Southern Nigeria were pivotal to
farming and trading, typically selling the goods produced on extended
family holdings.49 Furthermore, by the mid-1920s women traders from
Lagos to Calabar were well organized into local interest groups that amp-
lified their political voice and safeguarded their commercial interests.50
These phenomena were by no means unique to Nigeria. Disturbances
in Accra in October 1924 and April 1925 were remarkably similar in
origin and composition. Provoked by reforms to municipal government
that they identified with increased taxation, women traders, artisans
and the unemployed reacted strongly to the presence of armed police
trucked into the city to disperse them.51 Renewed outbreaks of rioting
in Accra in October 1931 would, again, highlight the clash between
public hostility to greater taxation in times of acute hardship and gov-
ernment efforts to use taxes to underpin local administration, thereby
making indirect rule financially self-supporting.52
As in the Gold Coast, so in Southern Nigeria: women’s pre-eminent
position within the commercial structures and cultural practices of
customary trade clashed with the patriarchal precepts of the colonial
authorities and their support for indirect rule. So, too, the persistence
of traditional commerce collided with the authorities’ efforts to regular-
ize tax collection and impose the use of colonial currency.53 Historians
of colonial Nigeria’s economic history point to another source of griev-
ance. Calabar and Owerri provinces, the location of the 1929 Igbo
riots, were the heart of the manila belt. A metal, ring-like armlet usu-
ally forged in copper or brass, the manila remained the principal unit of
monetary value and exchange. Its continued use as currency conflicted
with colonial monetization. Problems accumulated after 1925 when the
colonial government began introducing a series of new taxes. District
officers tried to standardize payment methods to stimulate uniformity
of currency use. Integral to this process was the displacement of alter-
nate units of value: cowry shells, brass rods and, of course, the manila.54
Colonial introduction of unfamiliar metal coin, and nickel-based coins
in particular, created another difficulty – forgery, something unheard
of with cowry or manila transactions.55 Their own currency under
threat of replacement or demonetization, another irritation for local
traders was that British colonial currency was hard to come by. More
precisely, there were not enough low denomination coins in circulation.
Nickel coins and pennies were vital in market trading, the profitabil-
ity of which depended on large numbers of small-scale transactions in
foodstuffs and clothing. Business for artisans such as blacksmiths and
leather workers was adversely affected in the same way.56 Compelled
to adopt a currency whose local supply was inadequate, additional tax
demands were the final straw for the exasperated traders.
The 1929 disorders originated in local opposition to these new
taxes on households and their livestock. A decision to begin prelimin-
ary assessments of the taxable capacity of households in Calabar and
Owerri provinces was taken in November 1925, but over the next three
years village tours by district officers and tax clerks, often conducted
with police protection, created widespread confusion about the scope
and duration of the process. Rumour became decisive in the absence
of reliable official statements explaining what was intended. With no
administrative denials to counteract them, rumours snowballed out of
control.57 The expectation that, not just heads of household, but all
adult family members would be taxed took hold. Police involvement in
tax assessment made matters worse. Facing ‘passive resistance’ to their
demands for information about household wealth, assessors, backed by
police, conducted intrusive inspections of dwellings to count numbers
of doors, beds, domestic animals and other indicators of family size.
Matters came to a head in the village of Ukam on 4 December 1929.
A meeting convened by the district officer at the native court to explain
the extent of planned taxation – and so dispel the rumours – backfired.
Protesting villagers, mostly local women, occupied the courtroom.
They released prisoners from the adjacent lock-up and, having forced
the police to withdraw, set the buildings alight. A larger unit of fifty-
six armed police returned the following day. Mobbed by a crowd that
refused to disperse, the officer in charge instructed his men to fix bayo-
nets and fire at the protesters’ legs, action that Walter Long’s earlier
inquiry had specifically warned was ineffective. News of this violence
added impetus to a protest movement already spreading throughout
villages in the Port Harcourt region. Here, too, women played the lead-
ing role. Renewed attacks in Port Harcourt and nearby Owerrinta on
10 and 11 December against native courts, government property, post
offices and banks – in short, against the symbols of colonial supremacy
and economic control – brought a battalion of Nigeria Regiment troops
onto the streets. Further police reinforcements also arrived to supple-
ment the local units thinly stretched across the two provinces.58 These
additional security force patrols proved insufficient: on 12 December
1929 the Imo River Trading Station was destroyed. Its adjacent factory
premises as well as others in nearby Mbawsi were looted. Reports of
spreading disorder led the provincial government to conclude that the
entire apparatus of European commercial dominance was under assault
in the affected provinces.59
With no end in sight to the protests in Owerri and Calabar, the
Governor invoked article 79 of Nigeria’s law code to declare both
regions ‘proclaimed areas’. Martial law became applicable throughout
the two provinces from 15 December.60 That afternoon, troops acting
on the orders of the local police commissioner confronted the largest
women’s demonstration thus far near the Uto Etim Ekpo military camp
in Aba. Warning shots failed to scatter the protesters. Troops were next
ordered to fire into the crowd. Sixteen women died in this first vol-
ley. This did not satisfy the lieutenant in charge who ordered that a
Lewis machine gun be used. It killed two more and severely wounded
another seven.61 News of these events resounded through surrounding
communities. The bald facts were shocking enough but, compounded
by the exaggeration inherent in rumour, they became explosive. When
reports of the police action reached Colonial Office Under-Secretary,
Dr T. D. Shiels, his response underlined government preoccupation
with the adverse political consequences of security force violence:
I consider this most serious: For 18 women to be killed or wounded by rifle fire
will cause – and I think rightly – a serious outcry. I cannot conceive circumstances
where other forms of force e.g. rifle-butts, would not have been effective against
women, and I think we shall have to face severe criticism in the House.62
Events went from bad to worse in Southern Nigeria meanwhile.

Incensed by the Uto Etim Ekpo killings, in Opobo town another large
gathering of women protesters, estimated by police to be 1,500-strong,
allegedly ‘rushed’ the District Office. Policemen were assaulted and,
quite understandably, the lieutenant commanding the troop detach-
ment working with them was singled out. An unnamed police officer
reportedly read the Riot Act, but amidst the confusion it defies belief
that the implications of this statement struck home. Whatever the case,
the command was issued to fire rifles and another machine gun, this
time at point-blank range. Sixty-two women received gunshot wounds.
Thirty-two of them died. Another eight women drowned as the terri-
fied demonstrators stampeded back across the Opobo River. This was
the worst loss of life during an internal police action in British West
Africa between the wars. It indicated how few lessons about riot control
or the crying need to address the underlying causes of economic protest
had been learned.63
The protests’ origins were traceable in the avalanche of exculpatory

paperwork triggered by the killings. Similar conclusions were to be
found in the official inquiry (known as ‘the Aba Commission’), the
Lieutenant Governor’s review of events, and the Colonial Office aut-
opsy on the entire affair.64 Humiliating tax inspections and collective
punishments, such as house burning and livestock seizures in villages
where taxes were withheld, were ethically unjustifiable and politically
counter-productive. And, as the local press commented, introducing
Nigeria’s native revenue ordinance to Calabar and Owerri without clear
official explanation of how much taxation would be involved stoked
rumour to a point beyond which no official or policeman could con-
tain it.65 Additional taxes were certainly resented; even more so the
alleged corruption of the local chiefs and their warrant officers (effect-
ively native court agents with police powers) in the revenue collection
process. Native court prosecutions for tax infringements became even
harder to swallow. Finally, trading company insistence that purchases
from African traders should, henceforth, be paid by precise weight
and not, as previously, by approximate measure seemed unnecessarily
penny-pinching. Perhaps not enough in themselves to provoke mass
opposition, cumulatively these grievances became critical when gen-
eral economic conditions declined. And, as the Aba Commission report
concluded, police riot control, while certainly deficient, was not the cen-
tral problem. Recourse to lethal security force violence became inevit-
able because the colonial authorities had not adjusted their fiscal and
commercial policies in recognition of the worsening poverty among the
trading communities of southeastern Nigeria after commodity prices
crashed in late 1929.66
The Lagos government did not take these economic remedies to
heart. It preferred instead to focus on cheaper, short-term adjustments
to police numbers, policing practice and legal punishments meted
out by district officers and magistrates. On 13 October 1930 Captain
Walter Buchanan-Smith, newly appointed as Lieutenant-Governor of
the Southern Provinces, responded to the Aba Commission report by
endorsing police proposals for reinforcement and reform throughout
Southern Nigeria.67 The police establishments at Enugu, Aba and Port
Harcourt were reinforced and two police reserve units, each of 102
rank-and-file constables, were to be created. These two units repre-
sented something new: standing riot squads ready for deployment any-
where in the Southern Provinces in case of renewed unrest. Problems
of inadequate training were addressed by plans to open a police training
school at Enugu. It would induct up to 106 rank and filers plus six offi-
cer cadets at any one time. To make these reinforcements affordable,
Nigeria’s auxiliary ‘special police’ force was abolished. This killed two
birds with one stone. First, it reduced the net increase in police num-
bers from 426 to 226. Second, by targeting the specials it identified
a scapegoat for Whitehall criticism of Nigerian police indiscipline.68
Perhaps more important, these changes constituted the most substan-
tial Africanization of any of British West Africa’s colonial polices since
the First World War.69
The 1930 police ordinance transformed the Nigerian force. What
had been a ramshackle and regionally diverse organization closely tied
to the overarching requirements of indirect rule in the North, urban
policing and trade protection in the South, became a more professional
force organized for labour control and the suppression of disorder. The
‘prevention and detection of crime, the apprehension of offenders, and
the maintenance of law and order’ identified in the ordinance as central
police tasks were, in practice, conflated into a single short-term prior-
ity: the containment of economic protest.70
The reforms went furthest in the South. It was here that all African
police officers were concentrated, typically taking responsibility for
the policing of townships and supervising criminal prosecutions in
Nigeria’s lower courts. On paper at least, European commissioners and
assistant commissioners, in consultation with the local resident and
district officers, determined police recruitments and deployments in
response to civil unrest. They were to liaise with one another by tele-
phone to pool their resources as needed.71 In the Northern Provinces,
by contrast, unarmed local dogarai still performed numerous police
functions, enforcing customary law and chiefly rule (or, rather, what
they understood them to be), often with minimal supervision. Units of
regular African police constables were largely held in reserve in town-
ships and near mining centres, available for call-out if required. These
units also assisted district commissioners, accompanying them during
tax collection and inspection tours, particularly in the so-called ‘pagan
areas’ and frontier districts.72 Broadly speaking, the further north one
travelled from Lagos, the less the impact of reform.
The image of hierarchical control and clinical segmentation of respon-
sibilities also becomes harder to credit once the day-to-day reports of
police actions and abuses are taken into account. The picture was further
clouded by the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern provincial
police forces in 1931.73 Even so, commenting on a reorganization that
he helped design, Inspector-general of Police Major G. N. Faux-Powell,
noted that the availability of dogarai auxiliaries in the North, plus the
additional police numbers in the South, released European police offi
cers for political intelligence work. These officers were assigned to three
specialist units. First were the Criminal Investigation Divisions at each

province headquarters. Second was the ‘Preventative Service Branch’
(PSB) of 150 policemen that conducted anti-smuggling operations
along Southern Nigeria’s western and eastern frontiers. Third was the
Lagos Police Investigation Bureau, staffed by assistant commissioners,
which monitored seditious activity and functioned as a Special Branch.
The actions and responsibilities of these three police services often
merged in practice. The organized criminal activity and large-scale
smuggling tackled by the CID and the PSB were considered threats to
colonial order much like the trade union activity, Islamic brotherhoods
and rural disorder monitored by the Investigation Bureau.74
Limited changes to Nigeria’s trial procedures and corporal punish-
ment regimes were also made in the aftermath of the Aba violence.
Impetus for the former emanated from the colonial administration;
pressure for the latter from Passfield’s Colonial Office. The Colonial
Secretary was determined to make his mark as a reformer and he was
quick to exploit the contradictions of an administrative system in which
every aspect of colonial rule from taxation and legal authority to edu-
cation and policing applied differently in the North and South of the
country. Two examples, each relating to police powers and the judicial
system, illustrate the point.
Stung by Labour backbenchers’ criticism of colonial repression in
the wake of the Aba killings, on 2 December 1930 Passfield received
a letter from the Haldane Club, an association of Labour barristers
formed a year earlier. The club had inspired copy-cat colonial lawyers’
associations, among them a group of Nigerian barristers known as
the Protectorate Legal Reform Club. This organization was founded
to expose the unfairness of the judicial system in Southern Nigeria in
which Residents, district officers and native chiefs could still conduct
civil and criminal trials to the exclusion of qualified lawyers such as the
club’s members. Litigants in such cases were denied the privilege of
retaining counsel to represent them, even in capital crime trials.75
These trial procedures were enshrined in two legislative acts passed
soon after Nigeria’s colonial unification in 1914. Pressure for reform,
specifically, for Supreme Court jurisdiction, the right to a lawyer and
to trial by jury in serious criminal cases, had surfaced from time to
time within Nigeria’s Legislative Council and among its senior British
judges, uneasy about the potential for miscarriages of justice under the
existing system. As matters stood, those convicted by the provincial
courts had no right of appeal. Details of all convictions were passed
to the Lagos government because the Governor had notional power to
quash any convictions deemed unsafe. But such was the volume of cases
that unsound convictions were rarely spotted by Nigeria’s Chief Justice

to whom the Governor’s authority to pardon was usually delegated.
Prisoners commonly served five to eight years, even an entire sentence,
before their cases were reviewed and found to be unsafe. Native court
officials were accused of enriching themselves in the interim by taking
bribes from families desperate to secure a favourable trial outcome.76
Pressed by the Haldane Club to act, Passfield and his West Africa
Department advisers were readily persuaded that the entire process was
corrupt and unjust.77 They recommended the introduction of trained
lawyers to provincial courts, a welcome outcome for the Nigerian bar-
risters. Supreme Court jurisdiction was extended and the Governor’s
right of pardon reviewed.78 The 1929 riots and the administrative fail-
ings they exposed fed the Colonial Office appetite for reform.
Equally revealing was the Colonial Secretary’s attention to punish-
ments applied under Nigeria’s criminal codes. In April 1931 he insisted
that the use of stocks be abolished as punishment for minor offences,
such as brawling, drunkenness and petty theft. Native courts typic-
ally placed offenders in the stocks on the day they were caught. In the
Northern Provinces, 686 persons were punished in this way out of an
estimated total of 42,000 criminal cases to pass through the Provinces’
native courts during 1930.79 The Lagos government was content to
leave the practice unaltered. Clinging to indirect rule precepts, the
Governor’s senior staff saw no reason to intervene in native court pro-
cedure unless absolutely necessary. They were attracted by the cheap-
ness of the punishment, which also kept petty criminals from clogging
up the colony’s overcrowded jails.80
Passfield was undeterred. Stocks were demeaning and obsolete. They
were antithetical to the image of progressive imperialism the Labour
Government wanted to promote, not least to its own supporters and
the International Labour Organization, then in full flow in its attack
on forced labour. Passfield’s sense of administrative tidiness was also
offended by regional variations between provincial and native courts in
applying corporal punishment. Stocks would have to go.81 The Fabian
Colonial Secretary left the Colonial Office when Ramsay MacDonald’s
second Labour Government collapsed on 24 August 1931. Yet his
reformism lingered on. Thanks to Passfield’s original interest, the use
of riveted leg-irons on prisoners held in native administration lock-ups
was phased out and resort to a lighter and less acutely painful variety
was more closely regulated. Even so, the deeper issue of the meth-
ods used by poorly qualified, often brutal prison warders went unad-
dressed because the costs involved in training a professional prison
service were considered prohibitively high in depression conditions.82
Economies and police reorganization

Pressing security concerns may explain the colonial authorities’ focus
on police and prison reorganization in the wake of the Aba riots, much
as exposure to public criticism underpinned Colonial Office pressure
for legal reform. But they left unanswered the bigger problem of social
unrest provoked by Nigeria’s economic crisis. If material hardship was
so clearly at the heart of the trouble, why did the authorities in Southern
Nigeria fail to tackle it? A number of possible answers suggest them-
selves. The most mundane is that the depression had barely begun, so
the full severity of its impact was poorly understood. Another is that the
Nigerian government simply followed conventional colonial wisdom in
assuming that the remedy for collapsing export prices was to produce
and sell more goods. Even though Nigeria exported a greater range of
primary goods than most tropical British colonies, its economy remained
vulnerable to global price fluctuations on a narrow range of commod-
ities. Here again, the implications of this exposure did not register in
bold economic thinking; quite the reverse. In Nigeria, as elsewhere in
British colonial Africa, dependency on income from a handful of pri-
mary exports merely reinforced the orthodox deflationary prescription
administered after 1929. The medicine in question had two ingredients:
a production drive to compensate for falling export revenues combined
with increased taxes to help cover government debt repayments.83
As much a reflex response as a reasoned economic calculation, these
measures also allowed colonial authorities to side-step the longer-term
structural adjustments required. Authorities in Lagos claimed to be
taking steps to assuage the impact of catastrophic price falls, while con-
serving the laissez-faire principles of indirect rule. The challenge of
industrial diversification with all its worrying side-effects of economic
dislocation, unregulated urbanization and proletarianization was neatly
side-stepped.84 The irony was that this mix of economic orthodoxy and
political timidity added to Nigeria’s social ferment as living standards
deteriorated between 1930 and 1933.
Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that rank-and-file African
police constables personified the dangers posed by new forms of social
solidarity among wage workers struggling to make ends meet during
the economic crisis. On the morning of 18 April 1933 around eighty
African constables of the Lagos police, joined by forty members of the
city fire brigade, marched into the Police Headquarters compound to
protest at the government’s withdrawal of their supplementary cost of
living allowance. The payment was introduced in 1920 to help con-
stables in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Calabar and Enugu cope with rising
food prices. But in February 1932 Governor Sir Donald Cameron

announced that the long-term fall in retail prices, plus the urgent need
for austerity measures, spelt the end for the payments. The policemen
were furious. They considered the allowance an integral part of their
salary, not a supplement to it. And their real incomes were falling, mak-
ing it hard to feed families and pay rents.85 Nigeria’s Inspector-general
of police, C. W. Duncan, faced a de facto Lagos police and fire brigade
strike. Governor Cameron chose instead to call it a ‘mutiny’.86 He had
grounds to do so.
Since January 1933 the Governor and Inspector-general Duncan had
received a string of increasingly menacing anonymous letters protesting
at the impending payments withdrawal. Using the letter postmarks to
identify their likely source, Police Commissioner R. E. Foulger inter-
viewed constables at nearby police stations. He encountered a wall of
silence; no one was willing to air their grievances or lodge formal com-
plaints.87 The discontent rumbled on until finally spilling over on 18
April when constables received their first wage payment minus the allow-
ance. Intelligence gathered by CID chief C. H. F. Apthorpe pointed to
clandestine meetings among the policemen, secret oathing ceremonies
in which participants pledged to defend one another and discussions
with soldiers of the Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF) about
breaking into police armouries and the RWAFF magazine to steal
rifles and ammunition.88 Those involved in the compound ‘invasion’
arrived fresh from an earlier confrontation with Commissioner Foulger
at the Lagos colony police station in which an African police officer,
Inspector Agbabiaka, was beaten up. Foulger concluded that the men
were ‘entirely out of control’.89
Once the protesters reached him, Inspector-general Duncan played
disciplinarian and conciliator in equal measure. Afterwards, he became
disingenuous. Chastising the men for their unacceptable behaviour,
Duncan promised to forward their grievances to the Governor never-
theless.90 He called in the army, meanwhile, to disarm the Lagos
force and take charge of the city’s policing if necessary. With soldiers
deployed, whose loyalty, as we know, the CID thought questionable,
another week passed before Foulger and a hand-picked squadron of
policemen and white officers arrested fifteen individuals identified as
‘ringleaders’ of the earlier protests. Two days later, on 28 April, three
of the fifteen arrested, Samuel Ado, Charles Lawnfort and Musa Felua
were sentenced at Lagos District Court. Each received six months’
imprisonment with hard labour for assaulting Inspector Agbabiaka.91
The Lagos police ‘mutiny’ was over, but the Colonial Office inquest
was just beginning.
Governor Cameron was criticized for misjudgement and poor pres-

entation of the need for economies. But Inspector-general Duncan’s
mismanagement of the Lagos force drew sterner rebuke. Fundamental
questions about the nature of colonial policing were at stake. An urban
force largely devoted to ordinary ‘beat’ policing, the five divisions of
the Lagos police, like their counterparts throughout Nigeria, were
also trained as a gendarmerie and authorized to carry firearms. They
assumed this more paramilitary function whenever called upon to sup-
press disorder by provincial Residents or the Governor. This aspect of
security policing demanded tighter discipline, a stronger sense of unity
within particular units and a readiness to follow white officers’ orders
regardless of circumstance or consequence. The implication was that
officers and men should live, gendarmerie-style, apart from the com-
munity in dedicated barracks with parade-ground drill, firearms prac-
tice and team sports filling much of the policemen’s day.92
Yet Duncan, with thirty-four years of continuous colonial service
behind him, was less a soldier than a policeman at heart. He rejected
the military model outright. A soldier, in his view, was part of a fighting
machine and was seldom called upon to take individual responsibility.
A constable, patrolling a beat alone, was required to deal with any emer-
gency that might arise without supervision. Classroom training, famil-
iarity with legal procedure and the capacity for independent thought
distinguished the experienced policeman from the raw army recruit.93
It was an impassioned, clever defence but it did not wash with Colonial
Office observers. Their perspective on Lagos policemen’s sense of pub-
lic duty was less rosy. The force seemed chaotic, ill-disciplined and
unreliable. In Lagos at least, rank-and-file constables discovered their
sense of unity in opposition to senior officers, not in service to them.
Worse, neither Duncan nor his subordinate Commissioners realized
it.94 Alex Fiddian and his fellow West Africa Department staff were cer-
tain that further police protests were likely. These had to be avoided at
a time when the police force faced unprecedented challenges of labour
control and social disorders arising from Nigeria’s economic strife. As
one official commented, ‘It looks as if some one of the Dowbiggin school
would be good for the force.’ There was no place for Inspector-general
Duncan and his faith in the self-reliant African Bobby.95
The anxieties that encouraged Whitehall to make Duncan a scape-
goat had ample cause. Over the winter of 1933–4 Nigeria’s export trade
stagnated. Declining revenue from primary products was exacerbated
by poor harvests of groundnuts, palm kernels and cotton, as well as
falling prices for what produce did reach the market. Cameron’s admin-
istration, facing renewed Colonial Office criticism, this time for slack
financial management, promised a comprehensive spending review and

further retrenchment. The Governor conceded, however, that native
producers could not cope with more taxation. For many the net income
from their crops was already insufficient to meet subsistence needs.96
Cameron’s pledge of greater stringency did not appease the Colonial
Office doubters. Accustomed to battling with the Treasury for every
penny of extra colonial spending, West Africa Department officials such
as Alex Fiddian and Gerald Creasy were unimpressed by Cameron’s
belated conversion to rigorous housekeeping.97 As Creasy put it, ‘There
are so many differing sets of figures available [from the Lagos govern-
ment], and so many loose ends at the moment, that it is difficult to
explain clearly the present financial position of Nigeria.’98
Mauled by Whitehall’s financial watchdogs, Cameron’s advisers
turned their attention to fresh expenditure cuts. The task fell to an
‘Economy Committee’ chaired by the Lagos government Treasurer
C. W. Leese. The committee submitted its first report on 4 January
1934.99 Savings of £105,336 were promised without any reduction in
public services. This trick would be accomplished by leaving clerical
vacancies unfilled and cutting pensions and allowances.100 RWAFF
units were exempted from this retrenchment, but the police were not.101
Again, Colonial Office staff were unmoved, Fiddian commenting
thus: ‘I have seen a certain number of Retrenchment and Organisation
Committees and I have very little faith in their labours, more particu-
larly in the present case, when all we are confronted with is their answers
to the problems, without any indication of how they work them out.’102
Sent back to the drawing board, the Economy Committee produced
fresh proposals on 3 February 1934.103 Central to these was the aboli-
tion of the post of Southern Provinces Lieutenant-Governor along with
his secretariat at Enugu. The equivalent Northern Provinces secretariat
also faced the axe. Their responsibilities would be shared between the
Lagos government and the local Residents, all of whom already served
as senior district officers. Unsurprisingly, the incumbent Lieutenant-
Governor, Walter Buchanan-Smith disliked the scheme. He warned
that bureaucratic oversight of indirect rule – what he termed Nigeria’s
real ‘security service’ – would collapse.104 Colonial authority would
be destabilized, making police duties far more onerous. Buchanan-
Smith’s counterpart, the Northern Provinces Chief Commissioner,
G. S. Browne, was equally unimpressed. The planned cutbacks posited
the transfer of substantial local government work to Lagos while, at
the same time, requiring him to scrutinize provincial administration
more closely. The suggested reductions in native affairs personnel were
bound to deny him – and local police officers – the early intelligence
critical to the prevention of disorder. To make matters worse, police

numbers were also to be reduced, although more drastic plans to amal-
gamate the police and prisons service – which prompted a Colonial
Office minute of ‘God forbid!’ – were rejected.105 In its eagerness to pare
down the deficit the Economy Committee had concocted a recipe for
political disaster.106
Governor Cameron had other concerns. He feared that the Economy
Committee’s proposals would not make substantial inroads into
Nigeria’s looming deficit, estimated in January 1934 at £447,581 for
the 1934–5 financial year.107 During a June 1934 visit to London the
Governor discussed Nigeria’s financial crisis with Passfield’s replace-
ment as Colonial Secretary, Philip Cunliffe-Lister (the Earl of Swinton)
and his senior officials, including Permanent Under-Secretary Sir John
Maffey and West Africa specialists Fiddian and Creasy. Projections
for the colony’s deficit were by then downgraded to £335,000, but the
Colonial Office grandees still suspected that, what for them remained
a scandalously high figure, stemmed from Cameron’s financial mis-
management.108 Creasy dashed the Governor’s hopes that the Lagos
Treasury might be allowed to reschedule repayments on its two out-
standing long-term loans from the City of London. Loan subscribers
and future generations, he was told, should not be asked to shoulder
a heavier share of Nigeria’s debt burden.109 The Governor came away
from London with nothing except vague Colonial Office approval for
his planned closure of a branch railway line as an economy measure.110
Seemingly undaunted by Whitehall criticism and the simmering
revolt among his senior provincial staff, Cameron turned once more to
his Treasurer C. W. Leese for a solution. Together, they sought Colonial
Office support for an end to Nigeria’s subsidization of the neighbour-
ing Cameroon mandate.111 Occupied by British and French forces since
1916, most of this former German colony was under French control.
But in 1922 the League of Nations confirmed the British mandate
over the northwestern strip of Cameroon, 20 per cent of its total land-
mass.112 The outcome pleased the Admiralty and the Colonial Office at
the time. The former wanted British dominion over the port of Douala.
The latter saw advantage in consolidating Britain’s grip over north-
ern Cameroon to enhance co-operation with the Muslim emirs whose
domains straddled the Nigeria–Cameroon frontier. British ministers
seem to have ignored this indirect rule dimension. Nor was there much
discussion about the fact that administrative costs in British-ruled
Cameroon, much of them devoted to its police garrison, would fall upon
the Lagos Treasury.113 The more the depression sapped Nigerian gov-
ernment reserves, the more the mandate weighed heavily in Cameron’s
revenue calculations.114 Nigerian expenditure on Cameroon in the

1933–4 financial year amounted to £93,767 against a revenue yield of
£60,000: a deficit of £33,767. What the Governor omitted to mention
was that the Lagos authorities originally sought to integrate British-
ruled Cameroon with Nigeria’s Southern Provinces but allowed the
process to lapse through long-term administrative neglect.115
With little prospect of a favourable response from London to his
plans to divest Lagos of the costs of maintaining British Cameroon,
the Governor turned to Nigeria’s mining sector for a financial lifeline.
The discovery of diamonds in Northern Nigeria’s Sokoto province in
August 1934 triggered expressions of interest in exclusive prospect-
ing rights from the Consolidated African Selection Trust (CAST).116
Selection Trust chairman Sir Alfred Chester Beatty weighed in with a
personal letter to Cameron requesting his endorsement of the CAST
application for five such prospecting licences. Both the fixed sums paid
to the government and the revenues accruing from eventual diamond
exports would, Beatty assured him, work to the colonial administra-
tion’s ‘highest economic advantage’. He pointed to Sierra Leone as the
obvious example of the likely benefits. Cameron responded enthusi-
astically.117 But unearthing Sokoto’s diamonds could not extricate the
colonial government from its immediate economic predicament and no
policing arrangements comparable to Sierra Leone’s Mines Protection
Force were put in place. The episode pointed to the administration’s
willingness to support big exporters to meet the deficit crisis. The pre-
vious administrative ban on palm oil plantations was reconsidered in
1934.118 And the Lagos authorities also reviewed the costs involved
in its safety and accommodation standards for plantation workers in
British Cameroon, anxious lest the principal banana exporters in the
region be forced out of business.119
The more indulgent official attitude towards employers’ demands
could backfire. As depression conditions eased, Nigeria’s coal min-
ing sector was rocked by a series of wildcat strikes as miners, many
of them adolescent boys, pressed claims held in abeyance during the
earlier economic crisis. Miners at the Iva Valley collieries in Enugu
Province struck twice in March 1937 and February 1938, demanding
wage increases and improvements to living and working conditions.
Government arbitration in each case convinced the striking pick boys
to cease picketing and resume work without major police intervention.
But, much to Colonial Office frustration, the failure to conduct a prom-
ised government investigation into mining conditions at Iva in 1937
provoked the second strike a year later.120 Fear that the stoppages might
escalate into political violence underpinned Colonial Office analysis of
the Iva Valley disputes. In this sense, nothing much had changed over
the preceding twenty years. Public security and Nigeria’s changing pol-
itical economy remained inseparable as government attentions turned
to the imminent war in Europe.121
Conclusion
In the first autumn of the Second World War a long, reflective memo-
randum by Governor Sir Bernard Bourdillon on Nigeria’s development
prospects provoked one of the long but inconclusive debates beloved
by senior clerks in the Colonial Office West Africa Department.122 The
most avid minute-writers agreed that matters hinged on Bourdillon’s
proposed expansion of the fiscal, administrative and regulatory powers
of the colony’s native authorities. That was where consensus ended.
A cautious reformer, Bourdillon regarded these extended responsibil-
ities as critical to political education and preparation for eventual self-
government.123 The Colonial Office saw things differently. Bourdillon’s
recommendations were designed to reinvigorate chiefly rule. To most
Whitehall observers, this conflicted with the central task of creating
national institutions in which the majority of Nigerians might gradually
play a greater part. Put differently, expanding native administration
was the antithesis of democratic self-rule, not its precursor. Bourdillon’s
proposals were, for the moment at least, academic in light of altered war-
time priorities. But for the Colonial Office clerks who reviewed them
they retained a singular merit. As one senior officer wrote: ‘Whatever
the shortcomings of Nigerian native administration policy, at least I
suggest it is all to the good that the Governor should try and define
what that policy is. As Lord Hailey pointed out, one of the most notice-
able characteristics of British colonial policy is that it is almost impos-
sible either for an outsider or for an official to discover what it is. And
attempt at definition should, I feel, therefore be welcomed.’124
It was a revealing statement. Confusion about the very essence of
colonial administration – its methods and purpose – endured at the very
end of the inter-war period, much as it had at the beginning. Twenty
years before Bourdillon, in 1919 Sir Hugh Clifford, Lord Lugard’s suc-
cessor as Governor, had tried to rationalize Nigeria’s colonial admin-
istration. He introduced additional layers of provincial bureaucracy to
facilitate quick decision-making and foster closer relationships between
white officials and chiefly authorities. Clifford’s plans were frustrated
and only a generation later were they revived by Bourdillon.125 His
declared objective, as he explained it to Colonial Secretary William
Ormsby-Gore in July 1937, was to remove administrative ‘bottlenecks’.
Government in Nigeria’s Southern Province would be subdivided

into East and West, allowing authorities in each place to communi-
cate directly with Lagos. The intended result was to prevent the ‘quite
inordinate delay and often considerable embarrassment to a central
Government which reads accounts of important local developments
in the Lagos press days, and sometimes weeks, before it receives any
report at all from the responsible authorities’.126
In these circumstances, the errors and abuses that characterized
colonial policing in inter-war Nigeria are more readily explained. The
Opobo killings illustrated several phenomena that we’ve encountered
already, which might be broadly split into three. First, the overbearing
market presence of European-owned businesses, new forms of waged
labour and additional taxation as catalysts to protest. Second, critical
shortages of police on the ground, plus official doubts about the loy-
alty of the African rank and file led to a profound crisis of confidence
in protest policing. Reforms and a more paramilitary style of police
organization would result. Third, and finally, the short-term recourse
to emergency legislation suggested that colonial policemen struggled to
cope with the demands placed upon them when faced with demonstra-
tions or riot-like conditions. There was no comparable violence in the
decade ahead, certainly an improvement given that depression condi-
tions hung over West Africa for much of the 1930s. But one factor was
unaltered. Whether through labour control, coercive tax collection or
the repression of economic protest, policing in Nigeria, as in Sierra
Leone, and, one suspects, in British West Africa as a whole, was more a
matter of money and commercial interest than acknowledged hitherto.
12 Depression and revolt: Policing the
Belgian Congo
Were the depression-era changes to policing in the French and British

colonies studied so far unique to those two empires? Similar trends
in the territories observed – towards greater involvement in protest
policing and the maintenance of key export industries – suggest a more
generic process; one that was linked to industrial concentration and the
development of larger labour forces often housed on, or near, the work-
place. Policing, in other words, was functionally dependent on polit-
ical economy, its operational facets moulded by the speed and scale of
socio-economic change within colonial societies. But does this argu-
ment hold good if we glance sideways at another European colonial
empire? This, the final chapter, offers answers. It does so by consider-
ing how the impact of depression and revolt affected policing in an
especially large colonial agglomeration: the Belgian Congo. Ironically,
the story begins in London.
Police reorganization and disorder in Congo-Kasai

On 19 September 1931, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner at New
Scotland Yard contacted the Colonial Office. He was following up a
request from Baron Beltjens, chief administrator of Belgium’s Sûreté
publique who had asked for details about the organization of colonial
police in a British territory analogous to Belgium’s vast African domain.
‘It is understood’, the Commissioner continued, ‘that the Belgian
authorities are considering the entire reorganization of their Police in
the Belgian Congo, owing to the fact that a great deal of trouble has
recently been experienced with the natives because of the activities of
communists and other revolutionaries.’1 The Colonial Office was happy
to oblige. Their own review of Nigerian policing was, by then, con-
veniently nearing completion. Details of Major Faux-Powell’s proposed
redesign of the Nigerian force were forwarded to Brussels.2
British observers were right to link Belgian interest in restructuring
their colonial security forces to the ‘trouble’ then unfolding, but they
301
were wrong to identify communist insurgency as the underlying prob-

lem.3 Police units, reinforced by the colonial army, or Force publique, had
recently swept through several Pende districts in the western province
of Congo-Kasai. They cleared some villages, and destroyed others to
suppress what was labelled the Kwango revolt. Villagers in certain dis-
tricts, notably in Kwango and the palm oil plantation region of Kikwat,
were dubbed ‘Satanas’. A catch-all, pejorative term, ‘Satanas’ referred to
a charismatic sect that repudiated all things European, including pay-
ment of taxes or use of colonial currency.4 Sect members were accused of
attacking security forces with sticks and arrows and, in one incident, of
killing a district administrator and three of his local porters on 8 June.5
No sooner was this unrest put down than further disorders erupted in
Equateur province, as well as in other areas nearer the shores of Lake
Leopold (now Lake Mai-Ndombe) in the west of the colony.6 More wide-
spread, but sporadic attacks on settlers, missionaries and Force publique
patrols persisted until the summer of 1932. These, too, were thought to
have been inspired by the preceding disorders in Kwango.7
Colonial officials, describing animist religious practice and millenar-
ian social movements in lurid terms, derided such beliefs and practices
as ‘fetishist’, anti-European, anti-modern and, ipso facto, anti-colo-
nial.8 Persistent anxieties about the intrinsic otherness of the Congo
and its people made the colonial state systemically nervous. Security
force violence should be seen in this light. By February 1932 official
figures recorded 344 villagers killed during operations to put down the
Kwango revolt. Forty-one individuals, including seven village head-
men, were convicted of involvement in the disorders, receiving punish-
ments ranging from two years’ imprisonment to the death sentence.
State of emergency restrictions remained in place for months in the
affected areas.9
For the colonial administration the Kwango revolt exemplified the
destabilization of rural chefferies. These were the units of local government
in which village notables were assigned administrative responsibility for
tax collection and manpower provision whilst retaining other customary
juridical and property rights.10 The calamitous reductions in commod-
ity prices and employment opportunities for Congolese waged workers,
it was claimed, fed millenarianism among rural populations unable to
sell surplus home-grown food to see them through the downturn. Tax
evasion and defiance of local chiefs increased.11 In this official narra-
tive, disorder was more economic than political in origin.12 Its severity
was contingent on the contraction of commercial activity, consequent
deterioration in the labour market and shortages of cultivable land for a
resident population without alternative means of support.
Depression and revolt: Policing the Belgian Congo 303
Equally pervasive, although less susceptible to measurement, were

the cultural presumptions, intrinsic to government correspondence,
which blended casual racism with paternalist munificence. This read-
ing of events depicted the Congolese interior as a work in progress, its
populations unreceptive to western reason but susceptible to meta-
physical explanations of their distress. Administrative inquiries con-
ducted into the origins of the 1931–2 unrest cast the people of Kwango
district as naive ‘xenophobes’; those in Sankuru as misguided dream-
ers. Each required vigilant police surveillance.13 Followers of the
‘Satanas’ were merely drawn to another variant on Kibanguism, the
Congo’s most influential anti-western movement, which, the admin-
istration had long insisted, was devoid of ideological content or legit-
imate grievance.14 In considering such official thinking we need to
dwell on the basic administrative structures and economic priorities
that determined how colonial rule was experienced by Congo’s diffuse
population.
Between 1910 and 1912, barely two years after the Belgian state for-
mally supplanted the preceding royal administration of the Congo Free
State, colonial bureaucracy was restructured as an ‘African administra-
tion’, its new bureaucracy, or ‘territorial service’, reassigned to regional
postings. Members of this administrative apparatus distanced them-
selves from the rapacious cruelties of the Free State.15 Maurice Lippens,
a veteran minister who served as Governor-general in the early 1920s,
was convinced that colonial administration rescued Congolese commu-
nities from internecine violence and the predations of slavery, offering
peace, social stability and economic opportunity.16 It fell to local gov-
ernment agents to make these pious hopes real. Assigned to ‘territories’
similar to the area administered by a British district commissioner, staff
of the Territoriale, as it was commonly known, were the key supports of a
vertical colonial hierarchy. At its apex stood the government-general in
Leopoldville, beneath which were the colony’s four provincial adminis-
trations. As is evident from Map 12.1, Congo’s provinces were huge, and
this remained the case after their number was increased from four to six
in October 1933.17 So, too, the provincial ‘districts’, the next level down
the administrative ladder, were much larger than their British colonial
namesakes or the cercles of neighbouring French African territory. It
was only at the next subordinate levels – respectively, the territory, the
chefferie (chiefly area) and the sous-chefferie (chiefly sub-area) – that one
could meaningfully refer to ‘local’ government. Here the officers of the
Territoriale carried the heaviest bureaucratic load, often in so-called
‘detached posts’ physically and politically remote from the provincial
administration.18 Missionaries and medical staff complemented the
Ubangi Haut-Uele
1926 Bas-Uele
Bangala
Ituri
Lulonga Stanleyville
ORIENTALE
EQUATEUR
Equateur
Lac Léopold II Kivu

Urbain de
Léopoldville Sankuru Maniema
Bas-Congo CONGO-KASAI
Kwango Kasai
Tanganyika-
Lomami
Moero
K ATA N G A
Lulua Haut
Luapula
0 500 1000 1500 km
0 250 500 750 1000 miles
SUDAN
1933 Congo-Ubangi
Uele
STANLEYVILLE
FRENCH Kibali-
EQUATORIAL COQUILHATVILLE Ituri
Stanleyville
AFRICA Tshuapa
Kivu
Lac Léopold II COSTER- RWANDA-

URUNDI
Urbain de MANSVILLE (Belgian
KA
Léopoldville Sankuru Maniema mandate)

NYI
LEOPOLDVILLE LUSAMBO
Bas-Congo
TA N G A
Kwango Kasai
Tanganyika
K ATA N G A
ANGOLA Lualaba
Haut-
Kat
an
0 500 1000 1500 km

ga
NORTHERN
0 250 500 750 1000 miles
RHODESIA
Map 12.1 Belgian Congo administrative territories, 1926 and 1933

agents’ work, spreading western scientific practice and imparting their

ideals of domesticity, hygiene and moral propriety.19
The geographical distribution and internal hierarchies of the Congo’s
police and military forces traced a similar pattern to the colonial service.
In 1919 the Leopoldville government restructured its security forces,
determined to make economies in the name of rationalization. Reforms
to the Belgian colonial army, or Force publique, were most far-reaching.
The Force publique retained an internal security role after its foundation
in 1885. White officered, its African rank and file originally dominated
by Azande, Batetela and Bangala groups from the colony’s northeast
judged to possess martial qualities, by 1919 the Force publique was more
ethnically homogeneous.20 But the tradition of isolating garrison forces
and posting troops far from their home districts endured.
A decree of 10 May 1919 codified this practice, designating a dis-
tinctly colonial security force subdivided into two parts. It fell to
garrisons of troupes campées to patrol the colony’s frontiers and pro-
tect the Congo from external attack. A separate force – the troupes en
service territoriale – was established to assist provincial governors with
internal occupation, pacification and social control. Single battalions
of these territorial troops were assigned to the four provincial capitals:
Leopoldville (now Kinshasa, capital of Congo-Kasai), Coquilhatville
(now Mbandaka, capital of Equateur), Stanleyville (now Kisangani,
capital of Orientale) and Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi, capital of
Katanga). Smaller companies of troops were, in addition, posted to all
district headquarters to ensure that even the remotest sector could be
quickly reinforced.21 A reorganization of the police followed in mid-
August, differentiating urban units from their rural counterparts.
The ranks of police commissioner, deputy-commissioner and muni-
cipal police officer were introduced for European personnel serving
in city forces in Leopoldville, Matadi, Stanleyville, Elisabethville and
Jadotville. Precise circumstances in which rural police could call in the
Force publique’s territorial troops were codified.22
This was not just a paper exercise. Henceforth, the African police
rank and file was recruited from the ranks of the troupes en service ter-
ritoriale.23 During 1923 police training schools were created in Force
publique garrisons to retrain black troops as municipal police. Because
so many former soldiers re-enlisted as policemen, the instruction given
to African Force publique recruits at the Lisala military training school
became more relevant to the police service as well.24 In terms of both
career background and practical duties, distinctions between the police
and the colonial army’s internal security branch collapsed.25 Similar
observations could be made about the structure and activities of Force
publique and police forces in the mandate territories of Ruanda-Urundi

nestling at the Belgian Congo’s eastern margins. Although local police
forces were less well established than in their giant colonial neighbour,
by 1928 plans were in hand for a police training school linked to the gov-
ernment’s new administrative centre at Astrida.26 In all three Belgian
colonial territories local commanders could, in dire emergencies, call
upon reservists and volunteer auxiliaries, mainly administrators and
other public servants with previous military experience, to supplement
the ranks.27 The Belgian Congo’s resident European population first
exceeded 10,000 in 1922, of which only 58 per cent were Belgian citi-
zens. So it was perhaps inevitable that the colonial government should
expect its administrators to help maintain order when necessary.28 The
colonial service and its security forces were joined at the hip.29
Despite Governor-general Eugène Henry’s recollection of 1919
as a ‘quiet year’, military pacification continued throughout eastern
Congo. To the west, three separate ‘police actions’ were authorized
in Congo-Kasai. Units were employed to enforce labour recruitment
targets district-by-district, to prevent tax evasion in the sectors abut-
ting Lake Leopold, and to suppress illegal sects in Sankuru district,
an issue and an area that became flashpoints once more in 1931.30 For
all that, the Governor-general was right: 1919 was not an unusually
turbulent year.31 On numerous occasions in Congo-Kasai and in other
provinces the arrival of itinerant tax collectors accompanied by police
escort provoked violence.32 Harder to untangle is whether such out-
breaks stemmed primarily from the tax burden, from the coercive push
towards wage labour that it represented, or from the arbitrary authority
of the local officials administering it.33 If not quite ‘kings of the bush’,
members of the Territoriale retained wide discretionary powers when
implementing official instructions, labour requisitions and criminal
punishments.34 By delaying completion of the necessary judicial paper-
work, they could, for instance, imprison the recalcitrant for additional
days or impose heftier corvée duties to stamp their personal authority.35
The post-war administrative reforms, the colony-wide deployment of
Force publique units, and the latitude afforded Territoriale officials were
not enough to keep the peace. The breadth of the 1931 disorders sug-
gested the exact reverse.36 Forced to rely on sensational press reports for
details of what was happening, the Ministry of Colonies later identified
the three elements identified above – new bureaucratic structures, secur-
ity force availability and administrators’ over-zealousness – as causes of
the Kwango revolt.37 It was in this context that the request to London’s
‘Met’ was made. According to Ministry officials in Brussels, destruction
of a European-owned plantation in Kivu district in February, as well
as disorders in and around Kikwat district six months later indicated

that the colonial security apparatus was deeply flawed.38 Police were
ill-informed and vastly outnumbered. Territoriale administrators were
thrown off-balance by the depth of popular hostility to any European
commercial, missionary or administrative presence.39
Economic activity in the districts of Kwango and Kikwat reportedly
came to a standstill. The rebellion’s supporters refused to use colonial
currency; labourers on palm oil plantations absconded; European trad-
ing companies neither received deliveries, nor made any sales.40 District
administrations responded by imposing martial law – termed an ‘occu-
pation regime’ – in the worst affected areas.41 Few had army reinforce-
ments close by, contrary to government expectations. Force publique
detachments, when they arrived, therefore served as punitive columns
in unsettled areas rather than preventing escalation of the original dis-
order. As a first step, the government-general increased the number of
troupes en service territoriale from 1,820 to 4,550 by transferring men
from the frontier forces (troupes campées).42
Initial efforts to distinguish between a limited ‘police operation’
authorized on 18 June 1931 to sweep through Kandale, and wider ‘mili-
tary operations’ ordered a day later to suppress unrest in the larger
area of Kwango district, soon lost practical meaning. The Force publique
units treated any indications of dissent in the same fashion.43 By 16 July
eighty-four villagers in and around Pukusu were killed.44 News of army
retribution travelled faster than the columns themselves. The first Force
publique reinforcements to arrive in Kikwat territory between 8 and 20
July encountered less resistance as a result. Villagers fled at the first
sign of soldiers, feeding official optimism that the rebellion was subsid-
ing. Commercial activity resumed in the remunerative fruit-growing
region of the Gombambulu chefferie after headmen were coerced into
repudiating the Satanas sect and declaring village fealty to the colonial
administration. But military violence escalated sharply as the soldiers
moved into the administrative territories of Kandale and Haut-Kwilu.45
Troupes en service territoriale closed off access to Kwango at the end of
July while two separate troop companies moved from village to village
demanding ‘submission’. Resistance met a vigorous response – seven
killed in Mulua and Lufuku villages, five at Kimbuende, at least twenty
in Katembo.46
The rate of village submissions quickened in the latter half of August
1931 as the roving columns resumed their work in Kandale. At Mukuku
fifty-six people died in a single encounter with troops.47 By the end of
the month, twenty-three villages in the Yongo and Shimuna chefferies
were cleared. Governor Beernaert notified the Ministry of Colonies
on 11 September that the entire Kwango region had been pacified.

Administrative reoccupation could now begin.48
Sensitive to criticism from Brussels about the high mortality rate,
district commissioner Van den Hollen knew who to blame. The rebel-
lion, he insisted, exposed the local chiefs for what they were: ageing
notables insensitive to community concerns. Some were implicated in
the unrest; others acquiesced in it for fear of losing face.49 Other district
commissaires and Territoriale officials agreed, identifying generational
conflict and outsiders – preachers, witch-doctors, vagrants – as causes
of this crisis in chiefly authority. None mentioned the disruption to the
moral economy of Kwango villages precipitated by sharper conflicts
over resources in the depression years.50 Rather, these incoming reports
attached administrative failings to the chefferies, not, conveniently, to
the colonial officers further up the bureaucratic chain.51 The solution
was a purge of all chiefs compromised over recent months.
The authorities in Leopoldville acted on this interpretation, but only
to a point. On 10 September district commissioners in Congo-Kasai
were instructed to dismiss chiefs involved in the recent unrest, regard-
less of their subsequent role in securing village submissions.52 But dis-
trict administrations were not off the hook. Other, more senior officials
in Leopoldville and Brussels were certain that abundant warnings
about worsening economic conditions and popular resentment of the
tax burden were ignored. It clearly made sense for those closest to the
violence to stress its sectarian aspect and unpredictable, wildfire pro-
gress, but this was a revolt with more tangible socio-economic causes.
The lower administrative tiers and the police, in refusing to treat native
populations as rational economic actors, were caught out by dissent
they should have foreseen.53
The first account to contest the idea that the colonial administration
could be absolved of blame for the Kwango revolt was written back in
June 1931 by a deputy district commissioner, a Monsieur de Williamort.
He was sceptical that disorders involving diffuse populations across a
wide area were wholly attributable to religious fervour for which cus-
tomary chiefs had no answer. De Williamort reviewed previous months’
administrative correspondence from the affected territories. None
referred to the Satanas cult or incipient problems of social control at
chefferie level. Equally revealing, he retraced the precipitous rise in taxes
in 1929–31. Fiscal impositions had increased despite collapses in the
local rubber industry, cotton-growing and commercial food produc-
tion. Finally, he analysed the impact of colonial manpower requisitions
on agricultural production more generally in Kwango and Kandale.54 It
pointed to total economic collapse. A later analysis of local grievances
found additional evidence of chronic hardship. Labour recruitment was

often coercive. Workers for the Portuguese-owned firm Madail, the
region’s largest European employer, which operated palm oil refineries
in the district, complained of falling real wages and inadequate food
rations. The firm’s local suppliers stated that they were paid irregularly,
if at all.55 By late August 1931 press accounts were also making the con-
nection between the clusters of violence in Kandale and Kikwat where
the European administrative presence, although sparse, wrought havoc
in the local economy through its demands for forced labour and taxes.56
In the Belgian National Assembly, the Socialist opposition began saying
much the same.57
Railway construction and forced labour

Reverberations from the Congo’s 1931 disorders in Belgian politics
are better understood when set alongside longer-term arguments over
other contentious aspects of colonial policy. One issue stood out. Forced
labour was a touchstone of political and ethical attitudes to Belgian
colonialism. Like its colonial neighbour Portugal, another notorious
practitioner of forced labour, the Belgian state lacked sufficient finan-
cial wherewithal or technical staff to modernize the Congo’s industrial
production.58 Belgium’s internal economy and its financial market were
highly capitalized, but successive governments did not invest significant
proportions of state revenues in colonial development.59 Arguably, they
didn’t need to do so. Private venture capital filled the gap. Investors
were tempted by government incentives including monopoly rights,
subsidies and guaranteed rates of interest. Mining enterprises, palm
oil plantations, railway companies and construction firms proliferated
after 1918.60 All required a large, assured labour supply.
The coercion intrinsic to capital accumulation from the Congo
divided Belgian party political opinion more acutely after the barrage of
ILO criticism directed at methods of worker recruitment, use of child
labour and high mortality rates, particularly in the mining and palm oil
sectors and among labourers building railway lines to transport minerals
to the coast.61 The ILO’s voice was hard to ignore. It echoed the League
of Nations’ Slavery Convention of 1926, which reiterated international
condemnation of working practices analogous to slavery.62 Anti-colonial
lobby groups augmented the critical chorus. Foremost among them was
the League against Imperialism, whose inaugural 1927 conference was
held in Brussels. Their condemnation pushed Congolese railway work-
ers’ dreadful working conditions to the forefront of Belgian political
debate. Supporters of the Congo’s transport network did themselves
no favours by pursuing bitter arguments with their French commer-

cial rivals meanwhile. French sponsorship of an alternative rail link
through their Congolese territory to the Atlantic port of Pointe Noire –
the notorious Congo-Ocean line – threatened the economic viability of
the existing Belgian service between Leopoldville and Matadi. A deep
water port, Pointe Noire in French-ruled Congo could accommodate
much larger vessels to ship the region’s export produce.63
What began in the early 1920s as an argument between competing
consortia was overtaken towards the end of the decade by the bad press
resulting from graphic literary accounts, journalists’ reports and parlia-
mentary scrutiny about death rates among the Congo’s railway build-
ers. Once again, the railways’ backers were their own worst enemy. On
3 August 1929 the Belgian Embassy in Paris condemned members of
France’s Supreme Colonial Council for making inflated claims about the
Congo-Ocean line’s commercial potential. Recognizing that economic
arguments had been superseded by humanitarian concern in France
and elsewhere over the working conditions of the line’s 8,000 African
labourers, the Belgian government highlighted reports of forced recruit-
ment and a 40 per cent mortality rate. Far better, they implied, to use
the existing Leopoldville-Matadi line instead. The Belgian interven-
tion provoked an angry response from the Supreme Colonial Council,
which insisted that annual mortality rates never exceeded 12 per cent
among the Congo-Ocean workforce. The suggestion that the death of
more than one in ten workers each year should be looked on favourably
pointed to a stunning lack of official remorse. The Council went on to
cite Belgian official documents confirming death rates of up to 17 per
cent during the original construction of the line to Matadi, the implica-
tion being that if French practices were bad, the Belgians’ were worse.64
The severity of Belgian labour requisitions was certainly greater than
equivalent French practices in thinly populated areas of Equatorial
Africa, from where the bulk of the workers for the Congo-Ocean line
were drawn. But this was a difference in extent, not approach.65 By
1930, then, official arguments to justify continuing forced labour were
debased into a grotesque arithmetical rhetoric of lesser evils.
Spurred by the ILO’s mounting criticism, a revealing debate on forced
labour took place on 28 March 1930 in the Chamber of Representatives,
lower house of the Belgian National Assembly. Discussion centred on
the damaging social consequences of economic modernization. Even
Socialist parliamentarians, led by Émile Vandervelde, conceded that
the Congo’s forced labour abuses originated in hasty, poorly planned
colonial industrialization. The inevitable result was unanticipated
demands for labour after a trading concession was granted or a new
industrial concern established. Desperate to encourage inward invest-

ment, the authorities would employ police and troops to transport work-
ers between districts to the workplace. Drawing on evidence supplied
by Catholic missionary groups, Vandervelde stressed that the coer-
cion inherent in forced labour was merely its most obvious drawback.
The entire system also undermined the foundations of rural society.
It broke up extended family groups and denuded communities of vital
manpower. He doubted whether the government had made any serious
attempt at reform; on the contrary, the colony had witnessed unparal-
leled industrial growth over the preceding five years.66
It fell to Prime Minister Henri Jaspar to respond in his capacity as
Minister of Colonies. A ministerial veteran known for his pioneering work
in child protection, Jaspar conceded that industrial expansion explained
the problem. But he ridiculed the idea that modernization, which con-
ferred material, cultural and spiritual benefits, should be stopped because
it entailed temporary population transfers. Jaspar acknowledged mission-
aries’ criticisms but he noted that they, too, supported forced labour,
within limits. Everyone realised that abuses took place, but the proper
action was the limited official inquiry then under way.67
It was a stock response, which side-stepped the eruption of critical let-
ters and articles in the press. Three months after the Chamber debate,
La dernière heure, a Liberal paper with the largest circulation in Brussels,
published a critique of a scathing report on forced labour by Pierre
Orts, president of the Red Cross in Congo. The newspaper alleged a
cover-up. District commissioners and Territoriale officials denied Orts
the opportunity to gather testimony from Congolese victims of the
practice. As a result, neither he nor the parliamentarians appreciated
the role of police and troops in conscripting labourers. Force publique
units would march through a recruitment area knowing that some of
the inhabitants would take flight. Absconding would then be construed
as dissent and used to justify the seizure of all eligible males. Larger
numbers than were actually required would also be taken to serve in
the colonial militia. After a few days some would be given the option
to work on the railways for one or two years as an alternative to seven
years’ compulsory militia service. The appearance of voluntary labour
recruitment to the railway gangs was thereby preserved.68 True or not,
these claims were forgotten amidst the furore over the ILO’s June 1930
decision to promote a Native Labour Code imposing curbs on the use
of forced labour for public works. Belgium’s colonial business lobby
complained loudest, mocking the hypocrisy of other colonial powers
in accepting ILO recommendations. The alternative to compulsory
labour on infrastructure projects such as road and railway construction
was a new dark age, a return to the days of columns of African porters
decimated by illness as they hacked paths into the interior and women
condemned to remain ‘beasts of burden’ for want of roads or vehicles to
facilitate the transportation of goods.69
The business lobby’s emotive, quasi-ethical defence of forced labour
illustrated how arguments in Belgium over colonial recruitment and
workplace abuses evolved at the start of the depression. Earlier sweep-
ing attacks on forced labour as an unacceptable by-product of industrial
modernization condensed into something narrower. By July 1930 pub-
lic and party political criticism focused on corporate practices rather
than condemnation of the colonial authorities or colonialism itself. In
these circumstances, Jaspar managed to dismiss Socialist demands that
a more far-reaching commission of inquiry should go to Leopoldville to
sort fact from fiction.70
Renewed violence after the Kwango revolt

Acrimonious exchanges about connections between forced labour and
rebellion in the Congo return us to the official investigation of the
origins of the Kwango revolt. After reviewing the Leopoldville gov-
ernment’s analysis of events, the new Minister of Colonies, another
Catholic Union veteran, Paul Crokaert, intervened.71 He reminded
Governor-general Auguste Tilkens on 15 September 1931 of several
instances in which Force publique patrols in Congo-Kasai’s occupied
districts were fired upon. The weapons used indicated that former
security force personnel must have sided with the rebels, suggesting a
deeper social malaise brought on by harsh economic conditions.72
Crokaert took office in early June in the revolt’s opening stages.
Not until September did he feel confident enough to dismiss the colo-
nial administration’s efforts to pass the blame onto the chefferies. He
found support from Eugène Jungers, a long-serving administrator and
future Governor-general. Jungers suspected that the intensity of village
opposition reflected the manner in which police and troops had origin-
ally acted in enforcing chefferie labour demands and fiscal exactions.73
Evidence also emerged in November 1931 that prisoners captured by
the Force publique were whipped to death with the chicotte. The favoured
instrument of plantation overseers, the army’s use of the whip added
to the impression that the methods applied to enforce labour discipline
and political submission differed only in extent.74
Discussions between Brussels and Leopoldville over the Kwango
revolt continued as further disorder erupted during September 1931 in
Sankuru district, around Lake Leopold, and on the fringes of Equateur
province. On this occasion, the link between commercial retrenchment

in key export industries, increasing colonial taxation and other agri-
cultural impositions was more quickly made. In 1930 the hated impôt
indigène head tax brought in 102.4 million francs; in 1931 the figure rose
to 121 million. Close to a 20 per cent increase, the rise was explained
by a commensurate fall in customs revenues as net volumes of traded
commodities declined.75 The Belgian domestic market, struggling with
problems of its own, could not be expected to absorb ever-increasing
proportions of the Congo’s principal exports – copper, diamonds, gold,
palm oil, palm kernels, copal and, increasingly, cotton and coffee.76 So
the colonial administration would have to reduce its costs dramatically
before any reductions in the tax burden on individual Congolese could
occur.77 The Belgian franc was also chronically over-valued. Part of the
so-called ‘gold bloc’ of currencies, led by the French franc, it remained
tied to a gold standard after the devaluations of sterling and the US
dollar in 1931. Congo’s industrial exporters, their produce traded in
Belgian francs, struggled to compete. In 1932 the colony’s exports fell
by 24.56 per cent from 273,373 metric tonnes to 206,239, amount-
ing to a 39.5 per cent reduction in export revenue. Over a quarter of
Congolese-owned businesses closed in 1932 alone.78
Charles Duchesne, Governor of Equateur province, meanwhile
ordered his district commissioners to encourage market trading and
additional forms of monetary employment in the territories worst
affected by the renewed unrest. Once again, a charismatic, anti-Euro-
pean movement had been allowed to re-emerge among villagers pun-
ished because they lacked the money to pay their taxes. ‘Wrong-headed’
rather than ‘warlike’, the Dengese people in particular had been pushed
to the limit by the economic crisis. Falling consumption and lower prices
prevented them from selling surplus produce and accumulating cash
savings. This had made it easy for the devotees of millenarian cults to
‘fish in troubled waters’ with talk of expelling all traces of the European
presence. A more limited police action rather than a full-blown military
sweep was all that was required.79 The poorly armed Dengese avoided
armed units whenever possible and the disorders petered out over the
next three months.80 Pneumonia and pleurisy took a heavier toll of the
Congolese porters that accompanied the troupes en service territoriale
than any organized attacks.81 By late October Duchesne was advising
the Leopoldville government that more solid administrative structures,
backed by a larger security force presence, would restore calm and the
resumption of commercial activity in his province.82 A little premature,
he proved right nonetheless. The military sweep through Dengese ter-
ritory was declared over on 25 February 1932.83 Thirty-two Dengese
suspects were taken into custody. Seven were held on murder charges,
and six for attempted murder. Five Congolese policemen and two chiefs’
messengers figured among the remainder accused of sedition.84
Duchesne’s sympathy for the Dengese found little echo across the
provincial boundary in Congo-Kasai where news of another outbreak
so soon after the Kwango disorders was treated more severely. On 20
October 1932 Tilkens’ deputy, Joseph Beernaert, who also served as
Congo-Kasai’s Governor, invoked emergency powers under two decrees
dating from 1906 and 1920.85 Troops were requisitioned to restore order
in five chefferies to which martial law was applied.86 Sankuru’s district
commissioner also took a dimmer view of ‘fetishism’, insisting that trad-
itional religious practice had been warped into a xenophobia in which
the expulsion of Europeans was depicted as a panacea.87 He dispatched
two Force publique squadrons to secure village submissions in Kole ter-
ritory. Operations began on 3 October and continued for the rest of
the year.88 Troops fanned out from one village to the next, enforcing
submissions along the way. On 31 December Governor-general Tilkens
reported that martial law was to be replaced with a less stringent police
‘occupation regime’ (actually a variant of the same thing).89
Investigation into the underlying causes of these new disorders contin-
ued for a further eighteen months. Local missionaries were among the
first to make their opinions heard. They rehearsed Duchesne’s earlier
suggestion about the Dengese, advising Minister of Colonies Crokaert
in January 1932 that the Sankuru unrest was really a tax revolt pre-
cipitated by the sharp decline in the local monetary economy.90 Judicial
magistrates sent to record testimony from villagers in Sankuru district
thought otherwise. Four members of the police judiciaire gathered evi-
dence about abuses before and during the recent unrest, including kill-
ings, whippings and rape. The Equateur administration also appointed
a magistrate, a Monsieur Maffei, to evaluate the evidence gathered by
the police judiciaire with a view to future prosecutions. To that end,
Maffei collected further testimonies in Kole territory.91 The magistrate
did a thorough job. He filed four separate reports in March 1933. Two
dealt with tax and labour exactions in Kole territory. Another examined
the causes of revolt among the Dengese and Basongo-meno more gen-
erally. A final report analysed assaults and killings by soldiers and local
police guards during the course of operations in late 1931.92 Each drew
on witness accounts.
The reports were constrained by the Belgian legal procedures within
which Maffei worked. He required corroborated statements detailing
abuses or physical evidence of their outcome to take matters forward.
The deaths of some victims, the absence of others, made things harder.
Patrimonial authority in extended family groups disbarred women

and girls from providing independent testimony.93 Language barri-
ers, different conceptions of time and the inevitable contradictions of
eye-witness accounts provided weeks and months after the events in
question left the magistrate with reams of reportage that, he confessed,
seemed contradictory. By the end of the process his exasperation verged
on racist caricature: ‘All of this’, he concluded, ‘demonstrates that it
is impossible to have the least confidence in Dengese claims. They lie
habitually, as if under the influence of an unseen command, and above
all when it comes to explaining their participation in the attacks which
resulted in the deaths so far recorded.’ No cases against officials or
soldiers were initiated.94
Whatever their accuracy, rereading Maffei’s lengthy reports, the
weight of cumulative evidence – of grievances articulated and accusa-
tions repeated time after time – remains striking. It was clear that the
inhabitants of Kole territory were coerced into commercial cotton cul-
tivation, forced to abandon their own plots by a Territoriale official who
employed local overseers to ensure that the necessary labour service
was performed.95 These overseers used their chicottes freely. Some stole
women and committed multiple rapes. Maffei found evidence of men
scarred by repeated lashes and of traumatized women ready to testify as
victims of sexual violence.96 But he focused instead on the fact that little
cotton had actually been sown on plantations in Kole territory, proof, he
insisted, that forced labour exactions could not have been so severe.97
The magistrate did compile a dossier of other alleged abuses, includ-
ing the accusation that overseers gratuitously compelled women to per-
form fieldwork naked, but the matter was then handed over to the local
prosecutor.98 Maffei was also prepared to pursue cases against local
policemen and chiefs’ messengers accused of corruption, theft, assault
and rape in Dengese villages. Itinerant police customarily demanded
food when passing through villages during their tours of duty but,
once again, accumulated evidence suggested that policemen seized far
more.99 Again, as in the sexual assault cases, most victims were married
women. Ultimately, Maffei was unconvinced, revealing more facets to
his prejudice with a throwaway remark. ‘There is no doubt that mar-
ried [Dengese] women give themselves voluntarily to messengers and
policemen because they receive gifts in return. Being Dengese does not
mean that they are any less female!’100
In the end, both the police judiciaire and the investigating magistrate
were more impressed by dry statistics than by what they dismissed as sal-
acious accounts. Yet, here, too, the evidence pointed in the same direc-
tion. Two aspects of colonial tutelage aroused the strongest opposition.
One was forcible crop cultivation. During the first days of the revolt,
fields of rice, another crop that the Dengese had been compelled to grow,
were destroyed. For the same reason, the building of a road to facilitate
crop transport was violently opposed. The second source of dissent was
the steep rise in the tax burden. Head tax had more than doubled in
the three years 1929 to 1931.101 Antagonism arose both because it was
increasingly difficult to pay the sums required and because accumulat-
ing the requisite cash involved suborning oneself to the colonial monet-
ary economy.102 For the Dengese and the Basongo-meno, tax payment
meant waged work and abandonment of the village, which they equated
with a loss of personal identity, customary status and cultural integrity.
It was in this sphere of moral economy that opposition to taxes inter-
sected with millenarian calls to reject European influence. The mon-
etization of the local economy, the intrusive, abusive presence of police
and other local officials, plus the loss of local trading opportunities
in the depression had undermined traditional patterns of family and
village economics and respect for chiefly authority.103 These were not
issues on which the investigating magistrates or the Territoriale officers
in the affected regions wished to dwell.104 Official reportage and judicial
investigation began from the premise that disorders were anomalous,
not a logical reaction to structural economic problems, cultural affronts
and security force abuses.
Depression-era reforms and the

changing labour market
In the first week of August 1932 Paul Tschoffen toured the Kwango
region. Successor to Crokaert as Minister of Colonies, Tschoffen was
another leading light of the Catholic Union. From the Kwango, he
headed east to Elisabethville and talks with executives of the Union
Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK).105 Union Minière was part of the
Société Générale de Belgique (SG), a holding company with strong royal
connections that remained the colony’s economic giant.106 Aided by its
SG patron, UMHK grew rapidly from its inception in 1906. It domi-
nated copper mining in Katanga by the start of the inter-war period.107
Union Minière’s early operations were also supported by another royal-
related chartered company, the Comité Spécial du Katanga, responsible
for developing the communications infrastructure necessary to maximize
mineral extraction from the region.108 With such cast-iron support,
UMHK could hardly fail.
Tschoffen’s eagerness to parley with the company’s executives in
Katanga confirmed that problems other than the recent rebellions were
Table 12.1 Numbers of European-owned industrial, commercial and

agricultural businesses in the Belgian Congo, 1930–1
Belgian-owned companies Total companies and businesses
Provinces 1930 1931 1930 1931

Katanga 1,218 998 2,791 2,419
Congo-Kasai 1,283 1,102 2,310 2,059
Orientale 1,227 1,215 2,290 1,857
Equateur 746 644 1,421 1,208
Total 4,474 3,959 8,812 7,543
Source: AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport sur l’administration du Congo Belge pendant
l’année 1931, chapitre VII: Situation économique, tableau 1’.
claiming government attention. In the preceding boom years of 1925

to 1928 employers throughout the colony complained of labour short-
ages.109 Police involvement in the recruitment, movement and surveil-
lance of workers increased in response. The crash transformed labour
shortage into surplus. Unemployed workers posed new problems to
local administrators accustomed to the challenges of labour recruit-
ment.110 And businesses’ cutbacks multiplied. By December 1931 the
number of European-owned factories and trading posts to have closed
since the onset of the economic crisis topped a thousand.111 The closure
rate, shown in Table 12.1 above, caused particular alarm.
Large employers, including the railway and mining companies, laid
off thousands during 1931.112 Joblessness soared.113 Squatter camps
sprang up near large industrial sites as workers sought casual day
labour. Shantytowns swelled with new arrivals as former miners, rail-
way builders and plantation labourers flocked to the provincial capitals
in search of work. By the winter of 1931 unauthorized internal eco-
nomic migration and the corrosive social effects of ‘idleness’ (oisiveté)
among former wage labourers were major administrative preoccupa-
tions.114 Police units, previously diverted to trouble-spots in the interior
were reassigned to regulate this human traffic. They issued workers with
travel permits or ‘licences’ to seek employment outside their home dis-
trict, and they detained those found seeking work without the required
paperwork.
In towns, mining districts and plantations, police cleared squatter
camps, and enforced quarantine confinements for migrant labour-
ers. Those returning to municipal postings monitored slum districts
for signs of unrest.115 Troupes en service territoriale were used to guard
road-building gangs, monitoring the performance of required corvée

labour and ensuring that gang members did not abscond to become
unlicensed workers in the black economy.116 These regulatory pro
cesses were, in turn, tied to the resumption of local government
reorganization, the pace of which quickened as the political violence
of 1931 died down.
Orientale province blazed the trail in creating new chefferies with add-
itional bureaucratic responsibilities. The process began in earnest in the
early 1920s following the delimitation of provincial, district and sector
boundaries and a series of ethnographic studies intended to bring the
lowest tiers of local administration into line with ethnic, linguistic and
clan affiliations between village communities. Supposedly conducted
in sympathy with traditional hierarchies of power, revitalizing the chef-
ferie system was portrayed by the Leopoldville government as intrin-
sically beneficial. Yet, in Congo-Kasai and Katanga, the provinces
where commercialization and wage labour made the greatest inroads,
restoring the chefferies was unpopular with officials.117 In Congo-Kasai
native tribunals (tribunaux indigènes) were the preferred means to dele-
gate judicial authority to local communities. Use of these tribunals con-
ferred two advantages. First, they involved no lasting change to local
administration. Second, they relieved the Territoriale and the police of
unwelcome journeys into remote districts to prosecute minor misde-
meanours. Sixty-five such tribunals were established in Congo-Kasai
in 1926 alone.118 Only in Orientale and Equateur would the programme
of chefferie creation be sustained. Between 1930 and 1931 the number
of chefferies registered in Orientale increased from 405 to 459. Another
twenty-nine were added in 1932, bringing the province’s total to 488.
Only Equateur came anywhere close to this figure, with 292 chefferies
in place by December 1932. By contrast, Congo-Kasai, epicentre of the
recent unrest, lagged behind, with only ninety chefferies listed by the
end of the same period. Justified at the time as an indicator of efficient
indirect rule, chefferie creation also reduced the colony’s budget def-
icit.119 Sceptical Territoriale administrators had to persuade their superi-
ors that native tribunals could be as cheap.
The colony’s security forces also faced economies. Cutbacks were
made to barracks and army camps. Garrisons were expected to be self-
supporting, growing their own food, hunting and selling their own
meat.120 Once the disorders subsided, additional troops began working
on civil engineering projects: bridges, roads and public buildings pre-
viously ordered by their local administration, for which there were no
longer funds to pay private contractors.121 Other cuts were more long-
standing. Recruitment of NCOs to the Force publique was suspended
in 1930. Junior officers reaching retirement age were not replaced. So

many officer vacancies were unfilled that commanders worried that
the colonial army’s system of internal promotions faced collapse. An
ordinance of 26 April 1932 reduced army staffs, another way of cutting
senior posts. Rank and file numbers fell by 651. Although 52 per cent
of Force publique personnel who reached the end of their service term
in 1931 sought re-enlistment, the force faced a net cut from 14,970
effectives to 14,422. By the end of 1932 army strength was down to
13,665.122
Most significant organizationally, Governor Tilkens’ April 1932
ordinance suspended the assignment of troupes en service territoriale
as reserves for rapid deployment from district capitals. To meet any
shortfalls during civil unrest, frontline troupes campées were, for the
first time, made available for internal policing. Three months later, on
29 June 1932, Tilkens went further, authorizing a major expansion of
European volunteer militias. Recruited from the white business com-
munity, these auxiliary forces assisted the army and police in serious
cases of disorder. In Katanga alone this volunteer reserve increased
in size from 85 European personnel at the start of 1932 to 264 by
the end of the year.123 By the start of 1935 standing volunteer units
were in place in the colony’s larger provincial towns.124 The growth of
this white militia was more remarkable because hundreds of Belgian
company employees were, at the time, returning home, victims of
the colony’s commercial crisis.125 Katanga, heartland of the mining
industry, was especially badly affected. Its registered European popu-
lation, which stood at 10,477 on 1 January 1930, had fallen to 6,427
three years later.126
Reductions to overall numbers of public employees helped restore
budgetary balance, but did nothing to alter economic conditions.
Moreover, officials from national to provincial level were uncertain
about the depression’s impact on the colonial labour market because
workforce statistics were so imprecise. It proved impossible to keep
track of contracted workers, let alone those who alternated between
industrial employment, farming and an informal economy that existed
between the two. Only those directly employed by the state or by large
industrial concerns such as UMHK could be accurately counted. These
figures made stark reading: 125,326 out of 291,961 state employees laid
off, mostly from public works projects and railway construction, since
December 1929.127 As these numbers indicated, the state and the Union
Minière dominated the Belgian Congo’s labour market. So it is worth
dwelling on the relationship between them, particularly insofar as it
touched upon the colony’s policing.
The Union Minière du Haut Katanga,

police and labour
The largest copper mining company in the Belgian Congo, the Union
Minière towered over Katanga’s economy. UMHK’s connection to its
parent company, Société Générale, assured its privileged status, par-
ticularly after SG’s acquisition in 1928 of the Banque d’Outre-Mer,
which conferred control over the Congo’s largest trading company, the
Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l’Industrie.128 A private corpor-
ation, UMHK acquired certain vestiges of an autonomous adminis-
tration. It disbursed a substantial welfare budget. And it maintained a
company native affairs service, which kept detailed personnel files on a
workforce that, by 1930, exceeded 16,000. Housing for worker families,
a piped water supply, educational facilities, on-site medical dispensaries
and midwifery clinics impressed outside visitors more accustomed to the
overcrowded mining camps across the border in Northern Rhodesia’s
copper-belt.129 UMHK’s workers were tightly controlled, however.
Incidences of flight, as much an act of desperation as a rational eco-
nomic choice, increased after longer contract terms were imposed in
the mid-1920s.130 The problem intensified as day rates plummeted from
a thirty franc average in 1930 to sixteen francs in 1932.131 Permits were
introduced for journeys off-site.132 Overseers, usually former mine-
workers, administered discipline and distributed food to keep workers
in place. Force publique units patrolled camp perimeters and searched
for absentees in nearby settlements.133
UMHK’s welfare investments and its requirement for a perman-
ent police presence were easily explained. Katanga was thinly popu-
lated, remote from the Belgian Congo’s major urban centres. In the
first twenty years of company operations, its workforce was heteroge-
neous. Most Congolese workers from surrounding districts and other
provinces were forcibly recruited by the Force publique and private
recruitment agencies. Alongside them were Rwandans who moved
south looking for work and experienced mineworkers from Northern
Rhodesia and Portuguese Angola.134 UMHK recruitment stations
gained a new lease of life with the completion of coastal railway links
to Bas Congo and the Angolan port of Benguela between 1928 and
1931.135 Even so, when copper prices tumbled in 1930 the company
estimated that it cost an average of £16 per head to bring in migrant
labourers and equip them for work in the mines. Often literate and
conscious of their rights as contracted labourers, mineworkers from
the Rhodesias were considered particularly obstreperous.136 Typically
single men, these outsiders faced exceptional dangers. Few had any
resistance to local strains of malaria. Overcrowding and overwork
increased their susceptibility to pulmonary diseases, tuberculosis and

pneumonia especially.137
The company’s original lines were modelled on the South African
barrack-type dormitories that were instrumental in provoking the
Rand strikes of 1918 to 1922. Conditions were appalling. Dank earth
floors, tight-packed bunks and poor hygiene promoted infectivity.138
UMHK was eager to make greater use of local labour but, ironically,
was thwarted by state regulations whose introduction it had endorsed.
By the 1920s extensive restrictions on workers’ freedom of movement
were in place. Some were designed to regulate official labour recruit-
ment and unofficial economic migration. Others were subsumed within
a regulatory system of health ordinances designed to contain the spread
of epidemics such as sleeping sickness.139
The company turned to social engineering to stabilize labour sup-
ply. Existing workers were encouraged to move their families into the
camps, to have regular health checks, and to educate their children for
life as company employees.140 After compulsory vaccinations against
smallpox, typhoid and meningitis administered by the on-site medical
staff of Catholic White Sisters, new arrivals were ‘offered’ longer-term
contracts as an inducement to stay put.141 It was also the White Sisters,
with a staff of African orderlies, who ran the company hospital at
Lubumbashi. Two hundred beds were available. With the admission of
wives and dependants to the mining compounds, levels of prostitution,
the incidence of venereal diseases and infant mortality rates all began
to fall.142 By 1930, when UMHK’s welfare spending first exceeded one
million Belgian francs, the social profile of its labour force had changed
dramatically as shown in Table 12.2 below.143
The UMHK’s welfare initiatives were less enlightened altruism than
a race against time. Their goal was to neutralize the challenges of labour
shortage and worker militancy.144 As we have seen, similar British and
South African mining company initiatives were evident in Northern
Rhodesia’s copper-belt. And the labour unrest witnessed in UMHK
mining compounds between 1929 and 1931 was outstripped by later
copper-belt protests.145 Katanga’s lower population density, the author-
ities’ readiness to assist Union Minière to resolve its labour problems
and the stronger police presence in the vicinity of mining settlements
curbed strike actions. Gradual improvements in economic conditions
also helped. Colony-wide unemployment began to fall in 1933, with
25,844 additional public service posts created. Officials at national
and provincial level expressed cautious optimism that the worst of the
depression was over.146 Yet the Congo’s parlous budgetary position sug-
gested otherwise. With a deficit of over 187 million francs – that is, over
40 per cent of total revenue – the Leopoldville government needed a
Table 12.2 Union Minière du Haut Katanga workforce composition,

1925–30
Percentage Children
Number Number of Number Number of married per hundred
Date of workers bachelors of women of children workers families
1924 12,111 10,318 1,793 – 14.8 –

1925 13,849 11,343 2,506 – 18.8 –
1926 13,275 10,335 2,940 940 22.1 31.9
1927 15,477 11,845 3,632 1,423 23.6 38.9
1928 15,345 10,643 4,702 2,105 30.6 44.7
1929 17,257 11,440 5,817 3,149 33.7 54.1
1930 16,340 9,667 6,673 4,457 40.8 66.8
Source: TNA, CO 795/49/12, ‘A review of conditions existing in the mining camps of

the Union Minière du Haut Katanga’, n.d., July–August, 1932, p. 13.
165 million emergency loan from Belgium’s Treasury to see it through

the year.147 For all that, the colony’s leading industries turned a cor-
ner in 1933. Exporters of copper, palm oil and nuts, cobalt and cotton
recorded large year-on-year increases in tonnages shipped. Total raw
material exports grew by almost 31 per cent.148 The colony also showed
marginal strengthening in the labour market. Katanga registered the
strongest early signs of recovery thanks to the recovery in copper prices.
But cuts to food rations and real wages in the mining sector were not
restored. And, fearful of worker protest, administrators in mining areas
expressed alarm at continuing falls in numbers of European business
personnel. These declined by 11 per cent in 1933 alone.149
Governor Tilkens’ administration could not be accused of sitting on
its hands in the depression years. In readiness for the October 1933 tran-
sition from four to six provinces the Force publique was restructured once
more. A Governor’s ordinance of 29 September subdivided the army
into three regional commands, each encompassing two provinces.150
More relevant to us here, the colony’s improving economic fortunes ena-
bled Tilkens to reverse some earlier austerity measures to enhance the
troops’ internal policing role. Authorization was given to replace retiring
officers and NCOs; total force strength climbed back above 14,000. The
former demarcation between troupes en service territoriale, often serving as
de facto police, and the more elite troupes campées was, in theory, restored.
In practice, troupes campées continued with policing operations in Kasai
and Equateur, and served as occupiers in Kwango district.151
Colony-wide, the picture was similar in 1934. Prices were still
depressed, although commercial activity and export volumes both
increased.152 Administrative reorganization accelerated meanwhile.

Police occupations – two in Equateur, one each in Orientale and
Katanga – were ordered to assist the establishment of a larger administra-
tive presence. Municipal forces cleared the major towns of unemployed
newcomers, who were compelled to return to their home districts.153
Police also intervened at numerous points throughout the colony where
opposition to colonial and chefferie tax demands provoked local oppos-
ition.154 Coercion was not everywhere apparent, however. For the first
time in three years army and police occupiers kept out of the once unruly
Sankuru district.155 And, in an effort to encourage economic migrants
to leave the major towns, provincial administrations worked to increase
areas under cultivation, to distribute new seed types and thus diversify
crop production.156 Seen from an official standpoint, the renewed focus
on agronomics underlined the improvement in social conditions.157
Epilogue: emerging from the depression

The Congo’s economic situation and the resultant use of its security
forces changed dramatically following the devaluation of the Belgian
and Congolese franc enacted by Paul van Zeeland’s Socialist coalition
government in late March 1935. Now valued against a reduced meas-
ure of gold, franc exchange rates fell from 21.4 to 29.5 against the dol-
lar, and from 103.3 to 143.4 against sterling. Exports, rendered more
competitive, took off.158 The brighter economic outlook was not entirely
attributable to the March 1935 devaluation. The colonial government
balanced its 1934 budget thanks to recovery in the agricultural mar-
ket, growth in cash-crop farming and increased tax receipts. In 1935 it
posted a net budget surplus of 2.9 million francs, the first since 1929.
But devaluation encouraged the Brussels government to reschedule the
interest payments on the Congo’s outstanding long-term debts, thereby
lessening the cost of interest charges to the colonial administration.159
Pierre Ryckmans, who took over from Tilkens as Governor-general
in October 1934, estimated that the devaluation transformed the polit-
ical scene too. Force publique garrisons remained in barracks throughout
1935. No new police occupations were ordered. In December, security
forces finally withdrew from the Kwango, ending the longest emergency
occupation of the depression period. Its security costs falling, state fund-
ing for medical programmes and educational provision resumed.160 By
the end of 1937 Ryckmans could point to the longest spell since the war
without police occupations or recourse to martial law.161
Katanga’s mining sector was in the vanguard of the economic recov-
ery with demand for strategic minerals fuelled by industrial nations
desperate to rearm. Copper mines accounted for between 30 and 38 per

cent of the export tonnage shipped out of the colony in 1935 and 1936,
even though trade in copper was still subject to international restric-
tion.162 Mineworkers had, by this point, tried and failed to extract
workplace concessions through strike action. Anticipating the situ-
ation in Northern Rhodesia by over four years, disorders in Katanga’s
copper-belt had peaked by 1931.163 Where protest policing occurred in
the late 1930s it was devoted primarily to the suppression of religious
sects, some of them familiar – Kitawala in Katanga and variants of
Kibanguism in Leopoldville and Kasai – others more transient. This,
the colonial authorities concluded, a little perversely, was cause for opti-
mism because religious opposition was not consciously anti-colonial
but merely xenophobic in its anti-European manifestations.164 Other
key indicators – tax receipts, the incidence of police occupations, labour
recruitment and the performance of corvée obligations – all pointed to
heightened labour discipline and renewed political calm. Territoriale
officials were credited with having accomplished the rationalization of
local government in the toughest economic conditions since direct gov-
ernment rule began in 1908.165
Ryckmans’ government took greatest pride in its devolution of judi-
cial powers and tax collection obligations to chiefly authorities. The
new chefferie programme was substantially completed by 1937, as was
the expansion in the number of native tribunals. In some provinces,
according to government figures, chefferies assumed the entire burden
of the head tax. This left room for petty corruption and alarming vari-
ations in the sums collected and the means used to collect. These faults
notwithstanding, the native affairs service pronounced the new system
a success. Police and Territoriale agents were taken out of the frontline
of resistance to taxes and labour quotas, still the two principal causes
of local antagonism to colonial intrusion. District administrators could
assume an arbitral role instead, their interventions even welcomed when
they curbed the excessive zeal of certain chiefs.166
All of this suggests that protest policing in the Belgian Congo, while
different in form and extent from French and British colonial experi-
ence, was driven by the same motor of political economy. Connections
between government, industry and police were exceptionally strong in
the Congolese interior, but they were redolent of colonial practices else-
where – in French Vietnam or the British Caribbean for instance. The
depression catalysed dissent and reoriented security force activity in
the Congo much as in the other territories studied in previous chapters.
More than ever, extractive economics shaped the political culture of the
police and the Force publique.
Conclusion
The preceding chapters have argued that political, economic and

cultural connections between government, police and key industrial
concerns were critical determinants of protest policing, often more so
than a simple adversarial relationship between imperial authorities and
their anti-colonial opponents in nationalist or communist parties, reli-
gious organizations or other civil society groups. Put differently, the
protests that took up most colonial police time after 1918 were more
industrial than political in origin. Policing decisions about such protests
in individual territories reflected the ways in which networks of influ-
ence between officials, managers and police authorities operated locally.
The depression was a catalyst here. It weakened the export sectors on
which most colonial Treasuries relied. Life became significantly harder
for waged workers and the social relations that police were required to
maintain were, to varying degrees, destabilized. This does not mean
that manifestations of anti-colonial sentiment were unaffected by cul-
tural conflicts and social dynamics unique to particular communities.
Nor does it imply that collective violence was always instrumentally
tied to the material condition of those involved. But, at the macro-level
of comparison between colonies and empires, it does mean that the link
between changing economic conditions and consequent treatment of
colonial workforces is the most recurrent marker of European colonial
policing between the two world wars.
So what? To suggest that we might learn something from a political
economy approach to the forms and practices of empire policing is,
in some ways, banal. The contention that colonial police – and espe-
cially the more repressive kind – put the interests of ruling political
and economic elites above those of a subject people seems self-evident.
It merely connects police activity to the security of unrepresentative
government institutions, which lacked any secure foundation in the
legitimacy conferred by popular assent to their presence, much less,
their actions. A Marxist interpretation of colonial states as mere append-
ages of European capitalist interest is easily disproved. But few would
325
deny that colonial governments existed in some measure to promote

the commercial interests of the businesses, banks and foreign investors
operating within their territorial jurisdiction. Colonial police forces
were elements of what Fred Cooper dubbed ‘the gatekeeper state’, part
of an institutional apparatus designed to minimize external interfer-
ence and maximize internal control.1
It is important here to distinguish between police forces, whose
involvement in supporting economic activity was more or less constant
and colonial militaries for which it was not. Despite their engagement in
internal repression or ‘pacification’, the chief concern of colonial armies
was never to enhance the economic output of colonies. Admittedly,
military operations were often justified as ‘clearing a path’ for commer-
cial activity or putting down unrest to facilitate its resumption. Even so,
it is difficult to view organized military formations employed to destroy
rather than to administer as the handmaidens of economic policy.2
Police, by contrast, were intimately involved with the day-to-day for-
tunes of colonial industries, labour markets and workforces, whether
in times of peace or internal revolt. It is thus possible to view them as a
pillar of colonial economic activity to which occasional military support
was added.
I have not, I hope, suggested that one nation’s colonial police forces
were, in any meaningful way, better than others. Nor is it intended to
suggest the reverse: that all colonial police are essentially indistinguish-
able because of the generic social relations inherent to colonialism and,
in that sense, reducible to the same basic model. Tautological, clichéd
and unfair, such standpoints are reductive and unhistorical. Yet, the
book has indicated that valid comparisons may be drawn and, further-
more, that what unites colonial forces across continental, national and
regional divides is stronger than what distinguishes them. The central
contentions here are twofold. One is that the economic imperatives of
colonial policing, frequently implicit in the colonial experience before
the depression years, became nakedly transparent as a consequence of
the depression itself. Linked to this is the second conclusion: that the
depression made explicit what had been implicit: that the forces of colo-
nial order were ultimately geared to the protection of commercial inter-
est and colonial wealth extraction.
In the words of Sir Robert Peel, who founded London’s metropol-
itan police force in 1829, the essence of successful policing is that
‘the police are the people and the people are the police’.3 Such was
never, could never be the case with the colonial forces studied here.
While most relied on rank-and-file colonial recruits, usually deployed
Conclusion 327
outside their native countries or home region, all were officered and
led by white Europeans. Colonial police were not of the people they
policed, but nor were they meant to be. Their legitimacy as agents
of a central political authority was not predicated on any social rep-
lication of the communities they policed. Quite the reverse: colonial
police forces were deliberately constructed to be unrepresentative of
the surrounding population. One consequence was that the internal
cultures of colonial police forces were strangely schizoid, asserting
their superiority over the local community, yet fearful of its innate
hostility to police regulation. Their moral economies of action, their
rules, conventions and understandings about what was permissible
and what was not, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, their habitus and their
field, were always those of the outsider.
The point here is this. To say that colonial police were outsiders often
called upon to do unpleasant things does not take us very far towards
understanding the nature of colonial policing or its transformation
in the inter-war years. More illuminating conclusions about protest
policing and its outcomes may be found by tracing the connections
between changing police priorities, major security force deployments
and local economic crises. Whether they intended it that way or not,
European colonial police forces would be judged on how well they ful-
filled their core task: maintaining the apparatus of imperial government
and keeping the political economy it supported intact. Their actions
were inevitably bound up with monetary questions, whether relating to
revenue collection, to the defence of corporate interests and commer-
cial property, or, more basically, to the impact of changes in an individ-
ual colony’s annual police budget.4
Earlier chapters have also shown how more abstract questions of law,
procedure and accountability constrained police activity. As colonial
powers between the wars, Britain and France made repeated efforts to
square the circle between colonialism and individual rights under law.
Policy-makers on both sides of the English Channel wrestled with the
contradictions involved. Take the example of military obligation. As
John Horne notes, at the end of the nineteenth century liberal states,
including Britain and France, accepted that democratic choice implied
a duty to resist tyrannical threats to the regime. ‘Accordingly, these
same powers … justified the right to civilian participation in national
defence, including the self-organizing levée en masse, with the full pro-
tection of international law. This point of view, it goes without saying,
was confined to conflict in Europe. Quite different criteria applied in
colonial campaigns.’5 In France especially, the obligations of republican
defence at home and in the colonies were, at first glance, diametric-

ally opposed. Liberal defenders of French citizens’ rights to bear arms
in defence of the nation and its core values were, at the same time,
authoritarians who denied colonial subjects any equivalent right to
resist foreign occupation by force. Police forces were an institution of
government – perhaps the institution – whose activities brought such
contradictions into sharpest relief.
The changing operational priorities of French gendarmerie forces
revealed the difficulties that could result. Primary agents of rural
policing, the gendarmeries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were recon-
figured between the wars into providers of socio-economic intelligence
and instruments of protest policing. Protectors of the people they were
not. Over-stretched and under-resourced, gendarmerie command-
ers complained repeatedly that their forces would struggle to contain
organized dissent. At their most extreme, in Morocco especially, prob-
lems of poor accommodation, low morale, lack of vernacular language
and limited reach within local society translated into routine abuses
and misdiagnosis of social conditions.
In Algeria and Tunisia gendarmerie and police worked more effect-
ively. Yet, during the Maghreb’s protracted depression they confronted
economic protests that proved impossible to contain without recurrent
violence. Cultural borrowing between these forces, and their common
institutional derivation, was counter-balanced by the distinct complex-
ions and economic foundations of the three North African territories.
In the 1930s their internal policing priorities would converge nonethe-
less. The coalescence between industrial disputes, urban demonstra-
tions and growing nationalist militancy evident in Tunisia from 1934
onwards prefigured the clashes between security forces and protesters
that would play so pivotal a role in French decolonization from North
Africa. The trend may seem apparent in hindsight but the confronta-
tions involved should not be exaggerated. Persistent low-level violence
at no point escalated into national rebellion. Despite this, the challenge
to colonial supremacy was considerable. Algeria and the Tunisian pro-
tectorate lived under extended periods of martial law years before war
commenced in September 1939. Wartime ‘state of siege’ restrictions
signified a resumption of political lockdowns enacted earlier in the dec-
ade whose origins lay in the upheavals of an economic crisis of unprece-
dented duration. It seems fair to conclude that the depression marked a
watershed as significant for the internal politics of French North Africa
as the coming war and the changes of colonial regime that accompan-
ied it.
Conclusion 329
Policing the inter-war Maghreb presented huge difficulties. It did not,

however, involve political violence or workplace repression on the scale
evident in the Indochina federation. There, the conjunction between
the rise of integral Vietnamese nationalism and an indigenous social-
ism, on the one hand, the economic crash, the end of the 1920s rubber
boom and a northern rice crisis on the other, generated internal con-
flicts of unprecedented intensity. ‘Conventional’ policing, conducted by
a civilian Sûreté in the towns, by a combination of local auxiliary forces
in the countryside, gave way to overtly political police work designed
to predict, forestall or suppress opposition to the colonial state. After
the twin shocks of the Yen Bay mutiny and the Nghê ̣-T ı̃nh soviets in
north and central Vietnam, the focal point of this policing effort shifted
southwards in the 1930s to the rubber plantations of Cochin-China
and, later, the industrial workforce of Saigon. Police, plantation guards,
labour inspectors and colonial officials lent support to the major plan-
tation owners. Yet relations between government and rubber industry
were rarely amicable. The shared interests between them did not prod-
uce consensus about the treatment of plantation workers, economic
migrants or even the communist organizers widely presumed to have
infiltrated the lines. Indochina’s networks of cooperation between the
administrations in Hanoi and Saigon, Cochin-China’s estate owners
and various police and labour agencies rested on mutual dependence,
not mutual respect.
The rubber industry was also powerful in British Malaya. Reliance
on indentured labourers imported from elsewhere in the empire and
the crucial role played by a labour inspectorate were also remarkably
similar in outline. Friction between government, business and police
agencies in Malaya was, by contrast, less intense than in Indochina or,
it seems, the Deli plantation region of Dutch-ruled Sumatra.6 There
was certainly potential for bitter disagreement between these constitu-
encies. The bond between government and rubber producers forged
by the Stevenson restriction scheme was, for instance, tested by the
absence of state subsidies for rubber-cultivators to match those granted
to their French rivals in the depression years. Other factors helped
prevent Malaya’s plantation sector from developing into the political
battleground that it became in Cochin-China. The presence of rela-
tively few ethnic Malays among the plantation workforce was one. The
delegation of the unsavoury business of South Indian recruitment and
retention to kanganis was another. Managerial resentment of govern-
ment labour inspectors, while increasingly evident in the early 1930s,
did not match the obstructionism and downright deception practised
by certain French estate owners. The IIC’s role in channelling Tamil

labourers back and forth between Malaya and southern India and the
much higher proportion of women, children and married couples on
Malaya’s plantations were also conducive to a less confrontational
atmosphere. Tighter regulation of workforce numbers, in other words,
helped reduce police call-outs to estate disturbances. The distinctive-
ness of communal politics in the Malayan states enabled officials and
police to treat a predominantly Indian plantation labour force with less
anxiety about adverse political consequences than was the case for the
Vietnamese workers of Cochin-China. Finally, the singularity of the
Straits Settlements within British thinking about Southeast Asia in
the 1930s accelerated changes in security priorities that placed rest-
ive groups within Singapore’s Chinese community at the forefront of
police calculations.
Social conflict in the British West Indian colonies of Jamaica and
Trinidad tested colonial police and armed forces more severely.
Jamaica’s labour rebellion exposed police frailty. It also confirmed
the inadequacy of the protest policing strategies devised as a result of
Walter Long’s review of colonial riot control measures after the First
World War. The civic responsibility of the Jamaican political and labour
leaders who came to prominence during the rebellion was remark-
able. It was they who channelled economic protest into constructive
political engagement. The far-sightedness of Norman Manley and
Alexander Bustamante also underlined the short-termism and reac-
tionary self-interest of certain sugar producers and their allies in the
island’s Legislative Council. Colonial officials and ordinary policemen
were caught in the middle. Disinclined to use lethal force, they were
driven to it by the tasks they were assigned and the ways in which their
manuals and legislative guidelines instructed them to act. Other elem-
ents of Jamaica’s constabulary force, and the prison service especially,
were less the victims of circumstance than the inevitable product of
years of under-funding and administrative neglect. The Kingston gov-
ernment, it seemed, got the police force it paid for. And Colonial Office
instructions on protest policing added impetus to the cycle of work-
place clashes in the 1930s.
Security force violence was greater in Trinidad’s oilfields. Vigilantism
and the contest between a reformist Governor and a reactionary
Legislative Council made the repression of industrial protest politically
combustible. The racial dynamics of protest policing became impossible
to ignore. Trinidad was hardly unique in this respect. The economics
of race in the British West Indies scarred Caribbean communities and
Conclusion 331
created huge dilemmas for colonial administrators. Policing inevitably

mirrored these frictions: in the composition of local forces, in their
threat perceptions and task priorities and in their central preoccupa-
tion with labour unrest. In Trinidad’s case, police attention focused
on three areas above all: the southern oilfields, on sugar plantations
and on Port of Spain’s dockside waterfront. It was the first of these
three that erupted most dramatically. The policemen sent to disperse
pickets or to protect oil installations during the island’s strike wave in
1937 confronted collective violence, occasionally organized but more
often spontaneous, which they were ill-trained to handle and to which
some of them fell victim. For all that, the policing of Trinidad’s labour
rebellion also laid bare the shared interests between administration
and industrial employers. Sympathy in the Governor’s Red House for
low-paid oil workers ebbed away once industrial protest turned violent
and managers and their families came under threat. The speed with
which Trinidad’s business community mobilized in order to replace Sir
Murchison Fletcher and his deputy, the hated Howard Nankivell, with
a more Draconian Governor underlined the narrow limits to permis-
sible reform.
Policing in the West African colonies of Sierra Leone and Nigeria
is harder to fit within either a generic or a regional model of British
colonial practice. White-officered paramilitary forces and more civil-
ianized city forces there were, but, after 1918, police development in
each territory was driven by other precepts entirely. Sierra Leone’s
emergence as an important mineral producer transformed it, and
led to a fundamental reconfiguration – indeed, a reinvention – of its
small police force. Internally, the economic balance between Colony
and Protectorate, between Freetown and the mining zones, shifted
decisively. The cultural prominence of town-dwelling Krios was
challenged by the nascent power of an industrial labour force concen-
trated in mining compounds remote from the confines of Freetown.
Monetarily and politically, the SLST worked almost as an adjunct
of government in matters of policing. Selection Trust management
suggested the adoption of policing practices developed in its South
African mining centres and provided the financial wherewithal to
make the transition possible. The resulting Mines Protection Force
became the principal – and the most effective – component among
Sierra Leone’s police agencies. Mining profits meanwhile turned
depression-era deficit into Treasury surplus on the eve of war in 1939.
This is neither to imply that the Freetown government suborned
itself to the requirements of its new industrial clients, nor to suggest
that the police surrendered the capacity for autonomous action to

the Mines Protection Force. It is, rather, to make a more basic point:
Sierra Leone provides the clearest instance of the inter-relatedness
between internal politics, economic change and colonial policing in
the depression era.
The Nigerian case is, at once, more complex and less conclusive. The
heterogeneity of the colony’s regions was mirrored in the diffusion of
quite different policing models within and between provinces that were
administered in various approximations of indirect rule. Nigeria’s colo-
nial policing, in this sense, compares more readily with its equivalents
in British India where a significant number of its senior police offic-
ers learnt their craft. Scene of the most violent inter-war episodes of
protest policing in British black Africa, Nigeria seems to stand apart
from its near neighbours. For all that, the underlying pressures faced
by police units, their officers and their paymasters were not qualita-
tively different. The Igbo women’s war originated in demonstrations
against enforced monetization, tax increases and an incipient collapse
in customary trade. The differing legal and institutional structures of
police and court messenger services in north and south reflected eco-
nomic expediency and administrative convenience as much as they did
the theoretical benchmarks of native administration and indirect rule.
Only at the end of the period did more fundamental debates resurface
about the purpose of administrative reform, including police methods
and the juridical boundaries of the colonial state. Policing in the inter-
vening years responded to more immediate pressures, a good many
of which originated in the communal stresses of a low-wage economy
which hit the buffers in 1930.
In the Belgian Congo, too, the depression figures both as an accel-
erant of existing social pressures and incipient protest movements
and as a driver of basic reforms to internal policing. The colonial
administration was quick to tie the Kwango revolt to the destabil-
ization of rural chefferies, the units of local government in which vil-
lage notables retained customary rights and privileges in return for
furnishing taxes and manpower to the authorities. The severity of
the disorders stemmed from economic iniquities sharpened by the
depression: a declining commercial market, minimal opportunities
for waged employment and heightened competition for cultivable
land. Political violence, it was assumed, might be triggered by acute
poverty, but it was also inherent in cultures unable, as yet, to com-
prehend the deeper purpose of the Belgian colonial project. Policing
rebellion was, in this sense, less about restoring colonial control than
about imposing it, almost from scratch.
Conclusion 333
Anti-colonial movements from Kimbanguism to the Satanas were

treated not as indicators of popular anti-colonialism but as symptoms
of inadequate administrative implantation and an insufficient security
force presence. Large areas of Congo-Kasai lived under an especially
harsh police and military presence as a result. Security forces finally
withdrew from the Kwango region in December 1935, ending the
longest emergency occupation of the depression period.7 The colonial
authorities absolved themselves of blame following workplace protests
or when confronted with mounting international criticism of forced
labour. State authorities, it was argued, had been sucked into the sordid
business of trafficking manpower by employers’ insatiable appetite for
cheap workers. To the east, the Union Minière’s dominant presence in
Katanga lent weight to this interpretation. The UMHK remained the
Belgian Congo’s largest exporter throughout the depression period in
terms of tonnages shipped. The company was thus well placed to police
its workers. By the early 1930s, it strove to manage their lives. For the
colonial government, meanwhile, every facet of local administration
was dominated by austerity and problems of deficit reduction. Political
economy was writ especially large in the policing of the Belgian Congo
in the pre-war decade.
Collectively, the case studies indicate that the development of colonial
wage economies, often geared to export production of primary prod-
ucts, made labour discipline in key sites – factories, plantations, mines,
lumber camps, dockyards – a matter of central concern to local admin-
istration.8 Numerous other variables affected the resulting demands
imposed on individual police forces. The recruitment and working
practices of particular industries varied. So did the availability of local
workers. The settlements, plantation lines or urban districts that grew
up to house them ranged from the depths of squalor to ‘model’ com-
pounds whose standards of housing and hygiene reduced the incidence
of morbidity among the workforce. The extent of settler involvement in
large-scale farming or commercial production was usually significant
as well.9 So, too, were the countervailing pressures on police time. Tax
collection and criminal investigation, the suppression of internal dis-
sent: all drained workplaces of police coverage. More protracted upris-
ings had the same denuding effect. But even in the dependencies where
anti-colonial opposition and armed confrontation went furthest before
the Second World War – Morocco, Syria and Indochina on the French
side; India and the Middle East mandates on the British – outright
revolt was generally short lived.
Colonial police work in more ‘normal’ times was rooted in local
political economies of competition for land and other agricultural
resources, the growth of waged labour and the requirements of export

industry. The theatrics of rebellion may have reached a higher pitch
but the background noise of lower-level protest was more insistent.
Colonial policing was closely attuned to the rhythms of workplace dis-
sent as a result.
Notes to the text
I n t roduc t ion: P o l ic e , l a b ou r a n d c ol oni a l

v iol e nc e
1 Usually rendered in French colonial police reports as ‘meneurs’, British pref-
erence for the term ‘ringleader’ better captures the ascription of seditious
intent implied by the choice of word. By contrast, the other French descrip-
tor frequently employed was ‘militants’, often used to describe ‘activists’ more
generally, but strongly identified with members of the French Communist
Party in particular. I have found no mention of ‘militants’ in any British
colonial police accounts, perhaps because of its more strongly ideological
flavour. ‘Ringleaders’, however, are everywhere.
2 Archives Nationales (AN), Paris, Prime Minister’s Office files, F60/744,
‘Après les massacres de Metlaoui’, La Charte Tunisienne, 5 February 1938.
3 Among the extensive historiography, see Frank Furedi, Colonial War and the
Politics of Third World Nationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994); Robert A.
Holland, Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945 (London:
Frank Cass, 1994); David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds.), Policing
and Decolonization: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–65 (Manchester
University Press, 1992). I also followed this approach in my The French North
African Crisis: Colonial Breakdown and Anglo-French Relations, 1945–1962
(Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2000).
4 For the sympathetic insider’s view of the Nigerian case, see Margery Perham,
Native Administration in Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1937). Local stud-
ies of southern and northern Nigeria include Adiele E. Afigbo, The Warrant
Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (London: Longman,
1972); Chima J. Korieh, ‘Hegemonic and Negotiated Encounters: Reflections
on Indirect Rule and Protest in Colonial Eastern Nigeria’, in F. J. Kolapo and
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry (eds.), African Agency and European Colonialism:
Latitudes of Negotiations and Containment (Lanham, MD: University Press
of America, 2007), 111–14; Peter K. Tibenderana, ‘The Irony of Indirect
Rule in the Sokoto Emirate, Nigeria, 1903–1944’, African Studies Review,
31:1 (1988), 67–92. On Indochina, see Patrice Morlat, Les affaires poli-
tiques de l’Indochine (1895–1923): Les grands commis: du savoir au pouvoir
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 61–77; Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery,
Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2009), 71–6, 83–91, 105–15. Alice Conklin analyses
French adoption of associationism in A Mission to Civilize: The Republican
335
336 Notes to pages 3–4
Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford University

Press, 1997).
5 Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural
Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979),
174–83, 243–6.
6 Andrew Burton, ‘Urchins, Loafers and the Cult of the Cowboy: Urbanization
and Delinquency in Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961’, Journal of African History,
42:2 (2001), 206–8.
7 The colonial industrialization debate was particularly virulent in 1930s
France, see Bernard Mouralis, Anne Piriou and Romuald Fonkoua (eds.),
Robert Delavignette, savant et politique (1897–1976) (Paris: Karthala, 2003),
79–80, 95–8; Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français:
Histoire d’un divorce (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), 240–56; Andrew Hardy,
‘The Economics of French Rule in Indochina: A Biography of Paul Bernard
(1892–1960)’, Modern Asian Studies, 32:4 (1998), 807–48. For long-view
analyses of a British case, see M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Simon
Mollan, ‘Economic Imperialism and the Political Economy of Sudan:
The Case of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, 1899–1956’, University of
Durham Ph.D., 2008; Peter Cross, ‘British Attitudes to Sudanese Labour:
The Foreign Office Records as Sources for Social History’, British Journal
of Middle Eastern Studies, 24:2 (1997), 217–60.
8 AN, Paris, Paul Reynaud papers, 74AP/9, Banque d’Indochine rapport
du Conseil d’administration, 31 May 1935; Hubert Bonin, ‘Les Réseaux
bancaires impériaux parisiens’, in Hubert Bonin, Catherine Hodeir and
Jean-François Klein (eds.), L’Esprit économique impérial (1830–1970):
Groupes de pression et réseaux du patronat colonial en France et dans l’empire
(Paris: Publications de la SFHOM, 2008), 454–5; Y. Gonjo, Banque colo-
nial ou Banque d’affaires: La Banque de l’Indochine sous la IIIème République
(Paris: CHEFF, 1998).
9 AN, 74AP/9, bulletin quotidien no. 134, ‘Les perspectives de l’économie
extrême-orientale d’après le rapport de la Banque d’Indochine’, 15 June
1934.
10 Frans Buelens and Stefaan Marysse, ‘Returns on Investments during the
Colonial Era: The Case of the Belgian Congo’, Economic History Review,
62:S1 (2009), 141.
11 Kham Vorapheth, Commerce et colonisation en Indochine 1860–1945: Les
Maisons de commerce françaises, un siècle d’aventure humaine (Paris: Les Indes
Savantes, 2004), 148–57. Some of the trading companies that figured lar-
gest in West Africa’s colonial exports suffered major capital losses in the
depression while retaining their hold over particular commodity markets,
see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des grands compagnies
concessionaires, 1898–1930 (Paris: Mouton, 1972, reprint 2002), 522–6; D.
K. Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization: The United
Africa Company 1929–1987 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3–42 passim.
12 Loh Wei Leng, ‘The Colonial State and Business: The Policy Environment
in Malaya in the Inter-War Years’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 33:2
(2002), 246–9.
Notes to pages 4–7 337
13 Ewout Frankema, ‘Raising Revenue in the British Empire, 1870–1940:

How Extractive Were Colonial Taxes?’, Journal of Global History, 5:3 (2010),
447–77.
14 Martin Klein, ‘African Participation in Colonial Rule: the Role of Clerks,
Interpreters, and other Intermediaries’, in Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily
Lynn Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters,
and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 273–4, 278. Klein also stresses
police reliance on local intermediaries for access to politically sensitive
information.
15 Even the capital-rich Bank of Indochina felt constrained to reduce its run-
ning costs by eleven million francs as the depression worsened in 1932–3.
16 Régine Levrat, Le Coton en Afrique occidentale et central avant 1950: Un exem-
ple de la politique coloniale de la France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 65–7,
119–38; Allen Isaacman, ‘Peasants, Work and the Labor Process: Forced
Cotton Cultivation in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961’, Journal of Social
History, 26:4 (1992), 815–55; Allen Isaacman and Arlindo Chilundo,
‘Peasants at Work: Forced Cotton Cultivation in Northern Mozambique’,
in Allen Isaacman and Richard R. Roberts (eds.), Cotton, Colonialism and
Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995),
149–60, Osumaka Likaka, ‘Forced Cotton Cultivation and Social Control
in the Belgian Congo’, in Isaacman and Roberts (eds.), Cotton, Colonialism
and Social History, 201–11; Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 128–9.
17 As Adam McKeown observes, ‘miners and agriculturalists in Southeast
Asia and Africa, and railroad laborers in Siberia, Manchuria, and California
[in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] all undertook their work
in the context of financial, political, and military power concentrated in
the hands of Europeans and Japanese’. See his Melancholy Order: Asian
Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), 65.
18 This chimes with what Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson describe as
the ‘cultural economy’ of transnational connections between Europeans
living and working in the colonies, see Gary B. Magee and Andrew S.
Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital
in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14.
Their discussion of imperial networks (45–63) is equally illuminating.
19 Lynn Hollen Lees, ‘Being British in Malaya, 1890–1940’, Journal of British
Studies, 48:1 (2009), 76–81.
20 Timothy N. Harper, ‘Empire, Diaspora, and the Language of Globalism,
1850–1914’, in Anthony G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History
(London: Pimlico, 2002), 142, 156, cited in Lees, ‘Being British in
Malaya’, 78.
21 Lees, ‘Being British in Malaya’, 93.
22 Richard Drayton, ‘Maritime Networks and the Making of Knowledge’, in
David Cannadine (ed.), Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime
World, c.1763–c. 1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 73–81.
23 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’,
Cultural Anthropology, 23:2 (2008), 193.
24 Bourdieu described his Kabylia fieldwork in Sociologie de l’Algérie (Paris:

PUF, 1958).
25 Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein (eds.), ‘Introduction’, in Bourdieu
in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 10–18.
26 Peter Jackson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu’, in Nick Vaughan Williams and Jenny
Edkins (eds.), Critical Theorists and International Relations (London:
Routledge, 2009), 98–9; Jackson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu, the “Cultural Turn”
and the Practice of International History’, Review of International Studies,
34:1 (2008), 155–81.
27 A classic, and Marxist-influenced, expression of this view is Cyril D.
Robinson and Richard Scaglion, ‘The Origin and Evolution of the Police
Function in Society: Notes Toward a Theory’, Law and Society Review,
21:1 (1987), 109–53. For sociological approaches, see David Waddington,
Karen Jones and Chas Critcher, Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder
(London: Routledge, 1989), 3–6, 169–7; Bruce Baker, ‘Beyond the State
Police in Urban Uganda and Sierra Leone’, Africa Spectrum, 41:1 (2006),
55–76.
28 The National Archives (TNA), London, CAB 4/14, CID700/B, Committee
of Imperial Defence memo, ‘Imperial Defence Policy’, 15 June 1926,
appendix C.
29 The allusion here is to Anthony Milner’s deservedly influential work, The
Invention of Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the
Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
30 London School of Economics Library, Selection Trust archive (hereafter
ST), ST/ADD/Box 5, Sierra Leone Selection Trust papers, file 1: CO
267/634/962A, ‘African Selection Trust Limited, brief history’, n.d.; file
12: ‘Brief history of C.A.S.T. Operations in Ghana (Gold Coast)’, n.d.
If anything, gold mining in the Gold Coast achieved such pre-eminence
somewhat earlier, see Raymond E. Dumett, ‘Edwin Cade and Frederick
Gordon: British Imperialism and the Foundations of the Ashanti Goldfields
Corporation, West Africa’, in Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Mining Tycoons in
the Age of Empire, 1870–1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics, and
Territorial Expansion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
1 C o l oni a l P ol ic ing : A dis c u r si v e F r a m e wor k

1 The literature on the British Empire is strongest here. The classic articu-
lation of the exceptionalist view is Sir Charles Jefferies, The Colonial Police
(London: Parrish, 1952). More nuanced studies include Anthony Clayton
and David Killingray, Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in British Colonial
Africa (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1989); David M. Anderson
and David Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and
Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester University Press, 1991); Georgina Sinclair,
At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame, 1945–80
(Manchester University Press, 2006). For the concept of martial races as
pivotal to the composition of Britain’s colonial armies, see Heather Streets,
Martial Races and Masculinity in the British Army, 1857–1914 (Manchester
University Press, 2004). For French and Dutch colonial parallels, see Myron
Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West
Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990); Jaap de Moor,
‘The Recruitment of Indonesian Soldiers for the Dutch Colonial Army,
c. 1700–1950’, in David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of
Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964 (Manchester
University Press, 1999), 53–68.
2 Georgina Sinclair and Chris A. Williams, ‘“Home and Away”: The Cross-
Fertilisation between “Colonial” and “British” Policing, 1921–85’, Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35:2 (2007), 221–38.
3 Two pieces by David Killingray are especially useful: ‘The “Rod of
Empire”: The Debate over Corporal Punishment in the British African
Colonial Forces, 1888–1946’, Journal of African History, 35:2 (1994), 201–
16; ‘Securing the British Empire: Policing and Colonial Order, 1920–1960’,
in Mark Mazower (ed.), The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford: Berghahn, 1997), 167–90. See also David M. Anderson and
David Killingray, ‘An Orderly Retreat? Policing and the End of Empire’, in
Anderson and Killingray (eds.), Policing and Decolonization, 4–6.
4 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of
War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005),
parts I and II.
5 Important essays tackling these connections are in Holland (ed.),
Emergencies and Disorder and Anderson and Killingray (eds.), Policing and
Decolonization.
6 Elisabeth J. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador
(Cambridge University Press, 2003); Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial
Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (University of Chicago Press,
2004); Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent
Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic
of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stathis N.
Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro and Tarek Masoud (eds.), Order, Conflict, and Violence
(Cambridge University Press, 2008). One of the first studies of this type is
Tarsis B. Kabwegyere, ‘The Dynamics of Colonial Violence: The Inductive
System in Uganda’, Journal of Peace Research, 9:4 (1972), 303–14.
7 Most recently Manus Midlarsky, particularly his ideas of ‘prospect theory’
relating to degrees of violence sparked by anticipated and unanticipated
events, see his Origins of Political Extremism: Mass Violence in the Twentieth
Century and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 29–35.
8 Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures
of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially chapters 2–3.
9 Ibid., 61–2, 78–80. Hendrik Spruyt’s discussion of the relative power of politi-
cians, public and colonial ‘stakeholders’ in the endgames of European empire
is very useful here, see his Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial
Partition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chapters 2–5.
10 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 16–17, 89–93. Kalyvas (5) defines civil war
as ‘armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity
between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of hostilities’.
11 Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-

Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17–21.
12 Timothy N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Karl Hack, Defence and Decolonisation in Southeast
Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore 1941–68 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000);
Jacques Valette, La Guerre d’Algérie des Messalistes 1954–1962 (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2001), 118–28, 138–49; Gilbert Meynier, Histoire intérieure
du FLN 1954–1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 208–9, 445–58.
13 Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–
1948 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), part II; Daniel
Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War,
and Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 208.
14 These disparities and security force alliances with loyalist groups within a
colony are deftly explained in Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, chapters 1–4.
15 Colin Newbury, Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-Rule in
Africa, Asia, and the Pacific (Oxford University Press, 2003); A. S. Kanya-
Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French Military
Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1969, reprint 2008), chapters
5–6; Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks,
4–34.
16 The extensive sociological literature on European disorder is discussed in
Waddington, Jones and Critcher, Flashpoints, 1–23.
17 James C. Scott, ‘Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance’, The Journal of
Peasant Studies, 13:2 (1986), 13–31.
18 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 183–4, 192–201.
19 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, chapters 6 and 8; Stathis Kalyvas, ‘Promises
and Pitfalls of an Emerging Research Program: The Microdynamics
of Civil War’, in Kalyvas, Shapiro and Masoud (eds.), Order, Conflict,
and Violence, 397–407; Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and
Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2001),
16–24, 290–2.
20 Hilde Ravlo, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Han Dorussen, ‘Colonial War and
the Democratic Peace’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 47:4 (2003), 520–
48; Goodwin, No Other Way Out, parts 1–2; Christian Davenport, Hank
Johnston and Carol Mueller (eds.), Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), part 1; Spruyt, Ending Empire, chapters
2–6. For a ‘long view’, see Jay Winter, ‘Imagining Peace in Twentieth-
Century Europe’, Contemporary European History, 17:3 (2008), 413–18.
21 The theme of ‘north-south’ division as equally pertinent as the more famil-
iar ‘east-west’ conflict of the Cold War era is explored in the introduc-
tion to Christopher E. Goscha and Christian Ostermann (eds.), Connecting
Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia (Stanford
University Press, 2009).
22 Regarding the neglect of indigenous peoples as political actors in inter-
national relations, see J. Marshall Beier, ‘Beyond Hegemonic State[ments]
of Nature: Indigenous Knowledge and Non-State Possibilities in
International Relations’, in Geeta Chrwdry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power,
Post-Colonialism and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2002),

46–64.
23 Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn and Richard L. Roberts,
‘African Intermediaries and the “Bargain” of Collaboration’, in Lawrance,
Osborn and Roberts, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, 10. Ronald
Robinson proposed the concept of ‘bargains of collaboration’ in his ‘Non-
European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory
of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the
Theory of Imperialism (Harlow: Longman, 1972), 117–42.
24 For the consequences of imposing on colonies European legal regulation
informed by positivist ideas of how individuals and societies should behave
under law, see Antony Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty
and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century International Law’, Harvard
International Law Journal, 40 (1999), 2–3, 57–65.
25 Exceptions are Luis Rodríguez-Piñero, Indigenous Peoples, Postcolonialism,
and International Law: The ILO Regime (1919–1989) (Oxford University
Press, 2005), chapters 1–2; Daniel Maul, ‘The International Labour
Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour from 1919 to the
Present’, Labour History, 48 (2007), 477–500.
26 Catherine B. Ash, ‘Forced Labour in Colonial West Africa’, History
Compass, 4:3 (2006), 404–5.
27 Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–
1964 (New Delhi: Sage reprint, 2002), 172–85.
28 David M. Anderson, ‘Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1939’,
Journal of African History, 41:3 (2000), 482; Martin J. Wiener, An Empire
on Trial: Race, Murder and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge
29 Rodríguez-Piñero, Indigenous Peoples, 17–35.
30 Jasmien Van Daele, ‘The International Labour Organization (ILO) in Past
and Present Research’, International Review of Social History, 53 (2008),
487–93.
31 Alice L. Conklin, ‘“Democracy” Rediscovered: Civilization through
Association in French West Africa (1914–1930)’, Cahiers d’études Africaines,
145:37 (1997), 59–60.
32 Hoover Institution Library, Stanford University, Paul Bourdarie, ‘La
Politique d’association’, La Revue indigène, 1:1 (1906), 8–12.
33 Iba Der Thiam ‘Le Combat des populations africaines pour la démocratie,
l’égalité et la justice, 1895–1960: L’exemple du Sénégal’, in Charles Becker,
Saliou Mbaye and Ibrahimi Thioub (eds.), AOF: Réalités et héritages: Sociétés
ouest-africaines et ordre colonial, 1895–1960, 2 vols. (Dakar: Direction des
Archives du Sénégal, 1997), vol. I, 257, 260; Gregory Mann, ‘What was the
indigénat? The “Empire of Law” in French West Africa’, Journal of African
History, 50:2 (2009), 331–53.
34 Pierre Singaravelou, ‘L’Empire des économistes: L’enseignement de
“l’économie coloniale” sous la IIIe République’, in Bonin, Hodeir and
Klein (eds.), L’Esprit économique impérial, 145–6.
35 Ibrahima Thioub, ‘Economie coloniale et rémunération de la force de
travail: Le salaire de manoeuvre à Dakar de 1930 à 1954’, Revue Française
d’histoire d’Outre-Mer, 81 (1994), 436; Alice L. Conklin, ‘A Force for

Civilization: Republican Discourse and French Administration in West
Africa, 1895–1930’, in Becker, Mbaye and Thioub (eds.), AOF: Réalities et
héritages, 297–8.
36 Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), Marius Moutet papers, 28/
PA/4, d.127, ‘La législation française et le travail forcé’, n.d.
37 TNA, CO 822/26/2, 637/358/10/30, Granville, Brussels, to Arthur Henderson,
15 July 1930.
38 Richard L. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional
Economy in the French Soudan, 1800–1946 (Stanford University Press, 1996),
176–7; see also Idrissa Kimba, ‘L’échec d’une politique d’intégration: les
projets ferroviaires et le territoire du Niger (1880–1940)’, in Becker, Mbaye
and Thioub (eds.), AOF: Réalities et héritages, vol. I, 463. Kimba notes that
French officials in the early 1930s used coercion and deception to recruit
workers for railway projects in Niger and Dahomey, aware that the awful
working conditions and better wages in nearby British-ruled Nigeria dis-
couraged voluntary labour enlistment.
39 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question
in French and British Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–9,
55–6.
40 Alice L. Conklin, ‘Colonialism and Human Rights, a Contradiction
in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, American
Historical Review, 103:2 (1998), 419–42; Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna
to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of
Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, American
Historical Review, 113:5 (2008), 1338–41; Kenneth Weisbrode, ‘International
Administration between the Wars: A Reappraisal’, Diplomacy & Statecraft,
20:1 (2009), 32–9.
41 Sally Engle Merry, ‘Law and Colonialism’, Law and Society Review, 25
(1991), 889–922; also cited in Wiener, An Empire on Trial, 4.
42 Immanuel Wallerstein made this point in ‘Elites in French-Speaking West
Africa: The Social Basis of Ideas’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 3
(1965), 3–4.
43 G. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal (Stanford
University Press, 1971), 179–91 passim; Michael C. Lambert, ‘From
Citizenship to Négritude: “Making a Difference” in Elite Ideologies of
Colonized Francophone West Africa’, Comparative Studies in History and
Society, 35:2 (1993), 244–5.
44 Catherine Atlan and Jean-Hervé Jézéquel, ‘Alienation or Political Strategy?
The Colonized Defend the Empire’, in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur
(eds.), Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in
France (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), 104–5.
45 Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique-Occidentale française (1900–1946)
(Paris: Karthala, 1993), 295–6, 301–3.
46 Laurence C. Becker, ‘An Experiment in the Reorganization of Agricultural
Production in the French Soudan (Mali), 1920–40’, Africa, 64:3 (1994),
375–6; Roberts, Two Worlds, chapter 7.
47 Myron Echenberg and Jean Filipovich, ‘African Military Labour and the
Building of the Office du Niger Installations, 1925–1950’, Journal of African
History, 27 (1986), 536–8.
48 Jean Filipovich, ‘Destined to Fail: Forced Settlement at the Office du Niger,
1926–45’, Journal of African History, 42:2 (2001), 247–54.
49 Ibid., 252–3.
50 Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory, ‘Labour Reservoirs and Population:
French Colonial Strategies in Koudougou, Upper Volta, 1914 to 1939’,
Journal of African History, 23 (1982), 205–6, 213–18.
51 Work on colonial India is instructive here, notably Chitra Joshi, ‘Histories
of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities’, History Compass, 6:2
(2008), 439–54, especially 441–8.
52 For critical reflections on dependency theory, see Mahmood Mamdani,
‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political
Legacy of Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43:4
(2001), 651–64.
53 Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, ‘Crises of Accumulation, Coercion
and the Colonial State: The Development of the Labour Control System in
Kenya, 1919–1929’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 14:1 (1980), 56.
54 Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, its Empire, and their Imperial
Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (July 2006), 603, 624–5. Price’s view-
point is borne out by Benjamin Brower’s study of colonial violence in Algeria:
A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara,
1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 21–6, 31–2.
55 Daniel Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie: Comptes et mécomptes de la tutelle coloniale
1930–1962 (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1997); Pierre
Brocheux, The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy and Revolution, 1860–
1960 (Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1995); Lenore
Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya,
1870–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ann Laura Stoler,
Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
56 Allen Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural
Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1928–1961 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
1996); Roberts, Two Worlds; Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au temps des
grands compagnies; Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital.
57 A. G. Hopkins, ‘The New Economic History of Africa’, Journal of African
History 50:1 (2009), 155–62.
58 A point recently lamented by a leading historian of African decolonization:
Frederick Cooper, ‘Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in
Historical Perspective’, Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 179–81.
59 David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 48–9.
60 Jacques Frémeaux, Les Empires coloniaux dans le processus de mondialisation
(Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002), 126–33.
61 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction,
1914–1990 (Harlow: Longman, 1993). They expand their arguments about
344 Notes to page 27
the interactions of British commerce, City finance and imperial rule in

British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002).
62 Historians are divided over the use of colonial inspectorate records as useful
indicators of actual conditions within the plantations of colonial Southeast
Asia. Some of the most interesting debates relate to the Deli region of Eastern
Sumatra, the most extensively studied area within Dutch Indonesia’s
plantation economy. The pioneer here remains Stoler, Capitalism and
Confrontation, especially 43–90 passim. See also Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Kettle
on a Slow Boil: Batavia’s Threat Perceptions in the Indies Outer Islands,
1870–1910’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 31:1 (2000), 70–100; Wim
F. Wertheim, ‘Conditions on Sugar Estates in Colonial Java: Comparisons
with Deli’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24:2 (1993), 268–84; Margo
Groenewoud, ‘Towards the Abolition of Penal Sanctions in Dutch Colonial
Labour Legislation: An International Perspective’, Itinerario, 19:2 (1995),
72–90; Alec Gordon, ‘The Agrarian Question and Colonial Capitalism:
Coercion and Java’s Colonial Sugar Plantation System, 1870–1941’, Journal
of Peasant Studies, 27:1 (1999), 1–34. Argument has centred on the reports
regularly filed by the Dutch labour inspectorate. For Jan Bremen, such
records are problematic, their contents inevitably skewed by their authors’
presumptions about the fundamental validity of the colonial project and
their prejudices about Indonesian labour and the Europeans in charge of
it: Jan Bremen, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial
Order in Southeast Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193–5.
For other scholars, labour inspectorate records, while demanding careful
treatment, offer the best insight into the day-to-day workings of the plan-
tation economy. See V. J. H. Houben’s and J. Thomas Lindblad’s reply
to Jan Bremen’s review article on ‘New Thoughts on Colonial Labour
in Indonesia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 33:3 (2002), 559–60;
V. J. H. Houben, ‘Profit versus Ethics: Government Enterprises in the Late
Colonial State’, in Robert Cribb (ed.), The Late Colonial State in Indonesia:
Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880–1942
(Leiden: KITLV, 1994), 191–211. As Ann Stoler demonstrates, by reading
such sources both along and against their narrative grain, they even reveal
the institutionalized discrimination and low-level violence suffered by
coolie workforces: see Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties
and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–28. Such
records, moreover, indicate that the colonial state was no monolith. Well-
intentioned labour inspectors might rail against maltreatment of workers
without eliciting much reaction, either from the colonial authorities in
Batavia or from the Dutch government in The Hague.
63 David Anderson and David Killingray note that policemen, in their daily
enforcement of codes of law, ‘stood at the cutting edge of colonial rule’.
See their ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire,
1830–1940’, in Anderson and Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire, 2.
64 Robert Boyce traces the depression’s differential impact on Britain, France
and Belgium, among others, reminding us that catalysts to the collapse in
international trade antedated October 1929’s Wall Street Crash: The Great
Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2009), chapters 4–7. Variable effects of the economic crisis

on European empires are discussed in Frémeaux, Les Empires coloniaux,
chapters 4 and 5.
65 Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain
and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), 159.
66 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
67 W. G. Huff, ‘Boom-or-Bust Commodities and Industrialization in Pre-
World War II Malaya’, Journal of Economic History, 62:4 (2002), 1074–115.
68 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 111–15.
69 Margory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire, Oxford
History of the British Empire companion volume (Oxford University Press,
2010), 149–50, 159–70. The definitive account of the spread of indentured
labour is David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism,
1834–1922 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
70 Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the
Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, 43:3 (1983), 635–9.
71 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line:
White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), 23; Magee and Thompson, Empire
and Globalisation, 66.
72 Anne L. Foster, Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial
Southeast Asia, 1919–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010),
84–7.
73 Ibid., chapters 1–2. Anne Foster argues that this vision of colonial mod-
ernization was broadly shared by US governments and commercial inter-
ests whose economic presence in Southeast Asia grew markedly between
the wars.
74 The term ‘night watchman’ state was coined by David Morris in a land-
mark article, ‘Towards a Re-interpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian
Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, 23:4 (1963), 606–18. As
Anne Booth points out, analysts of under-development dismiss the lais-
sez-faire ‘night watchman’ as a misleading image that conceals the ruth-
lessness with which goods were extracted. See her ‘Night Watchman,
Extractive, or Development States? Some Evidence from Late Colonial
Southeast Asia’, Economic History Review, 60:2 (2007), 241–66, especially
241–3.
75 Booth, ‘Night Watchman’, 245–6, 255–8.
76 Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919–1939
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 126, 134–9.
77 Ibid., 141–3, 213–14.
78 Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 160–5, 173.
79 Ibid., 161: table 8.1, 167.
80 Boyce, Great Interwar Crisis, 247, 258–9. Amery’s sponsorship of colo-
nial development is described in Neal R. Malmsten, ‘British Government
Policy toward Colonial Development, 1919–39’, Journal of Modern History,
49:2 (1977), 1251–62.
81 Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 134–5.
82 Joe Maiolo, Cry Havoc: The Arms Race and the Second World War, 1931–1941
(London: John Murray, 2010), 2, 16, 74–91.
83 Marseille, Empire colonial, 102–3, 187–207; D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘The
Metropolitan Economics of Empire’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger
Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century
(Oxford University Press, 1999), 90, 100–3.
84 AN, 74AP/9, J. L. Turbé, President of Dakar Chamber of Commerce, memo
to Paul Reynaud, ‘Importante réunion à Dakar des commerçants, traitants,
cultivateurs indigènes et industriels du Sénégal’, 29 March 1933.
85 AN, 74AP/9, ‘Les cultivateurs de la région de Louga’, letter to Governor-
general, n.d., April 1933.
86 Boyce, Great Interwar Crisis, 247–65.
87 Robert D. Boyce, ‘Britain’s First “No” to Europe: Britain and the Briand
Plan 1929–1930’, European Studies Review, 10:1 (1980), 17–45; see also
Cornelia Navari, ‘The Origins of the Briand Plan’, Diplomacy and Statecraft,
3:1 (1992), 74–104.
88 Boyce, Great Interwar Crisis, 248–72 passim. It bears emphasis that some
French manufacturers, compelled by depression conditions to rationalize
and modernize production methods, did emerge stronger as a result, see
Daniel Lefeuvre, ‘Les Lumières de la crise: Les entreprises françaises dans
la dépression des années 1930’, Vingtième siècle, 52:1 (1996), 31–40.
89 The indispensable introduction here is Kenneth Mouré, Managing the
Franc Poincaré: Economic Understanding and Political Constraint in French
Monetary Policy, 1928–1936 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–45.
Also see his, The Gold Standard Illusion: France, the Bank of France, and the
International Gold Standard, 1914–1939 (Oxford University Press, 2002),
and ‘“Une éventualité absolument exclue”: French Reluctance to Devalue,
1933–1936’, French Historical Studies, 15:3 (1988), 479–505.
90 Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 175–7.
91 Zara Steiner proposed the idea of the depression period as Europe’s ‘hinge
years’ between ‘the decade of reconstruction and the decade of disintegra-
tion’. See her The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–
1933 (Oxford University Press, 2005), 635.
92 Moses E. Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 6–7, 32–42. Nigeria’s situation
was worsened by the fact that tenets of indirect rule, originally devised for
the Sokoto Caliphate, were applied generically.
93 TNA, CO 583/195/10, Sir Donald Cameron to Secretary of State for
Colonies, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, 29 December 1933. Nigeria’s Colonial
Treasurer also received comprehensive customs revenue figures covering
all ports each month. The Colonial Office, however, doubted the accuracy
of such figures, see CO minute by Alex Fiddian, 29 January 1934.
95 This is the central claim of Frémeaux, Les Empires coloniaux. Anne
Booth develops a similar, regionally focused argument in ‘The Economic
Development of Southeast Asia in the Colonial Era, c. 1870–1942’, History
Compass, 6:1 (2008), 25–53. The sociologist Charles Hirschman follows
much the same path, commenting that ‘the new colonial world of large-
scale plantations, mines and administrative cities was constructed in every

place that might conceivably yield a profit’. See Hirschman, ‘Population
and Society in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies, 25:2 (1994), 384.
96 Contra Hirschman, Philip Kelly notes that labour market processes in
sites of peripheral capitalism should not be reduced to a stereotype char-
acterized by the exploitation of abundant, cheap labour by foreign-owned
enterprises, see his ‘The Political Economy of Local Labor Control in the
Philippines’, Economic Geography, 77:1 (2001), 1.
97 For region-wide analysis, see Peter Boomgaard and Ian Brown (eds.),
Weathering the Storm: The Economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s Depression
(Singapore: ISEAS, 2000); Anne Booth, ‘Four Colonies and a Kingdom:
A Comparison of Fiscal, Trade and Exchange Rate Policies in Southeast
Asia in the 1930s’, Modern Asian Studies, 37:2 (2003), 429–60.
98 Booth, ‘Night Watchman’, 247–53.
99 Hirschman acknowledges the severity of the depression, but says less
about the return to profitability: ‘Population and Society’, 394–5.
100 Ian Brown, ‘Rural Distress in Southeast Asia during the World Depression
of the Early 1930s: A Preliminary Re-examination’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 45:5 (1986), 995. See also Ian Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis:
Burma’s Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s (London:
Routledge, 2005). Brown also reflects on evidential bias and limited official
understanding of rural responses to hardship in ‘“Blindness We Mistake
for Sight”: British Officials and the Economic World of the Cultivator
in Colonial Burma’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33:2
(2005), 181–93.
101 James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence
in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 85–8,
115–19; also cited in Brown, ‘Rural Distress’, 1010.
102 Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against
the European Colonial Order (Oxford University Press, reprint 1987), 201.
Surveying pre-colonial and colonial Southeast Asia, Adas has also sug-
gested that peasant smallholders resisted colonial government demands
through what he terms ‘the politics of denial’: hoarding, feigned ignor-
ance of fiscal demands and flight from the tax collector or recruiter: see
Michael Adas, ‘From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of
Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South-east Asia’, The Journal of
Peasant Studies, 13:2 (1986), 71–8. These competing interpretations are
tested in the case of Lower Burma in Ian Brown, ‘Tax Remission and Tax
Burden in Rural Lower Burma during the Economic Crisis of the Early
1930s’, Modern Asian Studies, 33:2 (1999), 383–403.
103 Brown, ‘Rural Distress’, 995.
104 Ibid., 1001–13.
105 Ibid., 1016–21.
106 Scott, Moral Economy, 85–8.
107 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Perceptions of Protest: Defining the Dangerous in
Colonial Sumatra’, American Ethnologist, 12:4 (1985), 642–58; Tobias
Rettig, ‘French Military Policies in the Aftermath of the Yên Bay Mutiny,
1930: Old Security Dilemmas Return to the Surface’, Southeast Asia

Research, 10:3 (2002), 309–31; Edmund B. Clipson, ‘Constructing an
Intelligence State: The Colonial Security Services in Burma, 1930–1942’,
University of Exeter Ph.D., 2010, chapters 1–2.
108 Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder
after 1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 19–22.
109 Brown, ‘Tax Remission’, 383–403; Brown, ‘Rural Distress’, 1011.
110 Brown, ‘Rural Distress’, 1014.
111 Brown, ‘Tax Remission’, 397–8.
112 Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant, 94; Joanna Lewis, Empire State-
Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–52 (Oxford: James Currey,
2000), 17.
113 Brown, ‘Tax Remission’, 383–4.
114 Ibid., 384–94.
115 Ibid., 398–9, 401; Clipson, ‘Constructing an Intelligence State’, chapters
1–3.
116 Christopher J. Baker, ‘Economic Reorganization and the Slump in
Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:3 (1981),
325–49; Cheng Siok-Hwa, ‘The Rice Industry of Malaya: A Historical
Survey’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 42:2
(1969), 130–44; Ooi Keat Gin, ‘For Want of Rice: Sarawak’s Attempts
at Rice Self-Sufficiency during the Period of Brooke Rule, 1841–1941’,
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 29:1 (1998), 8–23. For the antecedent to
this crisis, see Paul H. Kratoska, ‘The British Empire and the Southeast
Asian Rice Crisis of 1919–1921’, Modern Asian Studies, 24:1 (1990), 115–
46. The importance of absentee landlordism emerges strongly in Michael
Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on the
Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1974).
117 AN, Paul Reynaud papers, 74AP/9, Dossier: Indochine, ‘Office Indochinois
du Riz: constitution, objectifs, plan général d’action’.
118 AN, 74AP/10, E. Lecomte, President of Tonkin Chamber of Agriculture,
letter to Indochina Governor-general Jules Brévié, 6 August 1937.
119 AN, 74AP/9, GGI, Protectorat du Tonkin, ‘Rapport sur la situation finan-
cière du Tonkin durant la période 1934–1935’. Garde indigène expenditure
ran to 2,011,917 piastres in total budgetary spending of 11,117,537 piast-
res by the Tonkin protectorate government in 1934.
120 Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal’, American
Historical Review, 114:3 (2009), 565.
121 Ibid., 562–6.
122 Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161–4, quote at 164.
123 Ibid., 168.
124 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World
System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 431–3.
125 Boyce, Great Interwar Crisis, 260–1.
126 By guaranteeing currency convertibility against fixed measures of gold,
the gold standard’s benefits lay in the safeguards it offered to investors,
its promotion of international capital flows and its facilitation of trade.

But the gold standard re-created after the First World War was unsus-
tainable and co-operation between its leading members, some of whose
currencies were overvalued, broke down. For these arguments, see Barry
Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression,
1919–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1992), especially chapters 6–8. The
roles of John Maynard Keynes, Neville Chamberlain and the French
are examined in Boyce, Great Interwar Crisis, 244, 318–29; Boyce, ‘The
Government, the City of London and the Subversive Impact of the Gold
Standard, 1925–1931’, in Ronald Michie and Philip Williamson (eds.),
The Power to Influence: The British Government and the City of London
(Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215–35.
127 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 79, also cited in Fieldhouse,
‘Metropolitan Economics of Empire’, 94. Imperial members of the ster-
ling area could, in theory, withdraw their holdings or convert them into
foreign currencies until Britain tightened the rules in 1939. But they were
strongly discouraged from doing so in practice.
128 I. M. Drummond, The Floating Pound and the Sterling Area, 1931–1939
(Cambridge University Press, 1981), 14–22, 28–42; B. R. Tomlinson,
‘Britain and the Indian Currency Crisis, 1930–1932’, Economic History
Review, 2nd ser.: 32 (1979), 88–9; also cited in Darwin, Empire Project,
433–5, 745 n.43.
130 Social conditions in the colonies did not figure prominently in the Ottawa
Conference talks, for instance, see Tim Rooth, British Protectionism and
the International Economy: Commercial Policy in the 1930s (Cambridge
131 Such instances are explored in Ian Henderson, ‘Early African Leadership:
The Copperbelt Disturbances of 1935 and 1940’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 2:1 (1975), 83–97; Charles Perrings, ‘Consciousness, Conflict and
Proletarianization: An Assessment of the 1935 Mineworkers’ Strike on the
Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 4:1
(1977), 31–51; Rod Alence, ‘The 1937–1938 Gold Coast Cocoa Crisis: The
Political Economy of Commercial Stalemate’, African Economic History, 19
(1990–1), 77–104; David Meredith, ‘The Colonial Office, British Business
Interests and the Reform of Cocoa Marketing in West Africa, 1937–1945’,
Journal of African History, 29:2 (1988), 285–300; Maurice St Pierre,
‘The 1938 Jamaican Disturbances: A Portrait of Mass Reaction Against
Colonialism’, Social and Economic Studies, 27:2 (1978), 171–96; Sahadeo
Basdeo, ‘Walter Citrine and the British Caribbean Workers Movement dur-
ing the Moyne Commission Hearing 1938–9’, Journal of Caribbean History
(1983), 43–59; O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the
British Caribbean, 1934–39 (Oxford: James Currey, 1995); Richard Harris,
‘Making Leeway in the Leewards, 1929–51: The Negotiation of Colonial
Development’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33:3 (2005),
393–418; Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 196–200.
132 See, for example, Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the
Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 26–46; Alberto Sbacci, Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and

Fascist Italy, 1935–1941 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997). Longer-term
comparisons are made by Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies:
Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge University Press,
2010).
133 Introduction to Christian Davenport (ed.), Paths to State Repression:
Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics (Oxford: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2000), 1–17.
134 Kalyvas, Shapiro and Masoud (eds.), Order, Conflict, and Violence, 1.
135 Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, 62–3.
136 Ibid., 64–5.
137 Foster, Projections of Power, 27–30.
138 Elizabeth M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the
Raj, 1800–1947 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 142; also cited in Wiener, An
Empire on Trial, 7.
139 David Anderson and Sloan Mahone, ‘Civil War, Trauma, and the
Psychology of Mau Mau’, research paper delivered at the University
of Exeter, 22 May 2008. See also Sloane Mahone, ‘The Psychology of
Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa’,
Journal of African History, 47:2 (2006), 241–58. As David Anderson con-
cludes in relation to Kenya’s ‘black peril’ scares between 1906 and the
mid-1920s, ‘Economic downturn or political crisis was not so much a
cause of “black peril” scares as a conduit for anxieties that were already in
place.’ See his ‘Sexual Threat and Settler Society: Black Perils in Kenya,
c.1907–1930’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, 38:1 (2010),
47–74, quote at 66.
140 Patricia Lorcin, ‘Reflections on the French Colonial Mind’, in Martin
Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind: Mental Maps and Colonial
Encounters (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 3–18.
141 Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 11.
142 Davenport, Paths to State Repression, 3–5.
143 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, new English trans. (London:
Penguin, 2001), 38.
144 Price, ‘One Big Thing’, 626. See also the essays by Joshua Cole, Samuel
Kalman and Michael Vann in Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind:
Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 2012).
2 ‘ wh at di d you d o in t h e c o l oni a l p ol ic e
f orc e , da ddy ? ’ p o l ic ing in t e r -wa r diss e n t
1 TNA, CO 885/27/12, no. 365, Colonial Office Regulations for the Selection
of Probationers in the Police Services, published February 1930, pp. 3–15.
2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London:
Penguin reprint, 1991), especially part III: Discipline.
3 V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Crime, Authority and the Policeman State’, in F. M. L.
Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, 3 vols.
(Cambridge University Press, 1990), vol. III, 243–310; Clive Emsley,

‘“Mother, What Did Policemen Do When There Weren’t Any Motors?”: The
Law, the Police and the Regulation of Motor Traffic in England, 1900–1939’,
Historical Journal, 36:2 (1993), 357, 379–81.
4 For the ‘long view’, see the conclusion to Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire:
The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University
Press, 2005), 240–57. For later British and French examples, see Lewis,
Empire State-Building, chapters 1–2; Janice Boddy, Civilizing Women:
British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (Princeton University Press, 2007), part
III; Conklin, A Mission to Civilize.
5 Bonny Ibhawoh, ‘Stronger than the Maxim Gun: Law, Human Rights,
and British Colonial Hegemony in Nigeria’, Africa, 72:1 (2002), 55–83.
6 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of
Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009),
especially chapters 5 and 6.
7 TNA, CO 885/27/12, no. 365, Colonial Office Regulations for the Selection
of Probationers, p. 8.
8 David Killingray, ‘The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial
Africa, African Affairs, 85 (1986), 411–37; Baker, ‘Beyond the State Police
in Urban Uganda and Sierra Leone’, 55–76, especially 55–8; Bruce
Baker, ‘Who Do People Turn to for Policing in Sierra Leone?’, Journal of
Contemporary African Studies, 23:3 (2005), 371–90.
9 Key work on French territories includes Emily Lynn Osborn, ‘“Circle of
Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule
in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, 44:1 (2003), 29–50;
David Robinson, ‘Ethnography and Customary Law in Senegal’, Cahiers
d’Etudes Africaines, 32:126 (1992), 221–37; Ed Van Hoven, ‘Representing
Social Hierarchy: Administrators-Ethnographers in the French Sudan –
Delafosse, Monteil, and Labouret’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 30:118
(1990), 179–98; Ruth Ginio, ‘Negotiating Legal Authority in French West
Africa: The Colonial Administration and the African Assessors, 1903–
1918’, in Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters,
and Clerks, 115–35.
10 For a British colonial example of this process, see Roger Gocking, ‘British
Justice and the Native Tribunals of the Southern Gold Coast Colony’,
Journal of African History, 34:1 (1993), 93–102.
11 Emily Lynn Osborn, ‘“Rubber Fever”, Commerce and French Colonial
Rule in Upper Guinée, 1890–1913’, Journal of African History, 45:3 (2004),
447–62; J. H. Morrison, ‘Early Tin Production and Nigerian Labour
on the Jos Plateau, 1906–1921’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 11:2
(1977), 205–16; Bill Freund, ‘Labour Migration to the Northern Nigerian
Tin Mines, 1903–1945’, Journal of African History, 22:1 (1981), 73–84.
12 For evaluation of the depression’s impact on French West Africa, see
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘L’Afrique coloniale française et la crise de
1930: crise structurelle et genèse du sous-développement’, Revue Française
d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 63:232 (1976), 386–424; ‘Mutation de l’impérialisme
colonial français dans les années 30’, African Economic History, 4:4 (1977),
103–52.
352 Notes to page 44
13 T. N. Tamunu, The Police in Modern Nigeria, 1865–1965 (Ibadan University

Press, 1970).
14 Bill Nasson, ‘“Messing with Coloured People”: The 1918 Police Strike in
Cape Town, South Africa’, Journal of African History, 33:2 (1992), 301–19,
quote at 302. The integration of local constabularies into a national South
African Police Force culminated in 1912 Police Act no. 14 but, as Nasson
shows, this legislative tidying did not remove regional variation, inequal-
ities in pay and conditions and other inconsistencies between local units.
15 Groups of young men and adolescents garnered particular attention as
urban unemployment worsened, see Laurent Fourchard, ‘Lagos and the
Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–60’, Journal of African
History, 47:1 (2006), 119–20; Richard Waller, ‘Rebellious Youth in Colonial
Africa’, Journal of African History, 47:1 (2006), 77–92.
16 James B. Wolf, ‘Asian and African Recruitment in the Kenya Police, 1920–
1950’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 6:3 (1973), 403–4.
17 Tamunu, The Police in Modern Nigeria, 1–3.
18 Keith Shear, ‘“Not Welfare or Uplift Work”: White Women, Masculinity
and Policing in South Africa’, in Nancy Rose Hunt, Tessa P. Liu and Jean
Quataert (eds.), Gendered Colonialisms in African History (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997), 73–86.
19 Wolf, ‘Asian and African Recruitment’, 404–7; Nasson, ‘“Messing with
Coloured People”’, 303–12.
20 Police practice across huge Indian provinces varied widely, however. For
instance, while conviction rates throughout India rarely dropped below 75
per cent, proportions of criminal cases investigated differed. A snapshot
from the mid-1920s illustrates the point:
Province Percentage of cases Percentage of cases

investigated ending in conviction
Central Province 62.6 78.5

Punjab 85.4 75.2
Bombay 81.5 90.9
Madras 90.3 93.6
Bihar & Orissa 89.3 86.7
Bengal 78.01 89.9
Figures from Mss EUR D855: John Roland Phillips papers: Bengal
and Assam Superintendent of police, 1921–32, ‘Report on the Police
Administration in the Bengal Presidency, 1926’, 19. India’s bureaucracy
was also distinctive, with senior policemen, the District Superintendents
reporting directly to the District Magistrates of the Indian Civil Service,
while the highest police official in each province, the Inspector-general,
answered to the Governor. See Wiener, An Empire on Trial, 136.
21 David Campion, ‘Watchmen of the Raj: The United Provinces Police,
1870–1931 and the Dilemmas of Colonial Policing in British India’, Ph.D.
dissertation University of Virginia, 2002, 97–8; cited in Wiener, An Empire
on Trial, 136.
22 Wiener, An Empire on Trial, 137.

23 Ibid., 141–3, 171–90. The complexities of the plantation labour system,
and the pivotal role of Assam’s local elites within it, is explored by Jayeeta
Sharma, ‘“Lazy” Natives, Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry’,
Modern Asian Studies, 43:6 (2009), 1287–1324.
24 Quoted in David Arnold, ‘Police Power and the Demise of British Rule
in India, 1930–47’, in Anderson and Killingray (eds.), Policing and
Decolonisation, 43. See also David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule:
Madras, 1859–1947 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1986), 131–2;
Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the
Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141–6.
25 IOR, Mss EUR D855: Phillips papers, ‘Report on the Police Administration
in the Bengal Presidency, 1926’, pp. 2, 15, 31–2. Sanctioned permanent
strength of the subordinate police in 1926 was 24,325 as against 23,938
in the previous year. Numbers of dafadars and chaukidars ran to 80,023
the year before. The CID was especially busy in East Bengal, home of
the Chittagong Purity League and other revolutionary groups that spe-
cialized in bombings and targeted assassinations. On Bengali terrorism’s
copycat qualities, see Michael Silvestri, ‘“The Sinn Féin of India”: Irish
Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’,
Journal of British Studies, 39 (October 2000), 454–86. For analysis of ter-
rorism and security force counter-violence, see Durba Ghosh, ‘Terrorism
in Bengal: Imperial Strategies of Political Violence and its Containment in
the Interwar Years’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds.), Decentring
Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Delhi: Orient Longman,
2006), 270–89.
26 Michael P. M. Finch, ‘The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Pacification
Campaigning in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885–1900’, University of
Oxford D.Phil., 2010, 144–5.
27 Regarding ‘pacification’ operations in Tonkin against early national-
ist opposition and armed brigandage, the largest such group, Liu Yung-
fu’s ‘Black Flags’ especially, see Ella S. Laffey, ‘French Adventurers and
Chinese Bandits in Tonkin: The Garnier Affair in its Local Context’,
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 6:1 (1975), 38–51; J. Kim Munholland,
‘“Collaboration Strategy” and the French Pacification of Tonkin, 1885–
1897’, Historical Journal, 24:3 (1981), 629–50 and ‘The French Response to
the Vietnamese Nationalist Movement, 1905–14’, Journal of Modern History,
47:4 (1975), 645–7; Finch, ‘The Gallieni-Lyautey Method’, 111–15.
28 Morlat, Les Affaires politiques, 240–4.
29 Amaury Lorin, ‘“Gouverner partout, n’administrer nulle part”: Paul
Doumer, “Colbert de l’Indochine” (1897–1902)’, in Samia El Mechat (ed.),
Les administrations coloniales XIXe–XXe siècles: Esquisse d’une histoire com-
parée (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 25–30.
30 Morlat, Les Affaires politiques, 240–2.
31 Ibid., 249–50.
32 Isolated garde indigène blockhouses proved vulnerable to attack in the
1930–1 disorders and militiamen also faced intense local pressure to desert,
see Archives Départementales de l’Aude (ADA), Carcassonne, Albert
Sarraut papers, 12J301, no. 267-RS, Annam Resident-Superior Le Fol,

‘A. S. des incidents de Vinh et Ha-Tinh, Septembre 1930’, 29 September
1930; ‘Localisation de l’agitation’, 21 November 1930, 1–4.
33 ANOM, Fonds Ministériels Indochine (FM/INDO), Nouveaux Fonds
(NF), FM/INDO/NF2328, ‘Recherche des causes du mouvement insur-
rectionnel’, remis par le Général Claudel, n.d., 1931, pp. 6–7.
34 Natasha Pairaudeau, ‘Indians as French Citizens in Colonial Indochina,
1858–1940’, University of London Ph.D., 2009, 103–9, 112–18, 197.
According to Pairaudeau, other names in the archival record suggest that
other Saigon police officers and Poulo-Condore prison guards were of
Corsican descent.
35 Ibid., 109.
36 Ibid., 112–13.
37 Punjabi Sikhs were one such group preferred for service in the army or
police: Streets, Martial Races, 174–5.
38 Albert Grundlingh, ‘“Protectors and Friends of the People”? The South
African Constabulary in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, 1900–08’,
169–78; David M. Anderson, ‘Policing, Prosecution and the Law in Colonial
Kenya, c. 1905–39’, both in Anderson and Killingray (eds.), Policing the
Empire, 169–78, and 184–91; Sinclair, At the End of the Line, 223.
39 Chloe Campbell, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1939’,
Historical Journal, 45:1 (2005), 129–30. Campbell provides figures of a white
resident population of 16,831 among a black Kenyan population of well over
three million at the height of the depression in 1931. Brocheux and Hémery,
Indochina, 183, tables 4.1 and 4.2. In 1921 the registered French population
in French Indochina was 24,482. By 1940 the figure had risen to an estimated
34,000 (of whom 16,550 were in and around Saigon and another 12,589 in
Tonkin) among a total French Indochina population of 22,655,000.
40 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 120–32; Brocheux, The Mekong Delta,
chapters 3 and 5.
41 John Lonsdale, ‘Kenya: Home County and African Frontier’, in Robert
Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas, Oxford History of
the British Empire companion volume (Oxford University Press, 2010), 76.
42 David Anderson, ‘Master and Servant’, 463–7 and ‘Policing, Prosecution
and the Law’, 194–5; Daniel Branch, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in
Kenya, c. 1930–1952: Escaping the Carceral Archipelago’, International
Journal of African Historical Studies, 38:2 (2005), 239–65; Campbell,
‘Juvenile Delinquency’, 129–31.
43 Wiener, An Empire on Trial, 200, 205–14.
44 Ibid., 210–16; David Anderson’s assessment of evidence gathered by the
native punishments commission in 1921–3 is useful here, see ‘Policing the
Settler State: Colonial Hegemony in Kenya, 1900–52’, in Dagmar Engels
and Shula Marks (eds.), Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in
Africa and Asia, 1858 until Independence (London: British Academic Press,
2000), 248–66, and Anderson, ‘Master and Servant’, 459–85.
45 Settler anxieties intensified under the second Labour government of 1929–
31, which was broadly hostile to settler interests in Kenya’s Legislative
Council and was prepared to talk to Jomo Kenyatta’s Kikuyu Central

Association, see Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement,
187–91.
47 Ibid., 200–3. The case of women is examined by Stacey Hynd in ‘Deadlier
than the Male? Women and the Death Penalty in Colonial Kenya and
Nyasaland, c. 1920–1957’, Stichproben, 13 (2007), 1–22.
48 Berman and Lonsdale, ‘Crises of Accumulation’, 81. The authors suggest
that officials and police considered the coercion involved an unavoidable
consequence of agricultural modernization.
49 Campbell, ‘Juvenile Delinquency’, 139–46. Campbell demonstrates that
reform of criminal legislation and Kenya’s prison regime did take place
in the 1930s, albeit influenced by eugenicist thinking in the identifica-
tion of ‘juvenile delinquents’ and the development of the colony’s borstal
system.
50 Branch, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya’, 241–8.
51 The extent to which Shanghai’s Municipal Police Force (SMP) did so is
vividly recreated through the eyes of Richard Maurice Tinkler, who served
in the SMP from 1919 until his death in June 1939, see Robert Bickers,
Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Penguin,
2004), especially 64–94.
52 Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism,
1900–1949 (Manchester University Press, 1999), 73–88; Bickers,
‘Shanghailanders and Others: British Communities in China, 1843–1957’,
in Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates, 269–301.
53 Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British
Settler Community in Shanghai, 1843–1937’, Past & Present, 159 (May
1998), 162.
54 Commenting in 1953 on the excesses of settler vigilantism in the Mau Mau
conflict, Sir George Erskine, the security force commander with overall
authority over Kenya’s police, confided to his wife that ‘Kenya is a sunny
place for shady people … I hate the guts of them all’, cited in Sinclair, At
the End of the Line, 160. For the evolution of settler thinking, see Dane
Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern
Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987).
55 Stacey Hynd, ‘“The Extreme Penalty of the Law”: Mercy and the Death
Penalty as Aspects of State Power in Colonial Nyasaland, c. 1903–47’,
Journal of East African Studies, 4:3 (2010), 544. Her conclusion is equally
pithy: ‘The legal-administrative nexus in Nyasaland closely linked the
operation of justice with the maintenance of order and the defence of the
colonial state and society, and it was those cases deemed most threatening
to the colonial order which resulted in judicial execution’ (quote at 553).
56 Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London:
Routledge, 2009), 1, 4–5. The scope for misinterpreting customary law
was, and remains, substantial, see Judith Scheele, ‘A Taste for Law: Rule-
Making in Kabylia (Algeria)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
50:4 (2008), 895–919.
57 Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on

Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa
and the Caribbean’, History Compass, 7:3 (2009), 669.
58 Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, 2–3.
59 The persistence of corporal punishment mirrored colonial efforts to impose
workplace regimens on Natal’s black labour force, see Kaletso E. Atkins,
‘“Kafir Time”: Preindustrial Temporal Concepts and Labour Discipline
in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Natal’, Journal of African History, 29:2
(1988), 229–44.
60 Stephen Peté and Annie Devenish, ‘Flogging, Fear and Food: Punishment
and Race in Colonial Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31:1
(2005), 3–21. The racial characteristics of prison and police punishments
were sharpened by the influx of over 150,000 Indian labourers between the
1860s and 1914, primarily to work in Natal’s sugar industry. See Magee
and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 72.
61 Steven Pierce, ‘Punishment and the Political Body: Flogging and
Colonialism in Northern Nigeria’, in Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao
(eds.), Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality and Colonialism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 186–214; also cited in Stacey
Hynd, ‘Killing the Condemned: The Practice and Process of Capital
Punishment in British Africa, 1900–1950s’, Journal of African History, 49:3
(2010), 403–18.
62 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 185–213.
63 Former Belgian colonial officials, interviewed by the anthropologist Marie-
Bénédicte Dembour, admitted that illegal flogging persisted. Most of her
interviewees were recruited after 1945, see Dembour, Recalling the Belgian
Congo: Conversations and Introspection (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 100.
64 Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, ‘La Chicote comme symbole du colonialisme
belge?’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 26:2 (1992), 206–13. Chicotte
is a Portuguese term referring to a short, braided whip often carried by
policemen and, in the Belgian Congo, Force Publique officers.
65 ANOM, Henri Félix de Lamothe papers, 4PA/2, Sous-dossier: Congo,
1898–9, de Lamothe to Lieutenant-Gouverneur du Haut-Oubanghi,
Libreville, 27 June 1898.
66 The officer in question, Lieutenant Durand Authier, was recalled to France:
ANOM, de Lamothe papers, 4PA/2, ‘Rappel de M. Le Lieutenant Durand
Authier’, 6 September 1899.
67 In terms of this reconstruction of working patterns, I found Indian police
records available in the IOR V series the most comprehensive on the British
imperial side; North African gendarmerie records available at the Service
Historique de la Gendarmerie Nationale on the French imperial side. Records
of the Belgian Congo’s troupes en service territoriale are among the fullest.
68 For a survey of police in British African territories, see Clayton and Killingray,
Khaki and Blue. For US and Japanese examples of pacification as military
policing, see Brian Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific,
1902–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997),
29–42; Linn, ‘Cerberus’ Dilemma: The US Army and Internal Security
in the Pacific, 1902–1940’, in Killingray and Omissi (eds.), Guardians of

Empire, 120–2, 127; Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire,
the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006), 99, 113–15; Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword:
The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1995), 232–8 passim; Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire:
Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1998), 140–9, 157–61.
69 Frederick Wakeman Jnr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1997), 65–76; Kramer, The Blood of
Government, 40, 161–2.
70 Dakar in Senegal provides a notable exception. The city remained econom-
ically stratified but not formally segregated despite recurrent outbreaks
of bubonic plague between 1914 and 1944, see Myron Echenberg, Black
Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in
Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).
71 TNA, CO 583/233/10, R. Briercliffe, Director of Medical Services, to
Government Chief Secretary, Lagos, ‘Yellow fever in Nigeria’, 29 July
1937; CO minute, 10 March 1938.
72 Lauren Benton, ‘Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional
Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State’, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 41:3 (1999), 563–88, and Benton, Law and Colonial
Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), chapters 4 and 5; A. I. Asiwaju, ‘Law in African Borderlands:
The Lived Experience of the Yoruba Astride the Nigeria-Dahomey Border’,
in Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts (eds.), Law in Colonial Africa (Oxford:
James Currey, 1991), 227–31; Sally Engle Merry, ‘Colonial Law and its
Uncertainties’, Law and History Review, 28:4 (2010), 1067–8.
73 Samia El Mechat, ‘Les Libertés publiques à l’épreuve du Protectorat en
Tunisie (1884–1940)’, in El Mechat (ed.), Les Administrations coloniales
XIXe–XXe siècles, 213–27.
74 David Lambert, Notables des colonies: Une élite de circonstance en Tunisie et au
Maroc (1881–1939) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009).
75 Ibid., 120–39; Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics
of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1987), 251–62, 293–
302; Elizabeth S. Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal
Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 53–6; Philippe Droz-Vincent, ‘Notabilités
urbaines et structuration des systèmes politiques arabes dans les périodes
mandataires: L’exemple de la Syrie’, in El Mechat (ed.), Les Administrations
coloniales XIXe–XXe siècles, 100–6.
76 For the British case, see Sinclair, At the End of the Line, 3–5, 10–30;
Anthony Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service: A History of HM Colonial
and Overseas Civil Services, 1837–1997 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999),
chapter 2; P. E. Razzell, ‘Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and
British Home Army’, British Journal of Sociology, 14:3 (1963), 248–60;
Christopher M. Bell, ‘The King’s English and the Security of the Empire:
Class, Social Mobility, and Democratization in the British Naval Officer

Corps, 1918–1939’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (July 2009), 695–716;
William D. Rubenstein, ‘Britain’s Elites in the Inter-War Period, 1918–
39’, Contemporary British History, 12:1 (1998), 1–18. For French parallels,
see William B. Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in
Africa (Stanford University Press, 1971); Ronald Chalmers Hood, Royal
Republicans: French Naval Dynasties between the Wars (Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 1985).
77 TNA, CO 267/648/12, Extract from Sierra Leone despatch, 5 September
1934: Governor’s proposals for reduction of European personnel; CO
minute by J. Fletcher-Cooke, 20 November 1934.
78 TNA, CO 267/648/12, minute by Alex Fiddian, 23 November 1934.
79 Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 148–65.
80 TNA, CO 850/56/13, Officer Administering the Government, Government
House, Nigeria, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Secretary of State for the
Colonies, 4 January 1935.
81 TNA, CO 850/56/13, Enclosure 11a to confidential despatch E of 4 January
1935: ‘Report of a Committee of the Executive Council appointed to hold an
inquiry into charges preferred against Mr Thomas Elton-Miller, Assistant
District Officer, under Colonial Regulation 68’.
82 TNA, CO 850/56/13, T. Elton-Miller letter to Chief Secretary, Lagos,
26 October 1934.
83 Ibid.
84 TNA, CO 850/56/13, Enclosure no. 6 to confidential despatch E of
4 January 1935: E. A. Miller, for Acting Secretary, southern provinces, to
Government Chief Secretary, Lagos, 14 September 1934.
85 TNA, CO 850/56/13, Officer Administering the Nigeria Government to
Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 4 January
1935. Faithfull transferred to Nigeria in 1927.
86 TNA, CO 850/56/13, CO minute by J. Lloyd, 11 February 1935.
87 Reluctance to prosecute police officers within the British Empire, even
for extreme acts of violence, was not confined to black Africa. For a simi-
lar case involving Aboriginal Australians accused of cattle theft, see Mark
Finnane and Fiona Paisley, ‘Police Violence and the Limits of Law on a
Late Colonial Frontier: The “Borroloola Case” in 1930s Australia’, Law
and History Review, 28:1 (2010), 147–68.
88 TNA, CO 323/959/2, Colonial Police Officers Courses at Royal Ulster
Constabulary Depot, Newtownards, Ulster, 1926.
89 TNA, CO 323/1150/18, G. N. Faux-Powell to Under-Secretary of State,
Colonial Office, 28 October 1931, ‘Memorandum on the organization of
the Nigerian police’.
90 Ibid.
91 TNA, CO 850/56/13, CO minute by Cunliffe-Lister, 2 March 1935.
92 For African and British reactions to the shootings, see Misty L. Bastian,
‘“Vultures of the Marketplace”: Igbo and other South-eastern Nigerian
Women’s Discourse about the Ògù Umùnwa yi (Women’s War) of 1929’,
in Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi (eds.), Women in
African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2001), 260–81, and Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and

Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan,
2009), 162–79.
93 Isabel Hull’s analysis of military culture in Wilhelmine Germany and
German South West Africa is an exemplary guide here, see her Absolute
Destruction, part II. Another useful discussion of normative behaviours in
a police organization is Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National
Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY, Cornell
University Press, 1996), 18–20, 71–80.
94 Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion,
Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), 6.
95 This definition draws upon Emily J. Rosenberg, Spreading the American
Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1982), 7; also cited in Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 6.
96 Simon Kitson, ‘From Enthusiasm to Disenchantment: The French Police
and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1944’, Contemporary European History, 11:3
(2002), 371–90.
97 See, for instance, Risto Marjomaa, ‘The Martial Spirit: Yao Soldiers in
British Service in Nyasaland (Malawi), 1895–1939’, Journal of African
History, 44:3 (2003), 413–32.
98 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Beacon Press,
1965, revised edition 1991), 120; also cited in Wolf, ‘Asian and African
Recruitment’, 402.
99 Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘The Making of a Police Labour Force’, Journal
of Social History, 24:1 (1990), 109–34. Other long-term trends in the
Metropolitan Police that resonated with colonial experience were the
hostility felt among the rank and file towards unsympathetic senior offi
cers and the reliance on two constituencies – agricultural labourers and
ex-servicemen – to supplement local recruitment.
100 Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration
Control between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006),
161–4.
101 MAE, série M: Maroc, sous-série: Police, Dossier générale, vol. 839, no.
1527, Office du Protectorat (Rabat) to Foreign Ministry, Sous-Direction
d’Afrique, 8 May 1924.
102 MAE, série K: Afrique, sous-série: Défense nationale, vol. 31, Dossier:
Contre-espionnage, Ministère de la Guerre EMA 2e bureau to sous-
direction d’Afrique, 5 July 1932: ‘A/S Contre-espionnage en Tunisie’.
Contre-espionnage, no. 1170, Ministre plenipotentiare, résidence géné-
rale Tunis to Edouard Herriot, 13 September 1932.
Contre-espionnage, no. 368, Ministère de la Marine to sous-direction
d’Afrique, 31 August 1932.
105 MAE, série K: Afrique, sous-série: Algérie, vol. 1, Gouvernement Général
corréspondance générale, 1930–1934, no. 15881, Procureur Général,
Algiers Court of Appeal, to Governor Carde, 23 July 1933.
106 MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-série: Algérie, vol. 8, préfecture

d’Alger, Affaires indigènes et police générale arrêté, signed by Algiers
Prefect F. Atger, 14 February 1935; Ministry of Justice direction des affaires
criminelles, ‘A/S Arrêt de la Cour d’Assises d’Alger du 16 Décembre 1934’.
107 Stoler, ‘Perceptions of Protest’, 642–58, and, for the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Stoler, ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics
of Colonial Narratives’, Representations, 37 (Winter 1992), 151–89.
108 TNA, CO 323/959/2, Colonial Police Officers Courses at Royal Ulster
Constabulary Depot, Newtownards, Ulster, 1926; CO 323/1519/1, War
Office letter to F. J. Howard, Colonial Office, 25 November 1936.
109 TNA, CO 54/893/14, Colombo office of the Inspector-general of police,
Report on the new police training school, 11 September 1928.
110 TNA, CO 54/896/1, K. G. Bradley minute, 4 March 1929.
111 Gad Kroizer, ‘From Dowbiggin to Tegart: Revolutionary Change in the
Colonial Police in Palestine during the 1930s’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 32:2 (2004), 115–33; Martin Kolinsky, Law, Order
and Riots in Mandatory Palestine 1928–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1994),
93–100.
112 TNA, CO 323/1006/13 New Scotland Yard letter to Under Secretary
of State for Colonies, ‘Police officers: courses at New Scotland Yard for
senior officers’, 17 May 1928.
113 TNA, CO 323/972/11, Notes of conference held at the Home Office on
Tuesday 13 March 1927 to consider the proposed publication of a Police
Journal. This meeting was chaired by Sir John Anderson of the Home
Office, with Metropolitan Police, Colonial Office, Dominion Office and
Indian Office representatives. The Journal’s inclusive, populist tone con-
trasts sharply with the academic flavour of the Journal of the Royal Central
Asian Society, the publication that networked current and past members of
Britain’s various frontier district and nomad control administrations in the
desert regions of North Africa and Western Asia, see Robert S. G. Fletcher,
‘British Imperialism and “The Tribal Question”: Desert Administration
and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936’, University of
Oxford D.Phil., 2011, chapter 1.
114 TNA, CO 323/872/11, The Police Journal: A Quarterly Review for the
Police Forces of the Empire, sample copy published by Philip Allan and Co,
London, 1927; L. S. Amery, circular to colonial governors, 13 July 1927.
Described as a professional journal for senior and junior ranks, the jour-
nal’s specimen contents included the following articles: ‘The comparative
psychology of murder by poison’; ‘Recent medical discoveries and their
bearing on the detection of crime’; ‘Some reflections on unsolved murder
mysteries’; ‘Stories of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’; ‘The secret
societies of China’; ‘Famous escapes from prison’; ‘The native trackers of
Australia’; ‘Memoirs of a policeman on the North West Frontier of India’;
‘Some aspects of the criminal law of Great Britain’; and ‘The history of an
English county constabulary’. After the Colonial Secretary put his weight
behind the scheme, the journal went into publication in 1928.
115 Jean-David Mizrahi, Genèse de l’État mandataire: Service de renseignements
et bandes armées en Syrie et au Liban dans les années 1920 (Paris: Publications
de la Sorbonne, 2003). The role of French transferees in raising para-

military units is discussed in N. E. Bou-Nacklie, ‘Les Troupes Spéciales:
Religious and Ethnic Recruitment, 1916–46’, International Journal of
Middle East Studies, 25:4 (1993), 645–60.
3 ‘ paying t h e b u t c h e r’ s b i l l ? ’: p ol ic ing b r i t ish

c o l oni a l p ro t e s t a f t e r 1918
1 TNA, CO 323/771/B, Walter Long, Secretary of State for Colonies, let-
ter to Colonial Governors, 11 November 1918. Enclosure 1 to secret cir-
cular dispatch of 11 November 1918: extract from report of commission
appointed to inquire into the Featherstone Riots.
2 Ibid.
3 Bloxham and Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century
Europe, 19–20, 48.
4 Plans for the reorganization of the internal security forces in the newly
acquired Iraq Mandate illustrated the post-war pressure for economies
in action, see TNA, WO 32/5234, ‘Report of Macdonogh Committee on
Mesopotamia for raising a police force and special military force from
Indian or African units, 1921’.
5 Keith Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–1922
(Manchester University Press, 1984), 12–13, 17–24.
6 TNA, AIR 75/27, Official papers of MRAF Sir John Slessor, ‘Air Control –
The other point of view’,’ May 1931 and Air Staff memo, ‘What Air Control
means in war and peace; what it has achieved’, 20 June 1930; David Omissi,
Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester
University Press, 1990); Priya Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air
Control and the British Idea of Arabia’, American Historical Review, 111:1
(2006), 26–32; Jafna L. Cox, ‘A Splendid Training Ground: The Importance
to the Royal Air Force of its Role in Iraq, 1919–32’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 13:2 (1985), 157–84; Michael Paris, ‘Air Power and
Imperial Defence’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24:2 (1989), 209–25;
Charles Townshend, ‘Civilisation and “Frightfulness”: Air Control in the
Middle East Between the Wars’, in C. Wrigley (ed.), Warfare, Diplomacy
and Politics (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 142–62.
7 Michael Hanagan, ‘Charles Tilly and Violent France’, French Historical
Studies, 33:2 (2010), 283–5.
8 Tim Harper, ‘The British Malayans’, in Bickers (ed.), Settlers and
Expatriates, 249. Thirty-seven of the alleged mutineers were executed in
retribution.
9 Hynd, ‘“The Extreme Penalty of the Law”’, 547. The uprising was pre-
ceded by land seizures, famine and allegations that plantation workers were
severely maltreated.
10 Service Historique de la Défense-Département de l’Armée de Terre
(SHD-DAT), 5H6/D2, Philippe Pétain report, ‘Troubles et soulèvements
intérieurs en AOF pendant la guerre 1914–1918’, 26 March 1925.
11 The sequence of events and subsequent inquiry are laid out in two files:
TNA, CO 537/677 and 678.
12 A. P. Kannangara, ‘The Riots of 1915 in Sri Lanka: A Study in the Roots of

Communal Violence’, Past & Present, 102 (February 1984), 130–65, espe-
cially 131–47; Kumari Jayawardena, ‘Economic and Political Factors in the
1915 Riots’, Journal of Asian Studies, 29:2 (1970), 223–33.
13 George Rowell assesses the interpretations in ‘Ceylon’s Kristallnacht: A
Reassessment of the Pogrom of 1915’, Modern Asian Studies, 43:3 (2009),
619–48; see also John D. Rogers, ‘Social Mobility, Popular Ideology, and
Collective Violence in Modern Sri Lanka’, Journal of Asian Studies, 46:3
(1987), 591–4.
14 Charles Blackton, ‘The Action Phase of the 1915 Riots’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 29:2 (1970), 235–54.
15 TNA, CO 537/677, Ceylon riots correspondence, 1915; P. T. M. Fernando,
‘The British Raj and the 1915 Communal Riots in Ceylon’, Modern Asian
Studies, 3:3 (1969), 245–55; for administrative reforms in Ceylon from the
1880s onwards, see Lennox A. Mills, Ceylon under British Rule, 1795–1932,
new edition, (London: Routledge, 2005), 251–71.
16 Robert G. Neville, ‘The Yorkshire Miners and the 1893 Lockout: The
Featherstone “Massacre”’, International Review of Social History, 21:3
(1976), 337–57.
17 TNA, CO 323/771/B, enclosure 1: extract from ‘Report of Commission
appointed to inquire into the Featherstone Riots’, n.d.; Ian Christopher
Fletcher, ‘“Prosecutions … are Always a Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals,
and the 1912 “Don’t Shoot” Prosecutions’, Albion, 28:2 (1996), 252–60.
18 Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England
and Wales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 44–8, 154–64; Richard Vogler,
Reading the Riot Act: The Magistracy, the Police and the Army in Civil Disorder
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 74–8.
19 Vogler, Reading the Riot Act, 78–80.
20 Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain, 1906–
1926 (Oxford: Berg, 1990), 83–5, 92–3, 108–10.
21 Ibid., 116–17.
22 Subho Basu, ‘Strikes and “communal” riots in Calcutta in the 1890s:
Industrial Workers, Bhadralok Nationalist Leadership and the Colonial
State’, Modern Asian Studies, 32:4 (1998), 949–83; David Arnold, ‘Looting,
Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India’, Past & Present, 84
(August 1979), 111–45.
23 For details of continuing changes in security policing of India’s more
restive northern regions, see Gyanesh Kudaisya, ‘“In Aid of Civil Power”:
The Colonial Army in Northern India, c. 1919–42’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 32:1 (2004), 41–68.
24 D. George Boyce, ‘From Assaye to the Assaye: Reflections on British
Government Force and Moral Authority in India’, Journal of Military
History, 63:3 (1999), 651–5; David Arnold, ‘The Armed Police and Colonial
Rule in South India, 1914–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 11:1 (1977), 102–4;
Silvestri, ‘“The Sinn Féin of India”’, 454–86. The legislation was known
by a catch-all appellation: the Rowlatt Acts.
25 For the wartime background, see Thomas Hennessey, Dividing Ireland:
World War One and Partition (London: Routledge, 1998); for an overview
of the war’s conduct, see Dennis Showalter and William H. Kautt, The
Anglo-Irish War: A People’s War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999),
chapters 2, 5–7; for a unique insider’s perspective on its imperial ramifica-
tions, see Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier
(Oxford University Press, 2006), chapters 12–13.
26 Charles Townshend, ‘Military Force and Civil Authority in the United
Kingdom, 1914–1921’, Journal of British Studies, 28:3 (1989), 278–92.
27 Charles Townshend, Making the Peace: Public Order and Public Security in
Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 1993), 39–52.
28 Charles Townshend, ‘Martial Law: Legal and Administrative Problems of
Civil Emergency in Britain and the Empire, 1800–1940’, Historical Journal,
25:1 (1982), 171–5, 182–7.
29 Townshend, ‘Military Force and Civil Authority’, 287.
30 Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance
since 1848 (Oxford University Press, 1983), 277–321 passim; Eamonn T.
Gardiner, Dublin Castle and the Anglo-Irish War: Counter Insurgency and
Conflict (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 31–60 passim; Francis
Costello, ‘Lloyd George and Ireland, 1919–1921: An Uncertain Policy’,
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 14:1 (1988), 5–16. For participants’ per-
spectives, see Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare:
Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 1996).
31 Walter Long stands out as an exception here, see Richard Murphy, ‘Walter
Long and the Making of the Government of Ireland Act, 1919–20’, Irish
Historical Studies, 25:97 (1986), 82–6.
32 For the Riot Act’s eighteenth-century origins under the Hanoverian regime,
see Vogler, Reading the Riot Act, 1–2.
33 TNA, WO 279/796, ‘Notes on imperial policing, 1934’, Army Council
booklet, 30 January 1934.
34 TNA, CO 323/1519/1, Home Office letter to F. J. Howard, Colonial Office,
12 January 1937.
35 TNA, CO 323/1519/1, Colonial Office draft letter ‘For Mr Williams’, 12
February 1937.
36 Michael Rowe, ‘Sex, “Race” and Riot in Liverpool, 1919’, Immigrants and
Minorities, 19:2 (2000), 53–70; Jacqueline Jenkinson, ‘The 1919 Riots’,
in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries (Leicester University Press, 1996), 92–111; Jacqueline
Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain
(Liverpool University Press, 2008).
37 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922’, in Thomas Bartlett
and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 397–405. Julia Eichenberg examines the role of IRA repris-
als in Ireland’s escalating conflict in, ‘The Dark Side of Independence:
Paramilitary Violence in Ireland and Poland after the First World War’,
Contemporary European History, 19:3 (2010), 237–48 passim.
38 Weinberger, Keeping the Peace?, 148–9, 160–1.
39 Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear
of Brutalization in Post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History,
75:3 (2003), 557–9. For parallels with counter-revolutionary ex-service-

men in the defeated states of Central Europe, see Robert Gerwarth, ‘The
Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany,
Austria and Hungary after the Great War’, Past & Present, 200 (August
2008), 175–209.
40 R. J. Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919–1939
(London: Allen Lane, 2009), 10–15.
41 Townshend, ‘Military Force and Civil Authority’, 288–92.
42 Ibid., 291.
43 The limitations of this ‘Irish model’ are discussed in Richard Hawkins,
‘The “Irish Model” and the Empire: A Case for Reassessment’, in Anderson
and Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire, 18–31.
44 Kroizer, ‘From Dowbiggin to Tegart’, 115–33.
45 Michael Silvestri, ‘“An Irishman is Specially Suited to be a Policeman”: Sir
Charles Tegart and Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’, History Ireland,
8:4 (2000), 40–4.
46 The ‘Met’ special branch also worked with individual British colonial
police forces in the pursuit of serious criminal offenders. See TNA, CO
323/879, CO 286/52, Basil Thomson, Director of Intelligence, Scotland
House, Westminster, to Sir George Fiddes, Colonial Office, 7 June 1921.
47 Anthony Kinsella, ‘“Goodbye Dublin”: The British Military Evacuation
1922’, Dublin Historical Record, 51:1 (1998), 4.
48 Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Sir Warren Fisher and the Coalition, 1919–1922’,
Historical Journal, 24:4 (1981), 918–23.
49 Kent Fedorowich, ‘The Problems of Disbandment: The Royal Irish
Constabulary and Imperial Migration, 1919–1929’, Irish Historical Studies,
30:117 (1996), 88–110; for the backgrounds of the RIC’s auxiliary division,
see A. D. Harvey, ‘Who were the Auxiliaries?’, Historical Journal, 35:3
(1992), 665–9.
50 Kinsella, ‘“Goodbye Dublin”’, 16–17.
51 Susanna I. Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late
Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 3–5.
52 Ibid., 16–24.
53 Ibid., chapters 5 and 7.
54 Ibid., 141–4.
55 Louis Lépine, Mes Souvenirs (Paris: Payot, 1929), 128–38, cited in Barrows,
Distorting Mirrors, 190.
56 Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The
Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (London: Pall Mall Press, 1964),
58; John Steward Ambler, The French Army in Politics 1945–1962 (Columbus,
OH: Ohio State University Press, 1966), 318; George Armstrong Kelly,
Lost Soldiers: The French Army and Empire in Crisis, 1947–1962 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1965), 135. All cited in Neil MacMaster, ‘From Russia
to Algeria: Serge Chakhotin, Le Viol des Foules and the Development of
European Propaganda, 1914 to 1960’, unpublished article, note 3. My
thanks to Neil for giving me access to his work.
57 Waddington, Jones and Critcher, Flashpoints, 3–4.
58 TNA, CO 323/771/B, Walter Long letter to Colonial Governors, 11

November 1918.
59 It is worth noting that Walter Long, who would be promoted to First Lord
of the Admiralty in January 1919, was also an ardent anti-Bolshevik. Like
his friend Basil Thomson, Assistant Commissioner of the ‘Met’ and head
of the Special Branch, Long wanted to invest more resources in the anti-
seditionist work of Britain’s security services. See Keith Jeffery, MI6: The
History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury,
2010), 145.
60 TNA, CO 323/771/B, enclosure I, Featherstone Riots Commission; enclos-
ure III, ‘Orders for officers in command of troops acting for the assistance
of the civil authorities’: both 11 November 1918.
61 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–
1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32–5.
62 The following reports give a sense of the empire-wide crisis felt at the
time: TNA, WO 35/214, ‘Report on the Intelligence Branch of the Chief
of Police, Dublin Castle from May 1920 to July 1921’; IOR, Mss. EUR
D1194: Cyril George Grassby typescript: notes on Bengal police, ter-
rorism and policing in Darjeeling district, 1921–40; TNA, FO 407/184,
doc. 152, ‘Memorandum by Sir Ronald Graham on the unrest in Egypt’,
9 April 1919, doc. 373, ‘Expressions of opinion on political conditions in
[Egyptian] provinces extracted mainly from the reports of British polit-
ical officers’, 24 May 1919; KV1/17: ‘D’ Branch Report: The Organization
of the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau, 1921; TNA,
WO 32/5628, Governor of the Straits Settlements to Secretary of State for
Colonies, ‘Proposals for the establishment of a political intelligence bureau
in Malaya’, 18 October 1921.
63 Muhammad Haj Amin al-Hussaini, the future Mufti of Jerusalem, and
‘Arif al’Arif, editor of the newspaper Suriyyah al-Janubiyyah (Southern
Syria) fled to Transjordan after being charged with incitement over the
Jerusalem riots. See Taysir Jbara, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni
Mufti of Jerusalem (Princeton, NJ: Kingston Press, 1985), 32–5; Zvi Elpeleg,
The Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National
Movement (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 6.
64 Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots, 32; Bernard Wasserstein, The British in
Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–
1929 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 100–5. Palestine High Commissioner
Sir Herbert Samuel suspended Jewish immigration in response to the 1921
unrest.
65 Jeremy Krikler, White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killings in
South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2005); Krikler, ‘Women,
Violence and the Rand Revolt of 1922’, Journal of Southern African Studies,
22:3 (1996), 349–72, and ‘The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial
Massacre’, Historical Journal, 42:4 (1999), 1051–75. For the antecedents to
this racist ‘white labourism’, see Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The Imperial Working
Class Makes Itself “White”: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and
South Africa before the First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology,
12:4 (1999), 398–424; Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation,

112–14, 236.
66 For discussion of this scrutiny and its effectiveness, see Michael D.
Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914–1931
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1999); Susan Pederson, ‘The Meaning
of the Mandates System: An Argument’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 32
(2006), 560–82.
67 Townshend, Making the Peace, 37–41.
68 TNA, CO 323/771/B, enclosure II.
69 TNA, CO 323/771/B, enclosure VI: Extract from report of Jamaica Royal
Commission, 1866: ‘The duration of martial law’.
70 TNA, CO 323/771/B, enclosure II: West Indies, ‘The Use of Buckshot
Ammunition in the Suppression of Riots’, memorandum by John R.
Chancellor, Colonial Defence Committee Secretary, 15 August 1907.
71 Rhodes House Library, Mss. W. Ind. r. 9: Colonel Clive A. Crosbie-Smith,
‘The Jamaica Constabulary Force, 1867–1938’, pp. 14–15.
72 TNA, CO 323/771/B, enclosure II: West Indies, ‘The Use of Buckshot
Ammunition in the Suppression of Riots’, 15 August 1907.
73 Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian
Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993), 145. The riots led to a commission of
inquiry into their causes and consequences, the only such official investi-
gation in the history of indenture in Trinidad.
74 IOR, India Tea Association papers, Mss. EUR F174/628a: General com-
mittee 1937 report, pp. 7, 37–8.
75 Prashant Kidambi, ‘“The Ultimate Masters of the City”: Police, Public
Order and the Poor in Colonial Bombay, c. 1893–1914’, Crime, History, and
Societies, 8:1 (2004), 27–34.
76 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial
India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 271–83.
77 Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and
India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 31–7. For more details
of the inquiry into Dyer’s actions, see Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and
Punishment: Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgement, 1919–20
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986); Nigel Collett, The Butcher
of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon, 2005);
and Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’,
Past & Present, 131 (1991), 130–64.
78 Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, 16–37.
79 Kent, Aftershocks, 67.
80 Ibid., 68–74.
81 Mithi Mukherjee, ‘Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the
Pursuit of a “Different” Freedom in Modern India’, American Historical
Review, 115:2 (2010), 466–7.
82 Kidambi, ‘The Ultimate Masters’, 27.
83 Ibid., 28–41.
84 Defending killings of Jamaicans after the Morant Bay uprising in October
1865, the island’s Governor stressed that ‘ringleaders’ were quickly
identified and targeted, see W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian

Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford University Press, 2005), 24–8.
85 TNA, CO 323/771/B, copy of ‘Ceylon Orders for Troops’ and 1915 Martial
Law declaration. For an interesting, albeit extreme, parallel in the punish-
ment of ‘ringleaders’ of colonial insurrection, in this case, the Herero of
German South West Africa, see Hull, Absolute Destruction, 17–19.
86 For background, see Rana P. Behal, ‘Coolie Drivers or Benevolent
Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour
System’, Modern Asian Studies, 44:1 (2010), 29–51.
87 Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders’, 185–98.
88 Ibid., 162, 179–82; Bickers, Britain in China, 3–4, 69–70. British-
officered, the SMP relied on an Indian, mainly Sikh, rank and file, akin
to the Straits Settlements police in Singapore and Penang.
89 TNA, WO 32/2829, F7633/25/10, Report on formation of a special police
force for Shanghai, enclosure 1: Sir Miles Lampson to Shanghai Consul-
General Sir S. Barton, 27 July 1927.
90 Wakeman Jnr., Policing Shanghai, 8, 59–64.
91 TNA, WO 32/5350, CP 306(25), Joint memorandum by the Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs and the Secretary of State for the Colonies,
‘Kuo Min Tang’, June 1925; extract from Malaya Bulletin of Political
Intelligence, no. 33, October/November 1925.
92 TNA, CO 273/534/16, Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, no. 38,
April 1926, compiled by the Political Intelligence Bureau, Singapore,
10 May 1926.
93 TNA, CO 273/538/2, H. Fairburn, Inspector-General of Police, Straits
Settlements, ‘Report on the Kreta Ayer shooting incident, March 12th,
1927’, pp. 25–6; WO 32/5350, Governor Clementi, Government House
Singapore, to Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Passfield, 8 March
1930.
94 TNA, CO 273/538/2, G. Seth, acting Attorney-General, Straits
Settlements, ‘Report on the Kreta Ayer Inquest’, 7 July 1927, pp. 2–3.
Seth was Solicitor-General at the time of inquest proceedings.
95 TNA, CO 273/535/11, Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence,
February–April 1927, p. 4.
96 TNA, CO 273/538/2, despatch 493, H. Fairburn, Inspector-General of
Police, Straits Settlements, ‘Report on the Kreta Ayer shooting incident,
March 12th, 1927’.
97 TNA, CO 273/538/2, G. Seth, acting Attorney-General, Straits
Settlements, ‘Report on the Kreta Ayer Inquest’, 7 July 1927, pp. 1–2.
98 TNA, CO 273/538/2, Governor, Straits Settlements, to Leo Amery,
27 August 1927.
99 TNA, CO 273/538/2, P. A. Clutterbuck, CO minute, 21 June 1927.
Labour MP George Lansbury, a critic of colonial policing methods, led
back-bench calls for a full investigation of the shootings.
100 TNA, CO 273/538/2, Minute by G. G., 30 September 1927.
101 TNA, CO 67/240/10, Governor of Cyprus to the Secretary of State for
the Colonies, 22 October 1931. As Robert Holland has shown, the 1931
riot quickly entered Cypriot collective memory as a decisive step in the
struggle for Enosis, or union with Greece, see his Britain and the Revolt in
Cyprus, 1954–59 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1–5.
102 TNA, CO 67/240/10, GS81/22/10, Cipher telegram from HQ RAF Middle
East to Air Ministry, 22 October 1931; secret telegram 74, Governor of
Cyprus to Colonial Office, 23 October 1931.
103 TNA, CO 67/240/10, RAF HQ Middle East to Air Ministry, telegram,
26 October 1931; telegram 87, Governor of Cyprus to Secretary of State
for the Colonies, 28 October 1931. The story of the 1931 Cyprus crisis is
copiously analysed in G. S. Georghallidis, Cyprus and the Governorship of
Sir Ronald Storrs: The Causes of the 1931 Crisis (London: Cyprus Research
Centre, 1986).
104 The 1931 disorders were also ironic insofar as the heavy British military
presence on the island, originally justified after the 1878 takeover as a stra-
tegic lever with Ottoman Turkey, provoked tension between the island’s
Greek and Turkish communities: Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in
Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Manchester University
Press, 2009), 276–8; see also Varnava, ‘“Martial Races” in the Isle of
Aphrodite’, Journal of Military History, 74:4 (2010), 1047–67.
105 What Robert Holland calls ‘the unabashedly repressive regime’ of Governor
Sir Richmond Palmer between 1933 and 1939 ensured that the police had
such powers to hand, providing a precedent for restrictions introduced
with the onset of the Cyprus Emergency in the early 1950s: Holland,
‘Never, Never Land: British Colonial Policy and the Roots of Violence in
Cyprus, 1950–54’, in Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder, 150–1.
106 TNA, CO 67/269/20, Memorandum of instructions in event of rioting,
Cyprus, 1936, extract from secret despatch (4), from Governor of Cyprus
to Secretary of State for Colonies, 7 February 1936.
107 TNA, CO 67/269/20, CO minute by H. Duncan, 27 March 1936. For
other British colonial legislation in the Cyprus model, see CO 167/893/7:
Riots Order Ordinance, enclosure to Mauritius despatch of 29 February
1936, ‘A Bill for the prevention of riots and unlawful assemblies’.
108 TNA, CO 323/1543/3, ‘Report of the Commission of Enquiry concerning
the riot in Zanzibar on the 7th of February 1936’.
109 The same applied in the Colombo riots of February 1929, mentioned in
Chapter 2, in which striking transport workers attacked the city’s police.
They fired back in retaliation and were reinforced by soldiers of the Royal
Artillery, see TNA, CO 54/896/1, Governor of Ceylon to Colonial Office,
6 February 1929.
110 TNA, CAB 24/Secretary of State for Colonies memoranda CP 301(33)
and 301A(33).
111 TNA, CO 323/1341/19, CP 226(35), J. H. Thomas memorandum, ‘Use of
tear gas in the colonial empire’, 3 December 1935. As we saw in Chapter
1, Thomas was compelled to resign from his post in May 1936 after leak-
ing budget secrets to City financiers.
112 Ann Mosely Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939: The Frustration of
a Nationalist Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 114–
18; Ted Swedenburg, ‘The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great
Revolt (1936–1939)’, in Edmund Burke and Ira M. Lapidus (eds.), Islam,
Politics, and Social Movements (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

1988), 184–90; Yuval Arnon-Ohanna, ‘The Bands in the Palestinian Arab
Revolt, 1936–1939: Structure and Organization’, Asian and African Studies,
15:2 (1981), 229–47; Martin Kolinsky, ‘The Collapse and Restoration of
Public Security’, in Michael J. Cohen and Martin Kolinsky (eds.), Britain
and the Middle East in the 1930s: Security Problems (London: Macmillan,
1992), 148–56; Cohen, Army of Shadows, 116–41; Charles Townshend,
‘The Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 1936–1939’,
English Historical Review, 103 (1988), 919–49.
113 TNA, CO 323/1113, Palestine and Transjordan defence scheme, n.d.,
January 1930, chapter 4: ‘Army measures to be taken in peace during the
precautionary stage and at the outset of the action stage’; WO 191/170,
GHQ Palestine, ‘Military lessons of the Arab Rebellion’, compiled in
February 1938.
114 Matthew Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces
and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39’, English
Historical Review, 124:507 (2009), 313–54; Hughes, ‘Lawlessness was
the Law: British Armed Forces, the Legal System and the Repression of
the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–1939’, in Rory Miller (ed.), Britain,
Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 141–
56; Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and
the Palestinian National Past (Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press,
2003), 108–9, 179–86.
115 TNA, WO 32/4176, Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore to Palestine
high commissioner, 3 June 1936; H. J. Simson, British Rule, and Rebellion
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1938), 55–66.
116 For prisons in sub-Saharan colonial Africa, see Florence Bernault, ‘The
Politics of Enclosure in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa’ and Thierno
Bah, ‘Captivity and Incarceration in Nineteenth-Century West Africa’,
both in Florence Bernault (ed.), A History of Prison and Confinement in
Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 2 and 69–76. For par-
ticular focus on French Guinea, site of some of the worst colonial and
post-colonial prison abuses, see Mamadou Dian Chérif Diallo, Répression
et enfermement en Guinée: Le pénitencier de Fotoba et la prison centrale de
Conakry de 1900 à 1958 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); Mairi S. MacDonald,
‘Guinea’s Political Prisoners: Colonial Models, Postcolonial Innovation’,
paper to French Colonial History Society conference, Paris, June 2010.
My thanks to Dr MacDonald for pointing me to these references.
117 Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment’, 662–3.
118 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2490, Demongin mission reports on Saigon
prison and Poulo-Condore penitentiary, 23 February 1932. The Ministry
of Colonies colonial prison inspectorate described these two establish-
ments as the ‘best Communist training schools in Cochin-China’.
119 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2490, Reports on the organization of Tonkin
penitentiary system, 27 April 1932; Poulo-Condore penitentiary, 23
February 1932; and the disciplinary establishments of the Sûreté in
Phnom Penh 14 April 1932.
120 Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, chapters 7 and 9.
121 David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1981), 308.
122 Ian Brown, ‘A Shooting Incident at Insein Prison, Burma, in 1947’, Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:4 (2009), 520–1. Governed at the
time as a part of British India, rates of imprisonment in Burma in the decade
before 1920 were almost five times higher than in Bengal, a province some-
times depicted as the epicentre of Indian political violence at the time.
123 TNA, CO 323/1202/8, CO minutes, 3–7 July 1932.
124 TNA, CO 850/130/16, ‘Unification and staffing of the colonial prison
services’, 18 December 1936.
125 TNA, CO 850/130/16, Summary of replies to circular dispatch, 4 December
1937.
126 TNA, CO 884/24, ‘Report by Mr Alexander Paterson, H. M. Commissioner
for Prisons, of a visit to the Reformatory and Penal Establishments of
Jamaica, British Honduras, Bahamas, Leeward & Windward Islands,
Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, British Guiana, in the five months of sun-
shine between 20th December 1936 and 10th May 1937’, 25 May 1937;
‘The separation of police and prison services’, p. 21.
127 TNA, CO 583/223/9, Record of proceedings of conference of Yoruba
Chiefs, held at Oyo, 31 March and 1 April 1937.
128 TNA, CO 583/233/13, no. 14144/63, Northern Provinces Commissioner
T. S. Adams to Sir Bernard Bourdillon, Lagos, 30 October 1937;
Bourdillon, Lagos, to W. A. G. Ormsby-Gore, 26 February 1938.
129 TNA, CO 583/223/9, Conference of Yoruba Chiefs 1937, Record of
Proceedings.
130 TNA, CO 583/233/13, ‘Proposed amalgamation of Northern and
Southern Prison Departments’, draft, October 1937.
131 TNA, CO 884/24, ‘Report by Mr Alexander Paterson’, p. 32.
132 Ibid., p. 35.
133 Stephen A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies,
1854–1952 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 91–3;
Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam,
1862–1940 (Berkeley, CA: University Press of California, 2001), 95.
134 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2490, Mission Demongin, 1931–32, Rapport
concernant la maison centrale de Saigon, 30 January 1932.
135 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2490, Note by Inspector of Colonies Demongin,
23 April 1932.
136 The best treatment of British imperial security concerns in the imme-
diate post-war period remains Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of
Empire; see also John Gallagher, ‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire,
1919–1922’, Modern Asian Studies, 15:3 (1981), 355–68.
137 Mark Finnane, ‘The Public Rhetorics of Policing in Times of War and
Violence: Countering Apocalyptic Visions’, Crime, Law and Social Change,
50:1–2 (2008), 11–12.
138 Townshend, ‘Martial Law’, 171; Anja Johansen, Soldiers as Police: The
French and Prussian Armies and the Policing of Popular Protest, 1889–1914
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
139 Townshend, ‘Martial Law’, 168.
4 g e n da r m e s: wor k a n d p o l ic ing in f r e nc h
n or t h a f r ic a a f t e r 1918
1 Service Historique de la Gendarmerie Nationale, Vincennes (SHGN),
carton 427, No. 150/C, Général de brigade Gandon, Commandant le
5e Secteur de Gendarmerie, to Monsieur le Chef d’Escadron Vasticar,
Commandant la Force Publique du Maroc, Marseille, 27 May 1922.
2 SHGN, carton 49554, memo on employment of auxiliaires indigènes as
interpreters, 26 January 1921, fos. 170–1.
3 SHGN, carton 49554, memo on employment of auxiliaires indigènes as
interpreters, 26 January 1921, fos. 170–1.
4 For the RIC, see Charles Townshend, ‘The Irish Republican Army and
the Development of Guerrilla Warfare, 1916–21’, English Historical Review,
94:371 (1979), 318–45; Fedorowich, ‘The Problems of Disbandment’,
88–110; Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies
since 1922 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–38 passim. For Palestine, see
Yitzhak Gil-Har, ‘Political Developments and Intelligence in Palestine,
1930–40’, Middle Eastern Studies, 44:3 (2008), 419–34; Thomas, Empires
of Intelligence, chapter 9; and two key pieces by Charles Townshend: ‘The
Defence of Palestine’; ‘Policing Insurgency in Ireland’, in Anderson and
Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire, 21–42; and his ‘Going to the Wall:
The Failure of British Rule in Palestine, 1928–31’, Journal of Imperial and
5 Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford
University Press, reprint, 2002), 1–2.
6 Robert Tombs, ‘Crime and the Security of the State: The “Dangerous
Classes” and Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, in V. A. C.
Gatrell, Peter Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds.), Crime and the Law: The
Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980),
214–37; and for a colonial comparison, see Andrew J. Major, ‘States and
Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation
of the “Dangerous Classes”’, Modern Asian Studies, 33:3 (1999), 657–88.
7 The pioneering exception to this rule was a work with a colonial focus,
Christopher Bayly’s Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
I have also pursued this question in my Empires of Intelligence.
8 The term ‘domestic missionaries’ derives from Robert D. Storch’s influen-
tial article, ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and
Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–1880’, Journal of Social
History, 9 (1976), 481–509.
9 Ferdan Ergut, ‘Policing the Poor in the Late Ottoman Empire’, Middle
Eastern Studies, 38:2 (2002), 149–64; Nadir Özbek, ‘Policing the
Countryside: Gendarmes of the late 19th-Century Ottoman Empire (1876–
1908)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 40:1 (2008), 47–67.
10 Nursen Gürboga, ‘Compulsory Mine Work: The Single-Party Regime
and the Zonguldak Coalfield as a Site of Contention, 1940–1947’,
International Review of Social History, 54 (2009), Supplement, 119–21;
Asim Karaömerlioglu, ‘The People’s Houses and the Cult of the Peasant in
Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, 34:1 (1998), 73–85.
11 For the consequent manipulations of legal, fiscal and citizenship rights

opened up by French North Africa’s conflicting imperial juridical systems,
see Mary Dewhurst Lewis, ‘Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic
Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean,
1881–1935’, Journal of Modern History, 80:4 (2008), 791–830; Robin
Bidwell, Morocco under Colonial Rule: French Administration of Tribal Areas,
1912–1956 (London: Frank Cass, 1973), especially 63–97 and 262–82.
12 Ergut, ‘Policing the Poor’, 151–8; For examples of the Egyptian case, see
Harold Tollefson, Policing Islam: The British Occupation of Egypt and the
Anglo-Egyptian Struggle over Control of the Police, 1882–1914 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1999); Nathan J. Brown, ‘Law and Imperialism: Egypt
in Comparative Perspective’, Law and Society Review, 29:1 (1995), 103–26;
Zachary Lockman, ‘British Policy towards Egyptian Labour Activism,
1882–1936’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 20:2 (1988),
265–85.
13 SHGN, carton 427, Colonel Pacault, Commandant par interim le 5e
Secteur de Gendarmerie to Ministry of War, Direction de la Gendarmerie
Bureau Technique, Marseille, 5 May 1925.
14 For comparison, see Lees, ‘Being British in Malaya, 77–86; but on the
perceived ‘dangers’ of ‘degenerative’ behaviour, especially among poor
whites in the colonies, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial
Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2002), 61–9.
15 Brawling over affairs with fellow officers’ wives and repeated use of prosti-
tutes were common disciplinary offences in the 19e Légion, second only to
absconding without authorization and abuse of alcohol, see, for example,
SHGN, carton 745: 19ème Légion de Gendarmerie, R/2 EFF. 1936–1939 –
personnel files and disciplinary procedures.
16 As an indicator of the relative numerical strength of the Algeria gendarm-
erie, the approved force strength of the neighbouring Tunisia Gendarmerie
five years later in 1925 was 142 men of whom 24 were commissioned
officers, 90 were French gendarmes and 28 were classified as auxiliaires
indigènes. This force policed a territory approximately the size of eight to
ten mainland French départements. There were twenty-one vacancies in the
force at the time, see SHGN, carton 49555, no. 209/2, ‘Rapport du Chef
d’Escadron Gay, Commandant la Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Tunisie
sur la pénurie des effectifs de la Compagnie’, 11 May 1925.
17 Algeria’s registered population in 1925 was 5.8 million of which 528,000
were listed as European settlers or naturalized French; 75,000 as Jews;
220,000 as ‘foreigners’ and just over five million as Algerian colonial sub-
jects, or indigènes, see SHGN, carton 427, Colonel Pacault, Commandant
par interim le 5e Secteur de Gendarmerie to Ministry of War, Direction de
la Gendarmerie Bureau Technique, ‘Contrôle du Service de la 19e Légion’,
6 June 1925.
18 Police officers in French North Africa did not suffer the same wartime
depletion because the civil police remained a reserved occupation until 1 July
1918. The subsequent call-up was also limited. In Tunisia, for instance,
only thirty-one serving policemen were mobilized for military service
between July and November 1918, see MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–1929,
vol. 290: Personnel de Police, 1917–29, no. 24, Tunis Residency direction
des affaires politiques to Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon, 11 February
1919.
19 Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker,
France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003),
96; Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in
the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 309, 508–9.
20 SHGN, carton 427, Colonel R. Bonnet, Commandant par interim le 5e
Bureau Technique, ‘Contrôle du Service de la 19e Légion de Gendarmerie
[Algeria]’, Marseille, 10 January 1924.
21 Ibid., report section: ‘Troupe, année 1923’.
22 For sociological assessments of the Syria SR, Morocco’s Officiers des
affaires indigènes, Tunisia’s Contrôleurs civils, and Algeria’s bureaux arabes,
see Edmund Burke III, ‘A Comparative View of French Native Policy in
Morocco and Syria, 1912–1925’, Middle Eastern Studies, 9 (1973), 175–86;
Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 55–6, 155–6; Mizrahi, Genèse de
l’État mandataire, 225–31; Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat
français au Maroc 1912–1925, 2 vols. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), vol. II,
45–55; Bidwell, Morocco under Colonial Rule, 155–98; Elisabeth Mouilleau,
Fonctionnaires de la République et artisans de l’Empire: Le cas des Contrôleurs
Civils en Tunisie (1881–1956) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 37–42, 170–82.
Also relevant is George Trumball IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power,
Cultural Knowledge and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914 (Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
23 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, War Ministry Direction de la
gendarmerie note, ‘Primes aux militaires de la gendarmerie pour connais-
sance de la langue arabe ou de dialectes berbères’, 18 March 1922. The
1921 decree was extended to Tunisia’s gendarmes in March 1922 when
French officers and NCOs became eligible for the payments made to those
protectorate civil servants who completed advanced courses in Arabic and
Berber.
24 SHGN, carton 427, 5ème section, gendarmerie Marseille, 1920–25, 1925
AFN gendarmerie survey report, ‘Etat d’esprit’. Allan Christelow high-
lights the importance of these translators in a wider colonial context in his,
‘Algerian Interpreters and the French Colonial Adventure in Sub-Saharan
Africa’, Maghreb Review, 10:4–6 (1985), 101–8. Problems of language and
mutual comprehension were, of course, common to countless colonial
encounters, and not just in the French Empire. See, for example, Christian
Tripodi, ‘Peacemaking through Bribes or Cultural Empathy? The Political
Officer and Britain’s Strategy towards the North-West Frontier, 1901–
1945’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31:1 (2008), 129–34.
25 For comparisons, see Allan Christelow, ‘The Muslim Judge and Municipal
Politics in Colonial Algeria and Senegal’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 24:1 (1982), 3–24; Benton, ‘Colonial Law and Cultural Difference’,
563–88; Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire’, 227–63; Osborn, ‘“Circle
of Iron”’, 29–50. For similar use of informers by the paramilitary Palestine
Police, see Gil-Har, ‘British Intelligence and the Role of Jewish Informers’,
117–49, and his ‘Political Developments and Intelligence’, 423–4.
26 Jean-Marc Berlière, ‘A Republican Political Force? Political Policing in
France under the Third Republic, 1875–1940’, in Mazower (ed.), The
Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century, 28–36.
27 Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 120–4, 140–6.
28 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France,
1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976).
29 SHGN, carton 428, nos. 7 and 8/C, Rapports du Général de Brigade Huot,
Inspecteur du 4e Arrondissement de Gendarmerie sur l’inspection de la
19e Légion de Gendarmerie, Marseille, 29 January 1931; rapport no. 12,
17 March 1931. At the same point Tunisia’s gendarmerie possessed only
three ageing Renaults, two motorcycles and six additional vehicles on loan
to traffic police from the Department of Public Works in Tunis.
30 Jean-Noël Luc (ed.), Histoire de la Maréchaussée et de la Gendarmerie: Guide
de Recherche (Vincennes: Service Historique de la Gendarmerie Nationale,
2005), chapter 20: ‘L’Organisation de la Gendarmerie Mobile en XXe siè-
cle’. Although the GRM was maintained as a standing riot control squad
from 1927, it was only formally separated from the gendarmerie by a Vichy
state decree of 17 November 1940.
31 SHGN, carton 427, 5ème section, gendarmerie Marseille, 1920–5, 1925
AFN gendarmerie survey report, ‘Etat d’esprit’. Alcohol abuse was a recur-
rent problem among gendarmerie units across French North Africa, so much
so that in November 1920 the Tunisia gendarmerie instituted special pun-
ishments for officers found drunk on duty. Those caught twice faced a Board
of Inquiry, probable dismissal, and return to their original army unit. Senior
officers were also threatened with punishment for failure to report incidents
of drunken behaviour among their men, an indicator that abuse of alcohol
sometimes went unreported. SHGN, carton 49554, no. 497, GN, Compagnie
de Tunisie, Chef d’Escadron Bonnemaison, Commandant la Compagnie de
Gendarmerie de Tunisie, aux Commandants d’arrondissement de Tunis et
de Sousse, 13 November 1920, ‘Objet: Ivresse’.
32 SHGN, carton 427, Colonel Pacault, 5e Secteur de Gendarmerie to
Direction de la Gendarmerie, Bureau Technique, ‘Contrôle de Service de
la Force Publique du Maroc’, 6 June 1925.
33 Ibid.
34 Senior officers’ written criticism of gendarmes who spent time in cafés
recurred in inspection reports of all three French North African forces
throughout the inter-war period and, at least in some cases, was a euphem-
istic reference to alcoholism or the use of prostitutes while on duty, see
SHGN, carton 430, 4ème Arr. de Gendarmerie, Rapport du Général de
Brigade Huot sur l’inspection de la 19e Légion de Gendarmerie’, Marseille,
20 January 1932.
35 Ibid.
36 SHGN, carton 49554, no. 477, ‘Les Casernements de la Gendarmerie en
Tunisie’, unsigned, 30 October 1922.
37 SHGN carton 427, Colonel Pacault, 5e Secteur de Gendarmerie to
Direction de la Gendarmerie, Bureau Technique, ‘Contrôle de Service de
la Force Publique du Maroc’, 6 June 1925.
38 Lewis, ‘Geographies of Power’, 799–800, 816–18, 827–30; Bidwell, Morocco

under Colonial Rule, 33–47; Moshe Gershovich, French Military Rule in
Morocco: Colonialism and its Consequences (London: Frank Cass, 2000),
chapters 4–5.
39 Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History
and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 2007), 133–40, 157–61; Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages:
Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions, 1912–1986 (Princeton University Press,
1987), chapters 1–3.
40 SHGN, carton 427, Colonel R. Bonnet report, 10 January 1924.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.: ‘La surveillance des routes, des centres de colonisation, des fermes
isolées et des nombreux marchés constitue le service ordinaire; mais en
pays arabe, la constatation des crimes et délits, les perquisitions, la mise
en exécution des contraintes par corps, la recherche des individus signalés,
civils ou militaires, et des expulsés absorbent, en grande partie l’activité
des gendarmes.’
43 Again, gendarmes’ conditions of service in Tunisia provide a useful
basis for comparison. Of the Tunisia gendarmerie’s twenty-six perman-
ent brigade posts, all but three were close to a railway line, but half of
them (thirteen) were over 150 kilometres from Tunis and the most remote,
Houmt-Souk, was 750 kilometres away from the capital. Some of the lar-
ger brigade posts were also pretty remote from Tunis: Gafsa (490 km);
Gabès (427 km); Fériana (390 km); Kasserine (305 km); Mahdia (213 km);
Kairouan (208 km). Given such isolation, the decision was taken on 21
November 1916 to divide Tunisia into two zones, north and south. The
gendarmes serving in the more arid southern zone, which was equivalent to
the former Sousse arrondissement (and which incorporated the Sousse and
Sfax gendarmerie sections) and where accommodation was also more rudi-
mentary, had the right after completing three years of service to request a
so-called ‘relève du sud’ entitling them to reassignment to easier postings in
the north of the country. They were also eligible for an honourable men-
tion in their service record. SHGN, carton 49558, no. 671/2, Capitaine
Quelennec, Commandant provisoirement la Compagnie de Gendarmerie
de Tunisie, to M. le Ministre de Guerre, Direction de la Gendarmerie,
Bureau technique, 14 September 1932, ‘Répartition des postes’; carton
49561, no. 514/2, Lt-Colonel Mourot to Général Commandant Supérieur
des Troupes de Tunisie, ‘Objet: A/S temps minimum de séjour dans cer-
taines garnisons’, 24 July 1934.
44 SHGN, carton 49554, Compagnie Tunisie, Tunis, R/2, 1920–25, dossier
26/GN, no. 440, Chef d’Escadron Bonnemaison, Gendarmerie de Tunisie,
aux Commandants d’arrondissement de Tunis et de Sousse, 8 October
1920, ‘Objet: A/S des rapports sur la situation économique’.
45 Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 128–33; Roger Price, ‘Techniques of
Repression: The Control of Popular Protest in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
France’, Historical Journal 25:4 (1982), 854–87.
46 The rhythm and scale of left- and right-wing French protests is discussed
in Danielle Tartakowsky, ‘Stratégies de la rue: 1934–1936’, in Jean Bouvier
(ed.), La France en mouvement 1934–1938 (Paris: PUF, 1986), 31–60.
47 SHGN, carton 49561, no. 752–2, Capitaine Couthures to M. le Contrôleur

Civil, 12 September 1935, ‘Candidat à la Gendarmerie’, 12 September
1935. Arab recruits were required to complete a written test in Arabic
supervised by local caïdats.
48 Berlière, ‘A Republican Political Police?’, 34, 39–42; Clive Emsley, ‘Police
Forces and Public Order in England and France during the Interwar
Years’, in Clive Emsley and Barbara Weinberger (eds.), Policing Western
Europe: Politics, Professionalism and Public Order, 1850–1940 (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1994), 159–86.
49 SHGN, carton 427, 5ème section, gendarmerie Marseille, 1920–25, Chef
d’escadron, Gindre (Sétif), ‘Commandement et exécution du service aux
divers échélons’, summary report for 1921, n.d.
50 SHGN, carton 427, Colonel R. Bonnet, Commandant par interim le 5e
Bureau Technique, ‘Contrôle du Service de la 19e Légion de Gendarmerie
[Algeria]’, Marseille, 10 January 1924.
51 AN, F14: Ministère des Travaux Publics, F/14/12432, Gouvernement
Genéral de l’Algérie, Conseil Supérieur des chemins de fer d’intérêt général
de l’Algérie, ‘Programme de construction des lignes nouvelles de chemins
de fer adopté par les Assemblées Algériennes en 1920’, Rapports de la
Commission spéciale, 10 April 1924. These seven lines were designated as
priority cases, but for reasons of economic potential rather than security.
They were the following: Nemours port to Zoudj el Beral; Sidi bel Abbès to
Berthelot (a southern extension from Sidi bel Abbès to Saïda); Martimprey
to Tiaret; Mostaganem to Relizane via L’Hillil; Orléansville to Vialar; Aïn
Besem to Souk el-Arba (section between Berrouaghia to Aïn Bessem); and
Bougie to Meroua (section between Sétif and Bougie).
52 SHGN, carton 427, Colonel Pacault, Commandant par interim le 5e
Bureau Technique, ‘Contrôle du Service de la 19e Légion’, 6 June 1925.
53 SHGN, carton 427, 5ème section, gendarmerie Marseille, 1920–5,
‘Commandement et exécution du service aux divers echélons’, annual
report for 1921, p. 2.
54 Ibid., p. 3. In 1921, gendarme officers in Algeria were thought to require an
average of four years’ field experience before being able to meet the stresses
of brigade command.
55 SHGN, carton 427, 5ème section, gendarmerie Marseille, 1920–5, Chef
d’escadron, Gindre (Sétif), rapport, n.d., December 1924. Inter-personal
violence among settler families could also erupt into major shooting wars
as in Aïn-Kial near Oran where five Europeans received gunshot wounds
during a feud between rival families in December 1924.
56 It is worth recording that, twenty years earlier, in 1921, Guelma and Sétif
were, along with Tiaret, the three largest gendarmerie brigade districts
in the entire colony (1,870,93 hectares covered by the Guelma district;
1,711,485 by Tiaret district; and 1,689,332 hectares by Sétif district). Total
numbers of European settlers relative to Algerian subjects were also strik-
ingly low (5 per cent in Guelma; 8 per cent in Tiaret; 3 per cent in Sétif).
Figures from SHGN, carton 427, 5ème section, gendarmerie Marseille,
1920–5, ‘Tableau des arrondissements par ordre décroissant de grandeur

de superficie’, n.d., 1921.
57 For a subtle portrait of the stronger professional ethos within the Algeria
gendarmerie by 1939, see Benoît Haberbusch, ‘À la recherche d’une modèle
gendarme propre à l’Algérie en 1939’, in Sarah Mohamed-Gaillard and
Maria Romo-Navarrete (eds.), Des Français Outre-Mer (Paris: Presses de la
Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2005), 113–24.
58 SHGN, carton 49556, no. 573/2 Chef d’Escadron Gay Commandant la
Compagnie de Tunisie, à Monsieur le Directeur Général de l’intérieur,
‘Caserne de gendarmerie de Tunis’, 26 November 1927.
59 SHGN, carton 428, 4ème Secteur, Gendarmerie Marseille, no. 1/C,
Rapport d’Inspection de 1929, Légion du Maroc/Compagnie de Tunisie.
Thirty-seven Moroccan gendarmerie posts had a telephone link. The
remainder either used public payphones or the nearest police station to
make calls. Two posts – Bou Zuika and Aïn Chkeff – had no access at all to
telephone communications.
Rapport d’Inspection de 1929. Unsigned, but probably, Colonel Huot,
Inspecteur par interim du 4e Arrondissement de Gendarmerie.
61 SHGN, carton 428: 4ème Secteur, Gendarmerie Marseille, no. 1/C,
Rapport d’Inspection de 1929. Unsigned, but probably, Colonel Huot,
Inspecteur du 4e Arrondissement de Gendarmerie, quote at p. 24.
62 Indeed, there was no sharp increase in recorded crimes until economic
conditions worsened in Constantine’s main provincial towns, Bône,
Philippeville, Sétif and, of course, Constantine itself, in 1930–1. See
ANOM, GGA, Fonds Département de Constantine, B/3/152, Services de
Police rapports, ‘Etats de crimes et délits commis’,’ 1926–31.
Rapport d’Inspection de 1929.
64 SHGN, carton 428, no. 7/C, Rapport du Général de Brigade Huot sur
l’inspection de la 19e Légion de Gendarmerie, Marseille, 29 January
1931.
65 Ibid., quote at p. 36.
66 Gendarmerie officers’ suspicions of settlers of Italian, Spanish and Maltese
descent stemmed in part, from the relatively large numbers on the Algerian
Carnet B list, in part, from growing suspicions of fascist Italy and the
Spanish Second Republic, and in part, from more long-standing tensions
over the differential rights under civil and criminal law claimed by settlers
(and indigenous North Africans) that claimed special rights of protection
from foreign powers. For details of these urban racial tensions, see Joshua
Cole, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Situation in Interwar Algeria: The
Anti-Jewish Riots in Constantine, August 1934’, in Thomas (ed.), The
French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism, 77–111;
Samuel Kalman, ‘Le Combat par tous les moyens: Colonial Violence and the
Extreme Right in 1930s Oran’, French Historical Studies, 34 (2011), 125–53.
For parallels with the legal ambiguities caused by competing legal juris-
dictions in the Tunisian protectorate, see Lewis, ‘Geographies of Power’,
819–28.
67 Lewis, ‘Geographies of Power’, 819–28. For similar surveillance of sus-

picious European social or political ‘outsiders’, this time in French West
Africa, see Kathleen Keller, ‘On the Fringes of the “Civilizing Mission”:
“Suspicious” Frenchmen and Unofficial Discourses of French Colonialism
in AOF (1918–1939)’, French Colonial History, 9 (2008), 107–23.
68 SHGN, carton 428, Rapport du Général de Brigade Huot sur l’inspection
de la 19e Légion de Gendarmerie’, Marseille, 20 January 1932. The 4e
Compagnie in Biskra and the 5e Compagnie in Bedeau were each accused
of systemic corrupt practices in 1931.
69 SHGN, carton 428, no. 7/C, Rapport du Général de Brigade Huot sur
l’inspection de la 19e Légion de Gendarmerie, Marseille, 29 January 1931.
70 On the development of the Carnet B lists in France after their introduc-
tion in 1888, see Donald N. Baker, ‘The Surveillance of Subversion in
Interwar France: The Carnet B in the Seine, 1922–1940’, French Historical
Studies, 10:3 (1978), 487–8; Allan Mitchell, ‘The Xenophobic Style: French
Counterespionage and the Emergence of the Dreyfus Affair’, Journal of
Modern History, 52:3 (1980), 414–25.
71 MAE, série M, vol. 838: Police, copy tel., Interior Ministry to Foreign
Ministry Direction des affaires politiques, ‘A/S de la tenue du Carnet B au
Maroc’, 16 May 1914. Ironically, although the metropolitan Carnet system
survived beyond 1918, its focus narrowed to a concentration on Germans
resident in France, see Donald N. Baker, ‘The Surveillance of Subversion in
Interwar France: An Addendum’, French Historical Studies, 11:1 (1979), 132.
72 SHGN, carton 429, no. 4/C, Ministère de la Guerre, 4ème Arrondissement
de Gendarmerie, ‘Rapport du Général de Brigade Baert, Inspecteur du
4ème Arrondissement de Gendarmerie sur l’inspection de la Légion de
Gendarmerie au Maroc’, 15 January 1934, p. 17.
Rapport d’Inspection de 1929, Légion du Maroc, p. 22. Gay’s apparent
lack of concern about language competency was surprising. Prior to his
transfer to Morocco, he was appointed to head the Tunisia gendarmerie
in January 1925 precisely because he had extensive military experience in
French Arab territories, as both an infantry officer and a gendarmerie com-
mander. See MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, no. 66, Residency
Direction des affaires politiques et commerciales, to Foreign Ministry, 10
January 1925.
4ème Arrondissement de Gendarmerie sur l’inspection de la Légion de
Gendarmerie au Maroc’, 15 January 1934.
75 Katherine E. Hoffman, ‘Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies
in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, 50:3 (2008), 737–41.
76 Janet Abu Lughod, ‘The Islamic City-Historic Myth, Islamic Essence,
and Contemporary Relevance’, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
19:2 (1987), 155–76; William A. Hoisington Jnr., ‘In Search of a Native
Elite: Casablanca and French Urban Policy, 1914–24’, The Maghreb Review,
12:5–6 (1987), 160–5.

Rapport d’Inspection de 1929, Légion du Maroc. Personnel of forty-two
Moroccan gendarmerie brigades lived in town lodgings. The sector com-
mand considered existing barrack accommodation adequate for only a fur-
ther twenty-two brigades, a questionable judgement. In Taza for instance,
the gendarmerie was housed in the former military prison. In Oujda a
4,000 square metre site with electricity and water had been selected in the
new town, but the protectorate authorities had yet to release the funds to
build accommodation blocks.
78 Ibid.; Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality’, 328–30, 339–41.
79 SHGN, carton 428, ‘Rapport du Général de Brigade Huot sur l’inspection
de la Légion de Gendarmerie du Maroc’, Marseille, 20 January 1932.
Fourteen inquiries related to government employees and six to workers in
military establishments in Morocco. Seven complaints of brutality were
also lodged against the Tunisian force in 1928–9, proportionately a higher
number than in Morocco. On investigation, only one of these accusations
was upheld: SHGN, carton 428, 4ème Secteur, Gendarmerie Marseille,
no. 1/C, Rapport d’Inspection de 1929.
80 SHGN, carton 428, no. 12/C, Rapport du Général de Brigade Huot,
Marseille, 17 March 1931.
81 SHGN, carton 429, no. 4/C, Ministère de la Guerre, ‘Rapport du Général
de Brigade Baert, Inspecteur du 4ème Arrondissement de Gendarmerie sur
l’inspection de la Légion de Gendarmerie au Maroc’, 15 January 1934,
p. 6. Of Morocco’s twenty-two new barracks, fifteen dated from 1930–2 and
some of them, notably at Fez and Marrakech, offered model accommoda-
tion. Construction of a sixteenth, at Taza, was started in 1932, and the seven
others in existence were built from 1927 to 1929 because, prior to 1927, no
permanent gendarmerie accommodation had been constructed at all.
de Gendarmerie, ‘Rapport du Général de Brigade Baert sur l’inspection de
la 19ème Légion de Gendarmerie’, 22 December 1934.
de la Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Tunisie’, Marseille, 20 January
1932.
84 SHGN, carton 49561, no. 796/2, CSTT-GN, Lt-Colonel Mourot, to M.
le Directeur de l’Office Postal, ‘A/S de la surveillance des lignes télépho-
niques et télégraphiques’, 2 September 1935.
85 SHGN, carton 49561, no. 911/2, CSTT-GN, Compagnie de Tunisie to
Chef de Cabinet Militaire, Resident General, 5 November 1935. ‘A/S
détentions d’armes étrangères’.
86 During the Algerian War of Independence between 1954 and 1962, 272
gendarmes died in service. Approximately 2,000 were wounded and ninety
died from diseases contracted while in service. Forty-nine were recorded as
killed in action ‘en maintien de l’ordre’, see Luc, Histoire de la Maréchaussée
et de la Gendarmerie, chapter 24: ‘Gendarmes tués et blessés pendant les
guerres du XXe siècle (sauf la deuxième guerre mondiale): tués au com-
bat.’ These figures are based on reports sent to the Service des ressources
humaines de la direction générale de la gendarmerie nationale.
87 Mark Mazower, ‘The Policing of Politics in Historical Perspective’, in

Mazower (ed.), The Policing of Politics, 252.
88 Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie, 35–43, 57–74 passim.
89 SHGN, carton 430, no. 3/C, Ministère de la Guerre, ‘Rapport du Général
de Brigade Baert, Inspecteur du 4ème Arrondissement de Gendarmerie
sur l’inspection annuelle de la 19ème Légion de Gendarmerie, Mars–Avril
1935’, 20 January 1936, pp. 5–6. In January 1936 every brigade in Algeria
reported personnel shortages, making the rationalization of their patrol
sectors more urgent than ever.
90 Regarding accusations of racism against the Algeria gendarmerie, in this
case, the Sétif brigade, see SHGN, carton 430, no. 1314/14-PO, Général
de Brigade Lavigne, Algiers, to Colonel Commandant la Gendarmerie et
la Garde Républicaine Mobile de l’Algérie, 10 May 1937.
91 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
92 See Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945: Une subversion française dans
l’Algérie coloniale (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 2009).
93 Raphaëlle Branche, L’Embuscade de Palestro, Algérie 1956 (Paris: Armand
Colin, 2010), 142. Branche points out that in the Palestro region south-east
of Algiers, scene of a particularly notorious massacre of French conscript
troops on 18 May 1956, among the 130 Europeans resident in the area
three years later in 1959, twenty-five were gendarmes, fourteen had dir-
ect links to the police, and twenty-one to the civil administration: that is,
almost half of the total European population.
94 SHGN, carton 745, 19e Corps d’armée, Colonel Maria note, ‘Organisation
actuelle de la Légion de Gendarmerie et de GRM de l’Algérie’, 1 March
1937.
5 p o l ic ing t u nisi a : min e wor k e r s , fellahs a n d

n at ion a l is t p ro t e s t
1 GRM squads in metropolitan France took more action against strikers
after the left-leaning Popular Front coalition came into office in May 1936.
As examples from the Auvergne town of Clermont-Ferrand, home of the
Michelin rubber plant, see AN, F22, Ministère du Travail papers, F22/17448,
Commissaire de Police Mobile Marcel Dubois, à M. le Commissaire de Police
Mobile, Chef de la 1er Section du Contrôle Général des Services de Police
Criminelle, ‘Occupation de la Préfecture à Clermont Ferrand’, 10 October
1936; Le Moniteur (Clermont-Ferrand newspaper), ‘L’Usine Michelin réqui-
sitionnée’, Thursday 1 December 1938.
2 AN, F60 713, Note pour M. le Secrétaire Général, Présidence du Conseil,
‘Sécheresse et famine en Afrique du Nord’, 1 July 1937. The threat of famine
was even worse in Morocco, to which the bulk of government emergency-
relief spending for North Africa was channelled at the time.
3 Vivid accounts that use notorious political killings to illustrate enduring
Moroccan opposition to the French takeover are Jonathan G. Katz, Murder in
Marrakesh: Emile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2007); and William A. Hoisington Jnr., The
Assassination of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil: A Frenchman Between France and
North Africa (London: Routledge, 2004). More wide-ranging is Spencer

D. Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and
Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
2009).
4 Brower, A Desert Named Peace; Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty
and Empire in French Tunisia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
forthcoming), chapter 1.
5 Census figures from March 1936 recognized only three ethno-religious
groups among a total registered population of 2,606,215 as follows: 215,205
Europeans; 2,335,523 Muslims; and 59,485 Jews. Figures from AN, F60
763, Commission d’enquête dans les territoires de la France d’Outre-Mer,
July 1937. Homogeneity was less apparent among settlers, who were divided
politically, economically and culturally between French and Italian colonists:
Serge La Barbera, Les Français de Tunisie (1930–1950) (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2006), chapters 1–2. Divisions among the Arab population were polit-
ical and generational, not ethnic or communal: Samia El Mechat (ed.), Le
Nationalisme tunisien: Scission et conflits (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).
6 Christophe Giudice, ‘Législation foncière et colonisation de la Tunisie’, in
El Mechat (ed.), Les Administrations coloniales XIX–XXe siècles, 229–39.
7 The absence of major political violence does not imply that the Protectorate
authorities conferred greater liberties on Tunisia’s subject population; vari-
ous items of repressive legislation, including press restrictions and limits on
right of assembly, were introduced from 1884 onwards, see El Mechat, ‘Les
Libertés publiques’, 213–15.
8 See Lewis, Divided Rule.
9 ANOM, GGA, Governor Jules Carde Cabinet papers, 2cab/4, Emeutes
de Constantine, no. 1051, Département de Constantine, Brigade Mobile
de Philippeville, ‘Rapport spécial: Jemmapes: Troubles antisémitiques’,
8 August 1934; dépêche télégraphique, Cabinet du Gouverneur-Général,
Jules Carde to Minister of Interior, Algiers, 6 August 1934.
10 Kalman, ‘Le Combat par tous les moyens’, 146–8.
11 William A. Hoisington Jnr., ‘Cities in Revolt: The Berber Dahir (1930) and
France’s Urban Strategy in Morocco’ Journal of Contemporary History, 13:4
(1978), 433–5; Hoisington Jnr., The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial
Policy, 1936–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984),
29–32. The most detailed account is Gilles Lafuente, La Politique berbère de
la France et le nationalisme marocain (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1999),
190–241 passim. For longer-term background to French policy towards
Islamic law in Morocco, see Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘La Politique ber-
bère du protectorat marocain de 1913 à 1934’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine, 18:1 (1971), 50–90.
12 AN, F60 769, no. 3301 9/EMA, Section d’Outre Mer, Bulletin de ren-
seignements des questions musulmanes, 11 December 1935, Annexe 1:
Modificatif à l’instruction interministerielle du 12 octobre 1934, rélative à
la participation de l’Armée au maintien de l’ordre public.’
13 ANOM, GGA, 2cab/4, Emeutes de Constantine, no. 4261, Governor-
general Jules Carde to Minister of Interior/Cabinet et Direction des Affaires
Algériennes, 19 October 1934; 2/cab/5, no. 590, Constantine Prefect Labau
to mayors and communal administrators, ‘Etat d’esprit des indigènes’, 28

August 1934; no. 591/2, Gendarmerie nationale, 19ème Légion, 3ème
compagnie, ‘Rapport du Chef d’Escadron Vallon sur la situation dans
le département de Constantine à la suite des troubles du 5 Août 1934’,
22 September 1934; Cole, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Situation in
Interwar Algeria’, 77–111.
14 SHD-DAT, Fonds privés, General Joseph de Monsabert papers, 1K380/
C2, ‘Instruction rélative à la participation de l’armée au maintien de l’ordre
public’, 20 August 1907.
15 SHD-DAT, 1K380/C2, Sous-préfet de Tizi-Ouzou à Préfet d’Alger, n.d.,
May 1919; no. 31610, EM-Division d’Alger, ‘Additif à l’ordre particulier’,
26 May 1919.
16 SHD-DAT, 1K380/C2, no. 8590, Préfet d’Alger à Général Bajolle,
‘Banditisme’, 22 May 1919; ‘Liste des individus affiliés aux bandits ou leur
apportant aide et assistance’, n.d., 1919.
17 MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–40, vol. 388, Rapport du Capitane Macquart,
‘Le mouvement Destourien’, 22 June 1937.
18 AN, F60 744, no. 544, Resident General Marcel Peyrouton to Foreign
Minister Pierre Laval, 13 April 1935; MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–40, vol.
386, Residency security reports: ‘A/S agitation Destourienne’, 8 January,
10 March and 13 April 1935.
19 AN, F60 747, no. 704, Tunis Residency submission to Mediterranean High
Committee: ‘Rapport sur la situation du Protectorat’, 11 May 1935. The
notable urban exception was Ferryville (now Menzel Bourguiba), the new
town built on the south-western shore of Lake Bizerta and originally named
in memory of the protectorate’s founding father, Jules Ferry. Ferryville owed
its growth to the massive Sidi-Abdallah naval arsenal whose workforce was
overwhelmingly European. Unquestionably a pro-communist ‘red suburb’,
whether judged by voting habits or union affiliation, Ferryville nonethe-
less stood apart from nationalist politics and the Tunisian trade unionism
of the CGTT. See Jean-Paul Bruckert, ‘Administrer une ville en situation
coloniale: Le cas de Ferryville (Tunisie) (1900–1956)’,’ in El Mechat (ed.),
Les Administrations coloniales, 175–90. For details of the ethnic and commu-
nal basis of early Tunisian trade unionism, see Claude Liauzu, Salariat et
mouvement ouvrier en Tunisie, 1931–1939 (Paris: CNRS, 1978), and Juliette
Bessis, Les Fondateurs: Index biographique des cadres syndicalistes de la Tunisie
coloniale (1920–1956) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985).
20 AN, F60 993, Prime Minister’s office papers, ‘Le problème Nord-Africain,’
n.d., 1935.
21 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, Ministère de la Guerre, Direction
du Contrôle, Bureau des fonds et Ordonnances to Foreign Ministry
Direction de la Comptabilité, 21 May 1920: ‘Dépenses de la gendarmerie
de Tunisie, Exercice 1919’; no. 1893, Residency memo, ‘Gendarmerie fran-
çaise de Tunisie: Dépenses de solde pour l’exercice 1922’, 2 September
1924.
22 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 256, no. 187, Resident General, Tunis,
to Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Raymond Poincaré, 17 February
1922.
23 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 290, Ministry of Marine EMG-2, to

Ministry of Interior, 3 November 1921.
24 For details, see Philippe Masson, ‘The French Naval Mutinies, 1919’,
in Christopher Bell and Bruce A. Elleman (eds.), Naval Mutinies of the
Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (London: Frank Cass, 2003),
106–22.
25 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 290, no. 2, Residency delegate to
Foreign Ministry, 5 February 1922.
26 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, no. 1388, Direction des affaires
politiques to Foreign Ministry, ‘A/S de la gendarmerie de Tunisie’,
2 November 1929. The personnel increases proposed included 3 officers,
31 chefs de brigade, 86 regular gendarmes and 31 local auxiliaries.
27 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, no. 1388, no. 2387, Foreign
Minister to Tunis Resident General, 13 November 1930.
28 Mouilleau, Fonctionnaires de la République, 84–99, 144–64 passim.
29 SHGN, carton 428, 4ème Secteur, Gendarmerie Marseille, no. 1/C, Rapport
d’Inspection de 1929, Compagnie de Tunisie.
30 Ibid.
31 SHGN, carton 428, no. 8/C, Rapport du Général de Brigade Huot, 29
January 1931. In the Moroccan gendarmerie 236 gendarmes signed up for
extended service terms in the same nine-month period in addition to nine
new recruits. But no information was recorded about their citizenship sta-
tus or ethnic origin, see carton 428, rapport no. 12, 17 March 1931.
32 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, no. 1395, Direction des affaires
politiques, ‘A/S de l’admission dans la gendarmerie d’indigènes natural-
isés’, 26 November 1927.
33 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–40, vol. 669, no. 1198, Direction des affaires poli-
tiques to Foreign Ministry, ‘Personnel: A/S du Gardien de la paix MANOUBA
SALEM’, 28 August 1930. The individual mentioned here sought automatic
transfer to cadre A on the basis that he was a naturalized French citizen. This
was refused, but he was invited to sit the examination instead.
34 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1917–29, vol. 255, no. 15866, Jean Crinon to Lucien
Saint, 13 July 1937, ‘Indigènes naturalisés’.
35 There was some truth in this accusation. Gendarmerie commander Mourot
was forced to reprimand his section chief in Bizerta for the laxity of a par-
ticular rural brigade which had failed to respond to farmers’ complaints
of stock and food thefts from their properties: SHDN, carton 49561, no.
790/2, CSTT-GN, Lt-Colonel Mourot to Commandant de la Section de
Bizerte, 1 October 1935. ‘A/S de la brigade de Ghardimaou’.
36 SHGN, carton 49557, no 89/2, CSTT-GM, Chef d’Escadron Mourot to
Directeur Général de l’intérieur, 20 February 1931.
37 SHGN, carton 49561, no. 438/2, Lt-Colonel Mourot aux Commandants
de Section et Brigade, 9 May 1935, ‘Objet: Police de la route – Discrétion
et correction à observer’.
38 SHGN, carton 49557, DR 36, no. 42/2, Census instructions to Commandants
de Section de la Compagnie, 30 January 1931; carton 49561, no. 145/2,
CSTT-GN, Compagnie de Tunisie instruction to Commandants de Section,
de brigade, et de poste de la Compagnie, ‘Recensement’, 10 February 1936.

de la Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Tunisie’, Marseille, 20 January 1932.
40 SHGN, carton 49558, no 193/2, Chef d’Escadron Mourot, Commandant
la Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Tunisie, to Commandant de la Section
de Tunis, 9 March 1932 : ‘Objet: Services des brigades de Pont-du-Fahs et
de Zaghouan’.
41 Ibid. The three Tunisia brigade posts opened in 1931 – at Tébourba,
Metlaoui and Bou-Thadi – were all close to key industrial centres, particu-
larly the Metlaoui mining works, Tunisia’s largest.
42 Mourot was an exceptionally long-serving officer, remaining with the
Tunisia gendarmerie squadron from 1928, through the Vichy years, until
his retirement in 1944.
43 The fall in soft wheat prices hit Morocco hardest among the three French
North African territories, see C. R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History
(London: Hurst and Company, 2000), 219; Will D. Swearingen, ‘In Pursuit
of the Granary of Rome: France’s Wheat Policy in Morocco, 1915–1931’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 17 (185), 350–1.
44 Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya,
1830–1980 (Princeton University Press, 1986), 168; Lambert, Notables des
colonies, 246.
45 Mouilleau, Fonctionnaires de la République, 212–16.
46 MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–40, vol. 388, Rapport du Capitaine Macquart,
‘Le mouvement Destourien’, 22 June 1937.
47 Tunisia’s Arab industrial workers, of whom there were more than
110,000 by 1926 provided the CGTT’s core support, see Juliette Bessis
‘Le Mouvement ouvrier tunisien: de ses origines à l’indépendance’, Le
Mouvement Social (1974), 91.
48 El Mechat, ‘Les Libertés publiques à l’épreuve’, 216.
49 Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar, ‘M’hamed Ali: Tunisian labor organizer’,
in Edmund Burke, III (ed.), Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 199–203; Abdelmajid Guelmami, La Politique
sociale en Tunisie de 1881 à nos jours (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1996), 85.
50 Peyrouton is widely remembered as the official who, as Minister of State
at the Interior Ministry, implemented the Vichy regime’s early repressive
legislation in 1940–1, including the suspension of local government insti-
tutions, internment without trial and the arrest of senior Third Republic
politicians. These measures recalled the fact that Peyrouton’s background
was solidly colonial. He joined the Ministry of Colonies’ Africa division in
1910 and rose to become Secretary-general of the Algiers government in
1931, then Morocco’s Resident General, before moving to Tunis in 1933.
He returned to the Moroccan Residency in 1936, but was replaced before
the Popular Front took office that summer. In December 1943 the pro-
ally French Committee of National Liberation charged him with treason
for his Vichy activities and he spent five years in jail until his acquittal on
22 December 1948.
51 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, ‘Necropoles and Nationality: Land Rights, Burial
Rights, and the Development of Tunisian National Consciousness in the
1930s’, Past & Present, 205:1 (2009), 105–41.
52 El Mechat, ‘Les Libertés publiques à l’épreuve’, 218–19.

53 Ibid., 220; Marcel Peyrouton, Du service public à la prison commune: Souvenirs:
Tunis, Rabat, Buenos Aires, Vichy, Alger, Frèsnes (Paris: Plon, 1950), 48.
54 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1930–40, vol. 377, no. 791, Tunis residency to
Joseph Paul Boncour, 12 June 1933.
56 SHD-DAT, Moscow archive papers, C1109/D669, SEA (Algiers), ‘Note
sur la question tunisienne, 16 décembre 1934’.
57 MAE, série P: Tunisie, 1944–55, vol. 335, Direction Afrique-Levant,
‘Etude sur le Parti du Néo-Destour’, n.d.
58 Lambert, Notables des colonies, 182–4.
4ème Arrondissement de Gendarmerie sur le service de la Compagnie de
Gendarmerie de Tunisie’, 22 December 1934.
61 SHGN, carton 429, no. 72/C, ‘Rapport du Général de Brigade Baert,
Inspecteur du 4ème Arrondissement de Gendarmerie sur le service de la
Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Tunisie’, 22 December 1934, pp. 3–4.
62 Peyrouton, Du service public, 48.
63 MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–40, vol. 386, RG1, Peyrouton to Foreign
Ministry, 8 January 1935. On 2 January 1935 the detainees were sent to the
southern military territory administered by the army.
64 Peyrouton, Du service public, 48.
65 MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–40, vol. 386, no. 544, Direction des affaires
politiques report to Foreign Ministry, 13 April 1935.
66 TNA, FO 371/19872, C292/292/17, Sir H. Satow (Tunis) to FO, 9 January
1936. The ringleader of this communist cell was a certain M. Dupont, an
employee of the Sidi Abdullah arsenal in Tunis.
67 This overhaul extended to the protectorate administration in Morocco as
well, see SHD-DAT, Moscow, carton 286/D428, no. 1780, Direction des
affaires indigènes (Rabat), ‘A/S des incidents de Constantine et de leur réper-
cussion possible au Maroc’, 23 August 1934. See also Jean-Louis Planche,
Sétif 1945: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé (Paris: Perrin, 2006), 33–4. Planche
dates the overhaul to December 1934. See also Joshua Cole’s analysis of the
Constantine pogrom, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Situation’.
68 ANOM, Gouvernement Général de l’Algérie, GGA, Alger/41/1, no. 2281/
NA, Governor-general Naegelen to Algeria Prefects, ‘Rôle et attributions
des SNLA départementaux’, 29 August 1950: summarizes the history of
the SNLA and its CIE antecedent.
69 ANOM, GGA, Alger/41/1, no. 13/CIE, Direction Générale des Affaires
indigènes et des Territoires du Sud, ‘Note relative au fonctionnement
du CIE’, Algiers, 28 July 1936; no. 900 Direction Générale des Affaires
Indigènes, Sous-direction des affaires indigènes, 2e Bureau, Administration
générale, Governor-general to Algiers Prefect, ‘Centre d’Informations et
d’études: délégation de crédits provisionnels’, 22 February 1938.
70 AN, F60 744, Residency memo to Foreign Ministry, 22 November 1937:
includes details of Tunisian defence and intelligence budgets for 1938.
71 SHGN, carton 49561, no. 292/2, Lt-Colonel Mourot, Commandant la

Compagnie de Gendarmerie de Tunisie, to Général CSTT, ‘Effectifs’,
30 March 1935.
72 A trend also evident in France, see Bouvier (ed.), La France en mouvement
1934–1938, part II.
73 The definitive account remains Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France:
Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
74 For background, see William B. Cohen, ‘The Colonial Policy of the
Popular Front’, French Historical Studies, 7:3 (1972), 368–93; Tony Chafer
and Amanda Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front:
Hope and Disillusion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), editors’ introduction;
Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics
and Society (Manchester University Press, 2005), chapter 9.
75 Benjamin Stora, ‘La Gauche socialiste révolutionnaire, et la question du
Maghreb au moment du Front populaire (1935–1938)’, Revue Française
d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 70:258 (1983), 59–69.
76 Production in the Nord coalfields declined in 1936 and 1937 as a result,
leading to increasing imports of coal to meet increased demand from iron
and steel producers as French rearmament took off, see Aimée Moutet, ‘La
Rationalisation dans les mines du Nord à l’épreuve du Front populaire’, in
Bouvier (ed.), La France en mouvement 1934–1938, 116–17.
77 Communist organizers were especially active in the initial coalfield strike
actions in April–May 1936, see Raymond Hainsworth, ‘Les Grèves de
mai–juin 1936 chez les mineurs du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais’, in Bouvier
(ed.), La France en mouvement 1934–1938, 96–115.
78 ANOM, Marius Moutet Papers, PA28/1/D1, sous-dossier C: ‘Notes sur les
réalisations d’ordre politique du ministère, 1936–7’.
79 TNA, FO 371/19872, C4299/292/17, Satow (Tunis) to FO, 5 June 1936.
80 For examples, see SHGN, carton 49562, Compagnie Tunisie, Tunis, R/2,
1936–7, DR. 46 correspondence, 30 July 1936–19 January 1937.
81 Laure Machu, ‘Négociations et conflits’, in Xavier Vigna, Jean Vigreux and
Serge Wolikow (eds.), Le Pain, la paix, la liberté: expériences et territoires du
Front populaire (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 2006), 89–101.
82 Peerless guides are Kevin Passmore, ‘The French Third Republic:
Stalemate Society or Cradle of Fascism?’, French History, 7:4 (1993), 417–
49; William D. Irvine, ‘Beyond Left and Right, and the Politics of the
Third Republic’, Historical Reflections, 34:2 (2008), 134–46.
83 AN, F/7/14778: Grèves, 1911–38, dossier 119, Commissaire de police
mobile, Marcel Dubois, à M. le Commissaire, chef de la 1er section du con-
trôle général des services de police criminelle, ‘Occupation de la Préfecture
à Clermont Ferrand’, 10 October 1936.
84 Serge Wolikow, ‘Le Front Populaire: quel événement? Historiographie et
actualité des recherches sur le Front populaire’, in Vigna et al. (eds.), Le
Pain, la paix, la liberté, 11–24.
85 SHDN, carton 49562, no.852/2, CSTT-GN, Captain Escaffre to
Residency Secretary General, 18 August 1936: ‘A/S décrets sur la Presse
et les réunions publiques’.
86 TNA, FO 371/19872, C6045/292/17, Vibert (Tunis) to FO, 18 August

1936. These measures were introduced during the week of 7–11 August.
87 TNA, FO 371/19872, C6635/292/17, Satow to FO, 19 September 1936.
Bourguiba publicly affirmed that there was no question of ‘throwing the
French into the sea’.
88 TNA, FO 371/19872, C7009/292/17, Satow to FO, 2 October 1936.
89 SHGN, carton 745, 19ème Légion de Gendarmerie, 19e Corps d’armée,
‘Organisation actuelle de la Légion de Gendarmerie et de GRM de
l’Algérie’, 1 March 1937.
90 SHGN, carton 430, no. 14/4PO, 4e Arrondissement de la Gendarmerie,
to Commandant, 19ème Corps d’armée, Algiers, 25 May 1937. Vallon
transferred from a command in Tunisia.
91 SHGN, carton 429, no. 72/C, ‘Rapport du Général de Brigade Béart sur
l’inspection de la 19ème Légion de Gendarmerie’, 22 December 1934.
92 For Tunisia, see SHGN, carton 49562, no. 909/2, CSTT-GN, Captain
Bosc, provisional commander, to Government Secretary, 19 July 1937,
‘Objet: Situation économique’; carton 49563, no. 1344/2, Colonel
Mourot, monthly digest of forty-seven economic reports from Tunisia GN
brigades, 20 December 1937; no. 1217/2, CSTT-GN, Lt-Colonel Vallon
report, 19 October 1938 (monthly digest of fifty-six brigade reports).
93 AN, F60 763, Commission d’enquête dans les territoires de la France
d’Outre-Mer, minutes of first Commission session, 8 July 1937.
94 SHGN, carton 49562, dossiers 47/48: correspondence registers, 20
January–9 December 1937.
95 Although not stated in so many words, it seems clear that the army staff
approved Peyrouton’s repression of Neo-Destour in 1934–5. Army plan-
ners were equally disapproving of his successor Armand Guillon’s concili-
atory policies – a veiled way of criticizing Popular Front colonial reforms in
general. See AN, F60 769, no. 443, EMA Section d’Outre-Mer, ‘Bulletin
de renseignements des questions musulmanes’, 17 February 1936; no.
4097/9, annex 2: ‘L’évolution du Destour’, 17 December 1936.
96 AN, F60 769, no. 1415, EMA Section d’Outre-Mer, ‘Bulletin de rensei-
gnements des questions musulmanes’, 17 April 1937, pp. 162–3.
97 AN, F60 744, no. 708C/3, General Hanote, CSTT, to Daladier/Section
d’Outre-Mer, 21 August 1937, ‘Participation des troupes au maintien
d’ordre’.
98 AN, F60 744, no. 708C/3, Hanote to Daladier/Section d’Outre-Mer,
‘Tableau indiquant le nombre des journées de sections, Corps de Tunisie’,
1 July 1936–1 August 1937.
99 AN, F60 744, no. 708C/3, Hanote to Daladier/Section d’Outre-Mer, 21
August 1937, annex 2: ‘Détachement du Kef, 2eme bataillon’.
100 SHDN, carton 49562, CSTT-GN, Captain Bosc, provisional commander,
to Government Secretary, 19 July 1937, ‘Objet: Situation économique’.
101 ‘Après les bagarres du Sud’, La Dépêche Tunisienne, 8 March 1937.
102 ‘Les ouvriers de Gafsa ont fait grève hier’, Le Petit Matin, 5 March 1937.
103 Charles-André Julien, L’Afrique du Nord en marche: Algérie–Tunisie–Maroc
1880–1952 (Paris: Julliard, 1952, reprint: Paris: Omnibus, 2002), 81.
104 AN, F60 763, Le Secours Populaire de France et des Colonies à MM.
les membres de la Commission d’enquête des colonies, n.d., December
1937.
105 AN, F60 742, no. 1127, ‘Triste bilans … ou la loi de l’uniforme’, L’Action
Tunisienne, 29 May 1937.
106 AN, F60 742, no. 1127, Residency letter to Yvon Delbos, 23 July 1937;
‘Est-ce le retour à la dictature?’, L’Action Tunisienne, 23 July 1937.
107 Waleed Hazbun, ‘Rethinking Anti-Colonial Movements and the Political
Economy of Decolonization: The Case of Tunisia’, Arab Studies Quarterly,
16:1 (1994), 77–106.
108 There was both irony and hypocrisy to this mutual antagonism since on
12 July the Neo-Destour executive lined up to praise Taalbi at a rally held
to welcome the Sheikh’s return to nationalist politics. See AN, F60 742,
no. 815-5, Sûreté director to Resident General, ‘A/S d’un meeting destou-
rien à Gambetta Park’, 12 July 1937.
109 AN, F60 742, no. 1450, Ministre plenipotentiaire, délégué à la Résidence
Générale, to Direction des affaires politiques et commerciales, Afrique-
Levant, 18 September 1937.
110 AN, F60 742, no. 1559, Ministre plenipotentiaire, délégué à la Résidence
Générale, to Yvon Delbos, 2 October 1937.
111 AN, F60 742, no.1571, Ministre plenipotentiaire, délégué à la Résidence
Générale, to Direction des affaires politiques et commerciales, Afrique-
Levant, ‘Incidents de Béja’, 7 October 1937.
112 Ibid.
113 Ibid.
114 Alfred Silbert, ‘Avec M. Daladier en Tunisie’, Le Monde Colonial illustré,
188 (February 1939), 3 ; ‘Le Président Daladier en Tunisie’, La Revue
Française d’Outre-Mer, 762 (January 1939), 6–7; Reynolds M. Salerno,
Vital Crossroads: Mediterranean Origins of the Second World War, 1935–1940
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 91–6.
115 AN, F60 744, Residency memo to Foreign Ministry, 22 November 1937,
‘Part IV: Mesures spéciales envisagées pour la Tunisie’.
116 SHD-DAT, série Tunisie, 2H60/D1, Residency political intelligence:
‘Analyses de la presse tunisienne et des principaux événements d’ordre
politique et économique’, 1 October 1938–31 December 1939.
117 MAE, série P: Tunisie 1917–40, vol. 388, ‘Note sur les principaux inci-
dents survenus en Tunisie depuis le mois de mars 1937’.
118 ‘L’exposé de M. Albert Sarraut sur l’Afrique du Nord’, Le Temps, 28
November 1937.
119 MAE, série Tunisie, 1944–55, vol. 335, Direction Afrique-Levant, ‘Etude
sur le Parti du Néo-Destour’, n.d.; Souad Bakalti, La Femme tunisienne au
temps de la colonisation 1881–1956 (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1996),
74–84.
120 TNA, FO 371/21590, Tunis Consulate dispatches 39 and 48 to FO, 30
March and 11 April 1938.
121 Julien, L’Afrique du Nord en marche, 83–4.
122 SHD-DAT, 2H59, ‘Instruction règlant l’exercice des pouvoirs de police
de l’autorité militaire sur la territoire de la Régence en état de siège’.
123 Ibid.; El Mechat, ‘Les Libertés publiques à l’épreuve’, 225.

124 SHD-DAT, 2H59, DCTT, Division de Tunis, ‘Etat récapitulatif: nombre
de sections employées en maintien de l’ordre au cours du mois de l’avril
1938’. The 4ème zouaves spent twenty-five days of the month of April on
such ‘alerts’.
125 SHD-DAT, 2H59, EMA-2, General Bessière, Tunis divisional com-
mander, ‘Rapport’, 1 June 1938.
126 SHD-DAT, 2H59, no. 1052, General Bessière, ‘Note de service’, 14 April
1938.
127 SHD-DAT, 2H59, no. 1172, Division de Tunis, EMA-2, ‘Bulletin de
renseignements no. 2’, 26 April 1938.
128 SHD-DAT, 2H59, no. 119, Division de Tunis, EMA-2, ‘Bulletin de
renseignements, no. 3’, 28 April 1938; ‘État des détenus à Grombalia à la
suite des évènements Destouriens’.
129 SHD-DAT, 2H59, Commandant Supérieur des Troupes de Tunisie
(CSTT – General Hanote), ‘Note de service: maintien de l’ordre’, 10 May
1938.
130 SHD-DAT, 2H59, no. 970/BCR-2, CSTT instruction,16 June 1938.
131 SHDN, carton 49563, no. 582/2 CSTT-GN, Lt-Colonel Vallon to section
commanders, 17 May 1938.
133 SHD-DAT, 2H59, no. IGCC/933, Armand Guillon circular to Contrôleurs
civils, ‘A.S. de la dissolution du Néo-Destour’, 27 April 1938.
134 El Mechat, ‘Les Libertés publiques à l’épreuve’, 225.
135 TNA, FO 371/21589, Tunis consul report, ‘Economic conditions in
Tunisia’, 21 October 1938.
136 MAE, série Tunisie, 1944–1955, vol. 300, Section Afrique-Levant memo,
‘Habib Bourguiba’, n.d., 1951; TNA, FO 371/21590, Tunis consulate dis-
patch, 22 August 1938. To avoid an official ban, Tunisian political groups
were required to make a written declaration, acknowledging French
sovereignty.
137 AN, F60 745, ‘Plan pour servir à l’organisation de la “contre-propagande”
politique en Afrique du Nord (Tunisie)’, n.d., 1939.
138 SHDN, carton 49563, ‘Programme de voyage de M. le Président du Conseil,
Ministre de la Défense Nationale et de la Guerre’, fos. 261, 269–72.
139 TNA, FO 371/22920, C5495/226/17, Knight (Tunis) to FO, 14 April 1939.
140 TNA, FO 371/22920, C8390/226/17, Knight (Tunis) to FO, 6 June 1939.
141 AN, F60 745, Eirik Labonne letter to Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet,
6 May 1939. The maximum fines imposed for holding illicit meetings
were increased from one thousand to two thousand francs and offenders
were liable to imprisonment of between one month and a year.
142 SHGN, carton 49563, no. 582/2 CSTT-GN, Compagnie de Tunisie,
Lt-Colonel Vallon circular to Commandants de Section, 17 May 1938.
143 AN, F60 749, no. 119, Guillon to Delbos, 20 January 1938.
144 AN, F60 769, Ministère de la Guerre, Bulletin de renseignements des
questions musulmanes, 1935–39, no. 327 9/EMA, Section d’Outre Mer,
Bulletin de renseignements des questions musulmanes, 8 February 1935,
2ème partie, ‘Le mouvement panislamique au cours du 4eme trimestre
1934’; no. 2650 9/ EMA, Section d’Outre Mer, Bulletin de renseigne-

ments des questions musulmanes, 14 August 1936, Annexe 1: ‘L’action
du Komintern en Afrique du Nord’; ANOM, GGA 2cab/3, Direction du
contrôle, de la comptabilité et des affaires algériennes memo, ‘Object: A/S
de la propagande étrangère’, 28 August 1935.
145 ANOM, GGA, 2cab/3, Algiers government direction des affaires
indigènes, ‘Rapport sur la situation politique et administrative des
indigènes de l’Algérie au 31 Janvier 1931’; no. 3359, Jules Carde to Minister
of Interior, Direction du contrôle, de la comptabilité et des affaires algéri-
ennes, ‘Situation morale de l’Algérie’, 12 August 1935.
6 Ru b b e r , c o ol i e s a n d c omm u nis t s: p ol ic ing

dis or d e r in F r e nc h Vi e t n a m
1 Analogies may be drawn here with the forcible recruitment of Vietnamese
and highland minority workers to clear the path for road and rail links to
Dalat, Indochina’s premier hill station and putative federal capital, a process
vividly described in Eric Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and
Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2011), 26–9, 62–8.
2 The extent to which Europeans habitually perpetrated racial violence was
less readily admitted, see Michael Vann, ‘Fear and Loathing in French
Hanoi: Colonial White Images and Imaginings of “Native” Violence’, in
Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and
Colonialism, 52–76.
3 ADA, Sarraut papers, Sous-série 12J, carton 12J 301, Dossier: Gouvernement
Général de l’Indochine, Sûreté Générale, ‘L’Agitation Antifrançaise dans les
Pays Annamites de 1905 à 1918’, 199-page report, pp. 1–54, 96–117 passim.
4 Ibid., pp. 145–55. The Criminal Commission ultimately interrogated 254
detainees of whom 84 were found guilty of sedition. Seven received death
sentences for involvement in assassinations during April and May 1913. A
further eight detainees were deported, five were banished, two received five-
year prison sentences and nine others faced terms of between nine months
and five years. Among those condemned were the key leaders Cuóng Dê,
Phan-Bôi-Châu, Nguyen-Câm-Giàng and Nguyen-Quinh-Chi (known as
Hai Thac).
5 Peter Zinoman, ‘Colonial Prisons and Anti-Colonial Resistance in French
Indochina: The Thai Nguyen Rebellion, 1917’, Modern Asian Studies, 34:1
(2000), 57–98, also in Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, chapter 6.
6 As Peter Zinoman points out, the requirement for proficiency in Romanized
Vietnamese (quôc-ngu) was a double-edged sword. Depicted as proof of
administrative modernization, it further devalued Chinese script as the
preferred medium for official correspondence and educational preferment,
thereby marginalizing an educated elite proficient in classical Chinese. See
his introduction to Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Phong Trung, English trans.
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 4, 8–9.
7 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J81, Rapport, ‘Politique indigène : Réformes réal-
isées ou en cours de préparation’, n.d. 1918.
8 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2341, ‘Article de M. Pierre Herbart sur les pris-

ons politiques en Indochine’, sent to Minister of Colonies, Paul Reynaud,
5 February 1932. Herbart’s article was written in Vinh on 4 December
1931.
9 Van Nguyen-Marshall, In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on
Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (New York:
Peter Lang, 2008), 55, 128.
10 Ibid., 129 n.54, citing Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap, The Peasant
Question (1937–1938), English trans. Christine White (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1974), 13. For an earlier example of punitive colonial tax-
ation and its acutely divisive effects, see Erica J. Peters, ‘Taste, Taxes, and
Technologies: Industrializing Rice Alcohol in Northern Vietnam, 1902–
1913’, French Historical Studies, 27:3 (2004), 568–600.
11 William J. Duiker, The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, 1900–1941 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Daniel Hémery, Révolutionnaires viét-
namiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine (Paris: François Maspero, 1975);
Hunyh Kim Khánh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1982); David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial,
and ‘The 1920s Women’s Rights Debates in Vietnam’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 35:3 (1976), 371–89; Patrice Morlat, La Répression coloniale au
Vietnam, 1908–1940 (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1990); Hue-Tam Ho
Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Shawn F. McHale, Print and Power:
Confucianism, Communism and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); Zinoman, The Colonial
Bastille. Recent trends in the historiography are nicely summarized in Mark
Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), Making Sense of the Vietnam
Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (Oxford University
Press, 2008), 11–12.
12 Mark Philip Bradley, ‘Becoming “Van Minh”: Civilizational Discourse and
Visions of the Self in Twentieth-Century Vietnam’, Journal of World History,
15:1 (2004), 65–83; Christopher E. Goscha, ‘“The Modern Barbarian”:
Nguyen Van Vinh and the Complexity of Colonial Modernity in Vietnam’,
European Journal of East Asian Studies, 3:1 (2004), 99–134. See also Shawn
McHale, ‘Printing and Power: Vietnamese Debates over Women’s Place
in Society, 1918–1934’, in K. W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore (eds.),
Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995),
183–92.
13 Christopher E. Goscha, ‘Building Force: Asian Origins of Twentieth-
Century Military Science in Vietnam (1905–54)’, Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies, 34:3 (2003), 535–60.
14 Marianne Boucheret, ‘Les Organisations de planteurs de caoutchouc
indochinois et l’État au début du XXe siècle à la veille de la Seconde
Guerre mondiale’, in Bonin, Hodeir and Klein (eds.), L’Esprit économique
impérial, 716.
15 Indochina’s first rubber plantations were established in 1897, but only after
the first rubber ‘boom’ of 1910 did the industry take off. From only 475
hectares under cultivation at the start of that year, plantings increased to
15,000 hectares by the start of 1920 and exceeded 33,000 hectares by 1925.
By then, the second and larger rubber boom that began in 1923 was gain-
ing momentum, driven by inward investment, much of it by Michelin and
the Bank of Indochina. The result was that, by 1929, over 119,000 hec-
tares were being cultivated, see ANOM, FM/INDO/NF997: Indochine,
Caoutchouc (1933–9), Institut des recherches agronomiques, ‘La situation
des principaux produits d’exportation’, Hanoi, 4 April 1936.
16 Martin J. Murray cites a Ministry of Colonies figure of 1,007 plantations
spread over 127,000 hectares (of which 98,000 were in Cochin-China),
by 1937. Twenty-seven enterprises owned estates of 1,000 to 5,000 hec-
tares but only four held plantations larger than this. See Murray, ‘“White
Gold” or “White Blood”?: The Rubber Plantations of Colonial Indochina,
1910–40’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19:3–4 (1992), 49.
17 Frémeaux, Les empires coloniaux, 119.
18 Stephen L. Harp, ‘Marketing in the Metropole: French Rubber Plantations
and French Consumerism in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Kevin J.
Callahan and Sarah A. Curtis (eds.), Views from the Margins: Creating
Identities in Modern France (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
2008), 89.
19 Boucheret, ‘Les Organisations de planteurs’, 717–18. The Banque Rivaud
was a subsidiary of the Brussels colonial bank, the Banque des colonies de
Bruxelles.
20 Amarjit Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalization, the
International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), 100.
21 Foster, Projections of Power, 52–4.
22 AN, Paul Reynaud papers, 74AP/9, ‘M. Paul Reynaud parle à Bordeaux:
La tâche de notre colonisation devant la crise mondiale’, 14 June 1931.
23 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J307/Dossier: Rapport sur le ‘Complot des
bombes’, 1920, no. 974/SG, SCR Chef, ‘Note pour Monsieur le Directeur
des Affaires Politiques et Indigènes’, 9 September 1920. Sûreté intelligence
suggested that the conspirators came mainly from the provinces of Vinh-
Yen, Phuc-Yen, Ha-Dong and Hoa-Binh. Additional gendarmerie reports
filed on 5 August suggested a link with political prisoners in provincial jails
near Vinh.
24 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J80, ‘Discours d’Albert Sarraut sur la situation en
Indochine devant la Chambre des Députés’, n.d. 1919, pp. 33–4
25 Morlat, Les Affaires politiques de l’Indochine, 243–50.
26 Pairaudeau, ‘Indians as French Citizens in Colonial Indochina’, 169–73.
Outrey served as lieutenant-governor of Cochin-China in 1908–9, as
interim Resident in Laos in 1910–11 and as resident-superior of Cambodia
from 1911 to 1914. He then began five consecutive terms as a National
Assembly deputy between 1914 and 1936.
27 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J304, no. 32-RC, Procureur-général Lencou-
Barême, Cour d’Appel de l’Indochine, to Governor-general, ‘Rapport au
sujet de l’affaire de Monpezat’, 26 September 1918; 12J 305, ‘M. Albert
Sarraut blessé’, La Dépêche de Toulouse, 17 December 1918. De Monpezat
pleaded justifiable homicide, allowing the press to write salacious accounts
of the exact circumstances in which he encountered the unfortunate

Captain. Sarraut was rushed to the Hanoi military hospital where the
offending bullet was removed from his right side. He made a full recovery.
Devignes was less fortunate; he was almost lynched by bystanders at the
scene.
28 Patrice Morlat, ‘Les Réseaux patronaux français en Indochine (1918–
1928)’, in Bonin, Hodeir and Klein (eds.), L’Esprit économique impérial, 618.
From 1920 Indochina did become the principal Far Eastern destination for
French capital investment, overtaking China.
29 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J277, ‘Discours de Maurice Long’, n.d., 1920.
30 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J80, Directeur du Cabinet Pierre Pasquier (Hué),
personal note to Sarraut, 2 April 1923.
31 Khánh, Vietnamese Communism, 90–1; Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina,
309, 315.
32 For the extent of the crackdown, see Khánh, Vietnamese Communism, 91–6.
In July 1929 227 VNQDD members were brought to trial of whom 80
received prison terms ranging from two to twenty years. VNQDD members
also figured large among the 1,086 detainees tried by the Tonkin Criminal
Commission, which sentenced 80 people to death, 383 to exile, 106 to hard
labour, and a further 105 to shorter prison terms.
33 TNA, FO 371/14904, W1220/176/17, Paris Embassy despatch to Arthur
Henderson, 1 February 1930; Khánh, Vietnamese Communism, 94. Khánh
compares Bazin’s methods to those of a press gang.
34 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2344, no. 9253S, Governor-general to Ministry
of Colonies, 15 September 1930, sends Haiphong Sûreté Générale memo
‘Création sous le titre du ‘Trung Lâp’ d’un parti dérivé du VNQDD’.
35 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, sous-dossier ‘Travail’, Pasquier/Direction
Politique tel. 242, Hanoi, to Ministry of Colonies, 7 February 1930.
36 For the plantation’s early operations and testy relations between its
managers and the colonial authorities, see Sébastien Verney, ‘Le Nécessaire
compromis colonial: le cas de la plantation Michelin de Dâù Tiêng
(Cochinchine) de 1932 à 1937’, in El Mechat (ed.), Les Administrations
coloniales, 163–72.
37 Harp, ‘Marketing in the Metropole’, 85.
38 Guildhall Library, London, Rubber Growers’ Association (RGA) papers,
Council Minute Books, MS24863/36: 6 March 1933, item 6, Appendix H,
Eric Miller, Acting Convenor, Commercial Research and Marketing
Committee, ‘Position of the Rubber Planting Industry in French
Indochina’, 23 February 1933. Estates with trees averaging over eight years
old produced the highest yield; those with fifteen-year-old trees yielding
550 kg per hectare compared with only 200 kg per hectare for seven-year-
old trees.
39 Harp, ‘Marketing in the Metropole’, 92. Less densely populated than
Tonkin, Cochin-China’s rural population was too thinly spread to satisfy
inter-war demand for workers. Although some commercial plantations
were in Cochin-China’s terres grises (the ‘grey lands’ outlying Saigon),
most were further north in the so-called terres rouges, the ‘red lands’
northwest of Saigon that stretched in a 300 kilometre arc to Cambodia.
There is also evidence that peasant communities were either displaced

or reluctant to co-operate with large estates that competed with them
for land and labour, see Christine Pelzer White, ‘Everyday Resistance,
Socialist Revolution and Rural Development: The Vietnamese Case’, The
Journal of Peasant Studies, 13:2 (1986), 55; Murray, ‘“White Gold” or
“White Blood”?’, 49–50.
40 Martin J. Murray, The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina
(1870–1940) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 242–6;
Murray, ‘“White Gold” or “White Blood”?’, 51–2, 55–6; Kaur, Wage Labour
in Southeast Asia, 102–3. For cais in Indochina’s railway industry, see David
Del Testa, Paint the Trains Red: Labor, Nationalism, and Vietnamese Railroad
Workers in French Colonial Indochina, 1898–1945 (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), chapters 2 and 4.
41 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, undated press report, ‘Incidents sur les
plantations Michelin’. The plantation’s administration delegate arrested
the alleged extortionist but, the next morning, his original accusers
‘unaccountably’ requested that the man be released. This, too, was done.
42 Tran Tu Binh, The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial
Rubber Plantation, English trans. (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press,
1984), 67; also cited in Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing
Years, 1919–1941 (London: Hurst, 2003), 159. The suggestion that a new-
year offensive was planned also reached the French-language press, see
ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, undated report, ‘Incidents sur les plantations
Michelin’. Tran Tu Binh led the ICP cell on the Phu-Riêng plantation. His
long career saw him become a Viet Minh General in 1948 and, eventually,
Vietnam’s Ambassador to China between 1959 and 1967.
43 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2614, dossier du Ministre Piétri, Saigon Direction
des affaires politiques report, 28 February 1930.
44 For blow-by-blow details, see Pierre Brocheux, ‘L’Implantation du mou-
vement communiste en Indochine française: le cas du Nghe-Tinh (1930–
1931)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 24:1 (1977), 49–74;
Martin Bernal, ‘The Nghê ̣-Tı̃nh Soviet Movement, 1930–1931’, Past &
Present, 92:1 (1981), 148–68; Khánh, Vietnamese Communism, 151–60.
46 Ibid., 91–2; see also Binh, The Red Earth. Written by a man later to emerge
as a leading ICP activist, the book recounts the hardships of daily life on a
Michelin-owned estate.
47 Varenne was a Socialist from the Puy-de-Dôme in the Auvergne region, whose
administrative centre, Clermont-Ferrand, was also home to Michelin.
48 Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 105–7. The pécule was much resented
by workers. It entitled employers to make deductions from the deferred
payments for minor misdemeanours, absences from work or poor perform-
ance, sometimes leaving labourers with nothing.
49 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, sous-dossier ‘Travail’, Pasquier telegram
262 to Ministry of Colonies, 11 February 1930; FM/INDO/NF2614,
dossier du Ministre Piétri, Saigon Direction des affaires politiques report,
28 February 1930.
50 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, no. 757/S, Pasquier to Direction des affaires

politiques, 29 April 1930, sends Labour Inspectorate report, ‘Incidents
de Thuân-loï, Michelin et Compagnie’, 10 April 1930. Three individuals
received five-year prison terms: Pham Van Chuong, Pham Thê Mo and
Pham Van Phu. Twenty-nine other labourers accused of strike organizing
were acquitted.
51 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, Michelin Executive Board, Clermont-
Ferrand, letter to Minister of Colonies, 31 March 1930, ‘Plantation Michelin
de THUAN-LOI’.
52 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, Direction Politique, 3ème bureau, Gaston
Joseph letter to Directeur des Etablissements Michelin et Compagnie,
Clermont-Ferrand, 14 April 1930: ‘Récents incidents sur la plantation
Michelin de Thuan-Loï, province de Biên Hòa’.
53 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, Gaston Joseph, ‘Note au sujet du mouvement
gréviste sur les plantations MICHELIN en Cochinchine’, 5 June 1930.
54 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, no. 3652, Pasquier to Direction politique
3ème bureau, 12 August 1930.
55 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, François Piétri letter to Directeur des
Etablissements Michelin et Compagnie, Clermont-Ferrand, 3 November
1930; Michelin et Compagnie to Direction Politique, 3ème bureau, 28
November 1930. The Company insisted that all personnel changes at the
plantation stemmed from retirements or the expiry of work contracts, not
changes in management practice.
56 TNA, WO 32/3580, Captain J. A. Codrington, 3rd Battalion Coldstream
Guards, ‘Report on attachment to the French Army, Feb. 1930’.
57 TNA, FO 371/14904, Saigon consular tel. no. 2, 17 February 1930.
58 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2614, Affaires politiques: dossier du Ministre
Piétri 1930, tel. 258, Pasquier, Hanoi, to Colonies, 10 February 1930. The
French dead were named as Captain Jourdan, Lieutenant Robert, Adjutant
Cuneo and Sergeants Demour and Chevalier.
59 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2614, Affaires politiques: dossier du Ministre
Piétri 1930, tel. 260, Pasquier to Colonies, Paris, 11 February 1930.
60 TNA, FO 371/14904, Saigon consular tel. no. 2, 17 February 1930.
61 Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 380.
62 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2634, Commissaire spécial Robert to Resident,
Vinh, 18 September 1930.
63 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, no. 267-RS, Annam Resident-Superior Le
Fol to Pasquier, ‘A.S. des incidents de Vinh et Ha Tinh, Septembre 1930’,
29 September 1930.
64 Ralph B. Smith, ‘The Development of Opposition to French Rule in
Southern Vietnam 1880–1940’, Past & Present, 54:1 (1972), 117–20. As
Smith points out, Caodaism, which combined elements of Vietnam’s three
traditional religions of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, grew fast in
1920s Cochin-China.
29 September 1930.
66 SHD-DAT, série Indochine, 10H75/D3, Hanoi Army Command, ‘La situ-

ation en Indochine au cours de l’année 1930: Extension du mouvement
révolutionnaire en Cochinchine, en Annam’.
67 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2634, EM-3, no. 286, Troupes de l’Indochine,
‘Rapport spécial du 16 Septembre au 16 Octobre 1930’.
68 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2634, EM-3, no. 208, Troupes de l’Indochine,
‘Rapport sur les opérations dans le nord-Annam du 1er au 18 Novembre
1930’.
69 SHD-DAT, Événements d’Indochine, 1930–1, 6N503/D3, no. 1497, EMA
Section d’études, ‘Note pour le secrétariat général’, 20 June 1931.
70 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, Dossier: Agitation Communiste en
Indochine, 1930, ‘Etat des incidents survenus en Indochine depuis le 10
février 1930’.
71 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2634, Annam Résident Supérieur to Pasquier,
‘Incidents Communistes du 11 Décembre 1930’, 28 December 1930.
72 Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 15–20; Hy Van Luong, ‘Agrarian Unrest from
an Anthropological Perspective: The Case of Vietnam’, Comparative Politics,
17:2 (1985), 165. Luong points out that the majority of the ICP’s early
national leadership came from Confucian scholar families of the mandarin
elite in Nghê ̣-An and Ha-Tinh.
73 For the politics of Indochina’s rice pricing and the role of French trading
houses, see Irene Nørlund, ‘Rice and the Colonial Lobby: The Economic
Crisis in French Indo-China in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Boomgaard and
Brown (eds.), Weathering the Storm, 201–11; Vorapheth, Commerce et colon-
isation en Indochine, 371–90.
74 There were other continuities, too: regarding the role of taxation and
corvée labour in provoking pre-war unrest in central Vietnam see David
Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1971), 189–92. For the socio-economic impact of regres-
sive colonial taxation on village life in Annam and Tonkin, see Popkin, The
Rational Peasant, 142–58.
75 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 263–5, 317–18.
76 Luong, ‘Agrarian Unrest’, 157–62, 169–71. For the structural processes
involved, see Ngô Viñh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants
under the French, new edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
especially chapters 3, 4 and 6.
77 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, Dossier: Agitation Communiste en Indochine,
1930, unsigned report, ‘Localisation de l’agitation’, 21 November 1930,
pp. 1–2.
78 Ibid., pp. 3–4.
79 The police correctly observed that most early ICP leaders trained in the
Soviet Union and served as Comintern agents, a point recently reiterated
by Tuong Vu, ‘From Cheering to Volunteering: Vietnamese Communists
and the Arrival of the Cold War, 1940–1951’, in Goscha and Ostermann
(eds.), Connecting Histories, 174.
80 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, no. 5648/SG, Service Central de
Renseignements de la Sûreté Générale (Hanoi) to Colonies, Direction des
affaires politiques, 8 October 1930.
81 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, ‘Localisation de l’agitation’, 21 November

1930, pp. 1–4.
82 Ralph B. Smith, ‘The Foundation of the Indochinese Communist Party,
1929–1930’, Modern Asian Studies 32:4 (1998), 769–805; Khánh, Vietnamese
Communism, 125–9; Ngo Vinh Long, ‘The Indochinese Communist Party
and Peasant Rebellion in Central Vietnam, 1930–1931’, Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars, 10 (1978), 15–35.
29 September 1930.
84 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, no. 466-C, Vinh Resident Guilleminet to
Resident Supérieur Hué, 9 September 1930.
85 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2341, ‘Article de M. Pierre Herbart sur les pris-
ons politiques en Indochine’, sent to Minister of Colonies Paul Reynaud,
5 February 1932.
86 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, ‘Localisation de l’agitation’, 21 November
1930, p. 4.
87 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J301, no. 466-C, Vinh Resident Guilleminet to
Resident Supérieur Hue, 9 September 1930.
88 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2344, Opérations anti-communistes, 1930, no.
5277SG, Pasquier to Colonies, Direction des Affaires politiques, ‘Activité
du parti nationaliste annamite, projets d’attentats du nouveau Parti “Trung
Lap”’, 15 September 1930.
89 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2345, Procès par la Court Criminelle du Tonkin, 29
Septembre 1931; Pasquier to Colonies, 30 September 1931. On 29 September
1931 alone the Hanoi criminal court handed down the following sentences:
life with hard labour (4); twenty years with hard labour (4); prison terms of
over ten years (5); prison terms between five and ten years (5); acquittals (5).
90 ‘Le Révolutionnaire annamite Nguyen Ai Quoc’, L’Humanité, 19 June
1931, reprinted in Alain Ruscio, La Question coloniale dans “L’Humanité”
(1904–2004) (Paris: La Dispute, 2005), 136–7.
91 Regarding the growing problem of communist sedition inside Haiphong
prison, see ANOM, FM/INDO/2349, Lettres du Gouverneur-général
Pasquier, 1931–2; more generally, see Peter Zinoman’s outstanding study,
The Colonial Bastille, 200–39.
92 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2345, Pasquier tels. to Ministry of Colonies,
9 and 27 January 1932.
93 Hardy, ‘The Economics of French Rule in Indochina’, 808.
94 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 189; Gonjo, Banque colonial ou Banque
d’affaires.
95 John H. Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 1876–1922: The Genesis of the Industry
(Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1973), 164–90 passim.
96 ADA, Sarraut papers, carton 12J277, Alexandre Varenne letter to Sarraut
(Minister of Interior at the time), 8 August 1926.
97 Varenne was Indochina’s governor between July 1925 and October 1927.
Earlier, in 1919, he founded the left-leaning Auvergne newspaper La
Montagne, rival to the right-wing paper Le Moniteur of which his political
nemesis, Pierre Laval, was proprietor from 1927.
98 Boucheret, ‘Les Organisations de planteurs’, 720–2. Varenne’s plans

built upon a February 1926 survey of concessions policy conducted by
Yves Henry, Indochina’s Inspector-General of Agriculture and Forests.
Although Varenne’s more radical proposals were repealed in 1927
they resurfaced in a further decree on rubber concessions passed on
4 November 1928.
99 ADA, Sarraut papers, carton 12J277, Varenne to Sarraut, 8 August 1926.
Varenne also drew settler anger with proposals to create ‘native assem-
blies’ with limited powers of budgetary oversight in Indochina’s five
territories.
100 Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 308.
101 Harp, ‘Marketing in the Metropole’, 85–92.
102 Pierre Brocheux, ‘The State and the 1930s Depression in French Indo-
China’, in Boomgaard and Brown (eds.), Weathering the Storm, 251–4.
103 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF997, Indochine, Caoutchouc (1933–9), Institut
des recherches agronomiques, ‘La situation des principaux produits
d’exportation’, Hanoi, 4 April 1936. Raw rubber prices declined from
$1.83 per kilogram in 1926 to $1 in 1929, falling to a low of 89 cents per
kilo in early 1930. 125,812 hectares were registered under cultivation in
1934.
104 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2490, Mission d’inspection Demongin, 1931–2,
Rapport fait par M. Moretti, Inspecteur de 1ère classe des Colonies, con-
cernant la situation financière du budget local de la Cochinchine, 28 May
1932.
105 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, sous-dossier ‘Travail’, Pasquier/Direction
Politique tel. 242 to Ministry of Colonies, 7 February 1930; Pierre
Brocheux, ‘Le Prolétariat des plantations d’hévéas au Vietnam méridi-
onal: aspects sociaux et politiques (1927–1937)’, Le Mouvement Social,
90:1 (1975), 66–71.
106 Morlat, ‘Les Réseaux patronaux français’, 618–20. The Bank of Indochina’s
erstwhile competitor, the Banque industrielle de Chine, suffered badly in
the post-First World War depression and was acquired by another bank,
Paribas, which gradually rebuilt its Far Eastern operations. The only other
significant rival to the Bank of Indochina was the Banque de l’Union
Parisienne, whose investments were far smaller.
107 ANOM, Albert Sarraut papers, 9/PA/15, André Crémazy, president of the
Indochina Rubber Planters’ Association, memo, ‘Question de prêts aux
planteurs de caoutchoucs’, n.d., March 1914.
108 Boucheret, ‘Les Organisations de planteurs’, 717. Between 1919 and 1924
the Bank used a holding company, the Société indochinoise de commerce,
d’agriculture et de finance, to manage its Indochina investments. See also
Morlat, ‘Les Réseaux patronaux français’, 624.
109 Vorapheth, Commerce et colonisation en Indochine, 294–5.
110 ANOM, Marius Moutet papers, 28/PA/carton 5, dossier 131, Direction
des affaires politiques ‘Note sur la Banque de l’Indochine’, n.d., 1937.
111 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2649, affaires politiques Cochinchine, 1931–4, rap-
ports politiques mensuels, janvier 1931–avril 1934; Vorapheth, Commerce et
colonisation en Indochine, 375. Regarding loss of cultivable land by Vietnam’s
peasantry during the depression, see Frémeaux, Les Empires coloniaux,

162–3.
112 ANOM, Moutet papers, 28/PA/5, Direction des affaires politiques, ‘Note
sur la Banque de l’Indochine’, n.d., 1937.
113 Hubert Bonin argues, rather differently, that in 1931 the Bank was forced
to concede both a fifth of its capital and greater state involvement in its
affairs in return for the retention of its status as a fiduciary bank, see
Bonin, ‘Les Réseaux bancaires impériaux parisiens’, 471.
115 Herbert R. Lottman, The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2003), 169–71.
116 Boucheret, ‘Les Organisations de planteurs’, 729–30. The Rubber Planters’
Union was also backed by the Union Coloniale, the inter-war successor to
Parti Colonial lobby groups, and the largest imperialist pressure group in
France.
117 RGA papers, MS24863/34, copy of Journal officiel de la République fran-
çaise, 4 April 1931. Planters were required to repay any bail-out loans over
the long term at 5 per cent interest.
118 RGA papers, MS24863/36, Council minutes, 6 March 1933, item 6.
119 RGA papers, MS24863/34, 1932, draft letter by George Maxwell, Chairman
of the RGA to the Governor and High Commissioner, Singapore, 7 May
1932.
120 RGA papers, MS24863/36, Council minutes, 6 March 1933, item 6:
Appendix: H. Eric Miller, Acting Convenor, Commercial Research and
Marketing Committee ‘Position of the Rubber Planting Industry in French
Indochina’, 23 February 1933. Taken from the Bulletin du Syndicat des Planteurs
de Caoutchouc, the report summarizes a letter of 12 October 1932 from the
‘superior resident of French Indochina’ (probably actually Cochin-China) to
the president of the Syndicat des planteurs de caoutchouc de l’Indochine.
121 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF997, Indochine, Caoutchouc (1933–9), Institut
des recherches agronomiques, ‘La situation des principaux produits
d’exportation’, Hanoi, 4 April 1936.
122 For details of the 1930 debates, see Martin Thomas, ‘Eradicating
“Communist Banditry” in French Vietnam: The Rhetoric of Repression
after the Yen Bay Uprising, 1930–32’, French Historical Studies, 34:3
(2011), 611–48.
123 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1838, Affaires politiques: interventions de
députés sur l’Indochine 1928–37.
124 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1836, no. 175, Gouverneur de la Cochinchine à
M. le Gouverneur-général de l’Indochine, Saigon, 14 February 1933.
125 Brocheux, ‘Le Prolétariat des plantations’, 61–86.
126 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2616, Sûreté Générale report, ‘Note au sujet
des incidents qui sont produits les 16 et 17 Décembre sur la plantation
Michelin de Dau Tiêng’, 6 January 1933. Rice allocations were to be
reduced from 800 to 700 grams for male labourers and from 700 to 600
grams for women. They were significantly lower in practice.
127 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, tel. 1393, Governor-general, Hanoi, to
Colonies, 19 December 1932.
128 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, no. 363AP, Pasquier to Direction des

affaires politiques, 3 March 1933.
129 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2626, no. 1997-C, J-P Rougni, Contrôleur du
Travail to M. l’inspecteur du Travail, Saigon, 23 December 1932.
130 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2626, Governor Pages to Pasquier, 24 December
1932.
131 Military reforms enacted in light of the Yen Bay mutiny are examined in
Rettig, ‘French Military Policies in the Aftermath of the Yên Bay Mutiny’,
309–31.
132 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF1839, no. 363AP, Pasquier to Direction des
affaires politiques, 3 March 1933.
133 Ibid.
134 Verney, ‘Le Nécessaire compromis colonial’, 169–72.
135 ADA, Sarraut papers, 12J303, unsigned Paris police report, ‘Comité
d’Amnistie aux Indochinois’, 16 May 1933.
136 For the new government’s election programme, see Jackson, The Popular
Front in France, 42–50.
137 ANOM, Moutet papers, 28PA/carton 3, Dossier 127, ‘La législation fran-
çaise et le travail forcé’; ‘L’Organisation internationale du Travail et le
travail indigène’; ‘Note sur la question du travail forcé pour les chefs
indigènes’, all undated but produced in 1930; ‘Marius Moutet dénonce les
méthodes terroristes de répression’, Le Populaire, 11 April 1930; Zinoman,
The Colonial Bastille, 269–70.
138 ANOM, Moutet papers, 28/PA/1, Dossier 67, no. 2950/AP, Brévié to
Resident Superior, Tonkin, ‘A/S des libérés politiques’, 12 October 1937.
Tabulates political prisoner releases by colony.
139 AN, Parliamentary Commission files, XVIème législature (1 June 1936–31
May 1942), C15150, commission de l’Algérie, des colonies et des protec-
torats, minutes, 24 Juin 1936.
140 Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 219, 222–3.
141 Christopher Goscha, ‘A New State of Knowledge: Power, Policing, and
Intelligence’, draft book chapter, forthcoming. My thanks to Chris for
sending me his book manuscript.
142 TNA, FO 371/22921, C4684/249/17, Saigon consul H. C. Walsh review,
n.d., February 1939.
143 Joseph-Jules Brévié was one of a host of Popular Front appointees to
colonial governorships, selected as part of the largest clear-out of senior
empire administrators enacted between the wars. Eighteen colonial
governors or residents-general were either replaced or forced to retire,
see Irwin M. Wall, ‘Socialists and Bureaucrats: The Blum Government
and the French Administration, 1936–37’, International Review of Social
History, 19:3 (1974), 325–46; Cohen, ‘The Colonial Policy of the Popular
Front’, 368–93. Previously Governor-general of French West Africa,
Brévié served in Hanoi from September 1936 until 16 July 1939 when he
was replaced by General Georges Catroux, a future Free French com-
mander who had also established the military intelligence service in
Mandate Syria. Minister of Colonies Georges Mandel appointed Catroux
to succeed Brévié, see Bertrand Favreau, Georges Mandel ou la passion de

la République 1885–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 334.
144 The limits to this reformism are evident in ANOM, 28/PA/1, Moutet
papers, ‘Politique républicaine colonial’, n.d., June 1936; see also Gary
Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism
Between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
145 For examples, see ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2279, Rapports du Gouverneur-
général Brévié, 1936–37; Moutet papers, 28PA/3: Correspondance,
Indochine, 1936–37.
146 AN, Paul Reynaud papers, 74AP/9, Union des planteurs de caoutchouc
d’Indochine memo, ‘Projet de taxe unique à la sortie de caoutchouc
d’Indochine’, 13 February 1937.
147 ANOM, 28/PA/1, Dossier 72, no. 334/S/AP, Brévié memo, ‘Grève des
ateliers de Truong-Thi (Vinh)’, 19 August 1937; no. 3105/AG, Sûreté
Générale, to Direction des affaires Politiques, Dalat, 13 July 1937: ‘Grève
à l’atelier des chemins de fer de Truong Thi (province de Nghê-An)’. The
strikes are explored in Del Testa’s Paint the Trains Red, chapter 6.
148 ANOM, 28/PA/1, Dossier 72, Dossier 74, Sûreté Générale memo, ‘Acte de
sabotage commis par les grèvistes pendant la grève des chemins de fer du
juillet et août 1937’.
149 ANOM, Moutet papers, PA28/4/Dossier Varenne, sous-dossier 72, no.
334/S, Brévié to Moutet, 18 August 1937.
150 Ibid., sous-dossier 71, no. 1756/SG, Brévié to Ministry of Colonies,
23 April 1937.
151 Ibid., sous-dossier 71, no. 1638, Brévié to Direction des affaires poli-
tiques, 28 May 1937.
152 ANOM, Moutet papers, PA28/2/D16, no. 682/2/SRM, SR Troupes
d’Indochine, bulletin de renseignements no. 33, 31 July 1937.
153 TNA, FO 371/20695, C4680/240/17, Consul Hogg (Saigon) to FO, 27 May
1937.
154 ANOM, Moutet papers, PA28/4/Dossier Varenne, sous-dossier 71, no
649/C, Cochin-China Governor Pages to Brévié, 14 May 1937.
155 Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 388–9; Khánh, Vietnamese Communism, 224–6;
Del Testa, Paint the Trains Red, chapter 6. La Lutte’s supporters helped cement
a working partnership in Saigon between Trotskyite ‘left-oppositionists’ and
the ICP, which the police crackdown destroyed.
156 ANOM, Moutet papers, 28/PA/1, no. 3600/IGT, Brévié to Direction des
affaires politiques, ‘Grèves et incidents de travail’, 26 November 1937.
The killing was not an isolated case; it followed a similar incident of over-
seer brutality at a nearby plantation in Quan Loi.
157 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2404, no. 1394, Inspection du Travail, Saigon,
Governor of Cochin-China Pages to Brévié, 14 September 1936.
158 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2404, Affaires politiques, ‘Manifestation de 65
coolies de la plantation de Quan Loi (Cochinchine) à la suite d’un suicide
par pendaison’, n.d., August 1936.
159 ANOM, FM/INDO/NF2404, no. 2443, Brévié to Moutet, ‘Suicide d’un
coolie tonkinois’, 7 November 1936.
160 ANOM FM/INDO/NF2366, Cambodia delegate, Henri Martinetti, ‘Note

confidentielle sur l’organisation du service de la Sûreté en Indochine’, no
date but circulated in December 1937.
7 s t uc k t o g e t h e r ? ru b b e r p roduc t ion , l a b ou r
r e g u l at ion a n d p o l ic ing in m a l aya
1 Lees, ‘Being British in Malaya’, 93–4.
2 A. J. Stockwell, ‘The White Man’s Burden and Brown Humanity:
Colonialism and Ethnicity in British Malaya’, Southeast Asian Journal of
Social Science, 10:1 (1982), 44–68, cited in Lees, ‘Being British in Malaya’,
96.
3 To illustrate that Malaya’s racial norms could be transgressed, Lynn Lees
cites the example of Hubert Berkeley, who, between 1886 and 1926 served,
first as a British police inspector, subsequently as a district officer in north-
ern Perak. He spoke fluent Malay and wore traditional dress. He was also an
enthusiastic supporter of local cultural events, at which he usually arrived
by elephant. Tellingly, Berkeley bequeathed money to several Malay chil-
dren that he had probably fathered. See Lees, ‘Being British in Malaya’,
77–8.
4 Ibid., 98; Harper, ‘Empire, Diaspora, and the Language of Globalism’,
142, 156.
5 Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political
Economy and Racial Ideology’, Sociological Forum, 1 (1986), 336–7, 341–50.
6 Rhodes House Library, Oxford, Mss. Ind. Ocn. s. 352, Sir Cecil Clementi
Malaya papers, box 29/file 1, Letter from I. Hall, Singapore, to Sir Cecil
Clementi [on leave], 12 March 1931.
7 Milner, The Invention of Colonial Malaya, 2–3, 282.
8 Ibid., 292.
9 For background, see Baker, ‘Economic Reorganization and the Slump in
South and Southeast Asia’, 325–49.
10 Triggered by wartime supply disruptions, shipping shortages, poor har-
vests and consequent rises in Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese rice prices,
the 1919–21 crisis spread across Southeast Asia. It was particularly acute in
territories reliant on imported rice such as Malaya: Kratoska, ‘The British
Empire and the Southeast Asian Rice Crisis of 1919–1921’, 115–46.
11 Lim Teck Ghee, Peasants and their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya,
1874–1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977); Havinden and
Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 366 n.58 and n.59.
12 Paul H. Kratoska, ‘Rice Cultivation and the Ethnic Division of Labor in
British Malaya’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24:2 (1982),
280–314.
13 Ooi Keat Gin, ‘For Want of Rice’, 8–23.
14 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 54–61.
15 Paul H. Kratoska, ‘“Ends That We Cannot Foresee”: Malay Reservations
in British Malaya’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 14:1 (1983), 149–68;
Kratoska, ‘The Peripatetic Peasant and Land Tenure in British Malaya’,
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 16:1 (1985), 27–32.
16 TNA, WO 32/5628, secret despatch, Governor, Straits Settlements, to

Secretary of State for Colonies, 18 October 1921.
17 TNA, WO 32/5628, Malayan Bureau of Political Intelligence, director’s
report for 1922.
18 Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 93–4, 138–9. Profits in Malaya’s rubber
industry fell sharply when the pre-First World War boom in prices – and
consequent speculative investment in land for planting – ended in late 1910.
But established estates continued to grow in size and in intensity of pro-
duction, fuelled by large increases in the numbers of Indian free labour-
ers, plus Chinese and Javanese estate workers. The FMS labour force rose
from 77,500 in 1909 to 188,000 in 1912. As we saw in the preceding chap-
ter, there was no comparable expansion in workforce numbers in southern
Vietnam until the mid-1920s.
19 Newbury, Patrons, Clients and Empire, 165.
20 Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 154–9. Most rubber companies that traded in
sterling registered profits in 1919, but they faced upward pressure on wages.
These were, in turn, driven by wartime increases in foodstuff prices, later
by a peacetime return to unrestricted tapping, which heightened demand
for labour.
21 Tin production from Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and Thailand fluc-
tuated between 59 and 65 per cent of the global total in the inter-war
years. Malaya’s tin mining was more capital intensive and technologic-
ally advanced, and tin production remained the largest commodity export
earner until the 1920s when it was gradually superseded by rubber, see
Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 52–3, 59.
22 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford
University Press, 2007), 243–4. Thankfully for Britain’s rubber producers
in Malaya, US automotive industry efforts in the 1920s to begin growing
rubber on their own plantations, purchased by Ford and Firestone Tyres in
Brazil and Liberia respectively, were largely a failure.
23 Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 61.
24 Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 162–3, 167–76.
25 Ibid., 176–80, 192–4.
26 Foster, Projections of Power, 53.
27 Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 205
28 Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire, 244–7.
29 Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 176–80, 192–4.
30 Leng, ‘The Colonial State and Business’, 251–4; but see also Huff, ‘Boom-
or-Bust Commodities and Industrialization’, 1074–1115. Huff’s central
argument is that Malaya’s exchange rate plus credit shortage in the depres-
sion were critical long-term impediments to industrialization.
31 Milner, The Invention of Colonial Malaya, 227.
32 Ibid., 227; Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 60. Malaya remained a net
labour importer throughout the inter-war years.
33 See, for example, TNA, CO 273/573/22, Straits Settlements and FMS
joint government handbook, ‘Malaya Rubber Statistics, 1930: Acreage,
Crops, Imports and Exports’, compiled by M. Rex, Acting Commissioner
of Lands, FMS, in November 1930.
34 TNA, CO 323/1151/6, Report by C. F. Strickland, I.C.S., ‘Report on

co-operation in Malaya’, 10 April 1929, pp. 394–5.
35 Ibid., p. 503.
36 TNA, CO 273/579/1, Annual report on the social and economic progress
of the people of the Straits Settlements, 1931, compiled by John Scott,
Colonial Secretary, Straits Settlements, 20 September 1932.
37 For a subtle, post-colonial reading of colonial recruitment of South Indian
labour, see Shanthini Pillai, Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions: Images
of the Indian Diaspora in Malaysia (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars,
2007), chapter 1: ‘The encounter between imperial control and its labour
force’.
38 For a succinct survey, see Lenore Manderson, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality and
Public Health in Early Twentieth-Century Malaya’, in Peter J. Rimmer and
Lisa M. Allen (eds.), The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes,
Plantation Workers (Singapore University Press, 1990), 193–213.
39 Manderson, Sickness and the State, 133–6. Manderson notes the difficulties
in assessing mortality rates: death returns were only required from estates
greater than 100 acres, a fraction of the total. Such returns often excluded
Chinese contract labour, and included only days in hospital, rather than
days of illness, thus under-estimating morbidity. Workers’ family members
rarely figured in the statistics.
40 Ibid., 130, 134–6, 149–51.
41 Ibid., 11.
42 Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 93–4. Heightened demand for labour drove
upward pressure on wages and complaints of ‘crimping’ or local recruiting
and ‘poaching’ of labour between estates. Elsewhere, planters worked together
to restrict workers’ movement between estates and so limit wage rises.
43 Colin Barlow and John Drabble, ‘Government and the Emerging Rubber
Industries in Indonesia and Malaya, 1900–1940’, in Anne Booth, W. J.
O’Malley and A. Weidemann (eds.), Indonesian Economic History in the Dutch
Colonial Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 187–209.
44 Alec Gordon, ‘Contract Labour in Rubber Plantations: Impact of
Smallholders in Colonial South-East Asia’, Economic and Political Weekly,
36:10 (2001), 847–59.
45 Established in 1911, the Malayan government Labour Department
assumed the functions of the Indian Immigration Department in the FMS
and Straits Settlements.
46 P. Ramasamy, ‘Labour Control and Labour Resistance in the Plantations
of Colonial Malaya’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19:3–4 (1992), 98–101;
Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 66–9. A semi-official agency close
to the Malayan federal government, the Indian Immigration Committee
(IIC) was established in 1907 to supervise importation of South Indian
labour. Until the depression, the IIC worked increasingly through kanganis
whose services were cheaper than dedicated recruitment agencies in India.
Kanganis also took a closer interest in the workers they recruited, many of
whom were directly indebted to them.
47 TNA, CO 717/130/9, Labour conditions in Malaya, 1938, enclosure no. 3
to FMS despatch no. 65, 24 March 1938: ‘Notes by Controller of Labour,
Malaya, on work and wages during the year 1937’. By 1937 comparatively
few kangani licences were being issued, and 3,726 Indians were recruited
by kanganis next to 38,506 assisted emigrants who migrated voluntarily.
The kangani system of labour recruitment all but ended in 1938 as recruit-
ment of free labour became the norm.
48 Amrith, ‘Tamil Diasporas’, 559. The system of kanganis was adopted in the
recruitment of emigrant labourers destined for Ceylon and Malaya.
49 TNA, CO 717/60/1, Labour conditions in Malaya, 1928, Controller of
Labour note, ‘Work and Wages’, 23 January 1928. Regarding the recruit-
ment of women and differences in the recruitment systems and wage rates
for Indian and Chinese labourers, see Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia,
71–4, 79–86.
50 TNA, CO 717/60/1, Controller of Labour note, ‘Work and Wages,’
23 January 1928.
51 Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 81.
52 TNA, CO 717/60/1, encl. 2 to Unfederated Malay States despatch 29 of
19 April 1928, State Engineer, Kedah, ‘Persons employed in industrial
undertakings under the control of government.’
53 TNA, CO 717/60/1, memo for Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies,
North Borneo, 5 April 1928.
54 TNA, CO 717/60/1, despatch no. 48, encl. 2: Note by the Director of Public
Works, FMS, ‘Persons employed in industrial undertakings under the con-
trol of government’, 28 September 1927.
55 TNA, CO 717/73/22, Report on the working of the [FMS] Labour
Department, 1929, p. 9.
56 For a long view: Colin Barlow, ‘Changes in the Economic Position of Workers
on Rubber Estates and Small Holdings in Peninsula Malaysia 1910–1985’,
in Rimmer and Allen (eds.), The Underside of Malaysian History.
Department, 1928, pp. 1–3; Unfederated Malay States despatch 104, encl.
1, 15 September 1929. Penang handled labourers destined for the FMS;
Port Swettenham was the disembarkation point for workers in Selangor,
Negri Sembilan, Pahang, Johor, Kelantan and the Straits Settlements.
Department, 1928, pp. 3–5.
Department, 1929, pp. 1–3.
60 Ibid., p. 3. An additional 28,917 non-recruited South Indian labourers and
their dependents also made the trip to Malaya in 1929 hoping to find work
on arrival.
Department, 1930, p. 3. In 1930 the Labour Department only licensed
eighteen kanganis to recruit in South India. 21,155 labourers were recruited
for the Federated and Unfederated Malay States in this way during 1930, a
fall of over 50 per cent on the previous year’s figure.
62 Ibid., p. 2.
63 TNA, CO 717/60/1, encl. 3 to Straits despatch 730 of 30 October 1928:
‘Attorney General, Singapore, Report of an ordinance to amend ordinance
no. 197 (Labour)’. The collective fine system was soon abandoned as too
harsh and replaced by a discretionary system of court fines.
Department, 1928, p. 9.
Department, 1929, p. 9. The 1929 figures for complaints by coolies regis-
tered 64 allegations of assaults by managers and 221 by clerks or kanganis.
None were taken up by labour controllers or the police.
Department, 1930, pp. 9–10. The 44 allegations of assaults against man-
agers and 133 against clerks or kanganis may have figured among the
151 cases brought before FMS magistrates by labourers, but this seems
unlikely as 134 of these cases were pay-related civil actions. I have not
found evidence of police investigation into assaults.
Department, 1928, pp. 38–41, appendices J and K; CO 717/73/22, Report
on the working of the [FMS] Labour Department, 1929, pp. 23–4, appen-
dix H. There were eighty-six fatal accidents on FMS estates in 1928, the
same year as the forty-three recorded suicides, among which tree felling,
rock falls, motor accidents and drowning (some of which may have con-
cealed additional suicides) were the most common causes of death.
68 TNA, CO 717/67/14, CO minute, 22 August 1929. Death rates among
labourers on rubber estates and in tin mines were sufficiently high to prompt
a Colonial Office investigation in 1929. Official death rates per thousand
workers in the FMS estates and mines during the preceding four years
were: 1925: 12.55; 1926: 15.62; 1927: 18.44; 1928: 15.71. Death rates were
significantly higher in the Unfederated Malay States, where record-keeping
was less comprehensive. Available figures for 1928 reveal rates of 23.31 in
Johor and 22.48 in Kedah. See Report by H. R. Joynt, Ag. Controller of
Labour, Unfederated Malay States, 1 August 1929.
Department, 1930, pp. 41–3, appendix H. There were another forty-five
recorded suicides on FMS estates in 1930: seventeen in Perak (five of them
women); fifteen in Selangor (five of them women); eleven in Negri Sembilan
(one woman); and two in Pahang (both male).
Department, 1928, pp. 38–9, appendix J. There were ten recorded suicides
on Perak estates, twenty-two in Selangor, eight in Negri Sembilan and
three in Pahang. Most died by hanging. Corresponding figures for 1929
were twenty recorded suicides in Perak (five of them women); twenty in
Selangor (again, five of them women); five in Negri Sembilan (all male). See
CO 717/73/22, Report on the working of the [FMS] Labour Department,
1929, pp. 23–4, appendix H.
71 TNA, CO 717/67/14, Report by H. R. Joynt, Ag. Controller of Labour,
Unfederated Malay States, 1 August 1929.
72 Shanthini Pillai, ‘Reclaiming Space on a Transforming Plantocratic
Chequerboard: Pierre Boulle’s Sacrilege in Malaya’, Journal of Colonialism
and Colonial History, 5:1 (2004).
73 TNA, CO 717/77/20, Malaya labour report, 1930, ‘Strikes and distur-

bances’, p. 10.
74 TNA, CO 273/569/12, Director of Labour, ‘Survey of labour conditions in
British Malaya, 1930’.
75 Manderson, Sickness and the State, 149–51.
76 Ibid., 153–4. In Kedah state, for instance, malaria rates increased in the early
1930s even though larger estates did maintain their anti-malarial spending.
77 TNA, CO 717/67/14, Malaya labour report, 1929, ‘Strikes and serious
disturbances’.
78 RGA papers, MS24863/34, Council minutes, 1932, RGA chairman,
George Maxwell, to Singapore high commissioner, 7 May 1932.
79 RGA papers, MS24863/32, Council minutes, 27 July 1931, item 11: Report
of committee consisting of British members of the British-Dutch Liaison
Committee.
80 RGA papers, MS24863/34, Report of the Netherlands Indies Committee,
25 April 1932.
81 TNA, CO 717/91/3, despatch 302, encl. 3: ‘Note by Controller of Labour,
Malaya, on work and wages during the year 1931’, 12 May 1932.
82 Ibid.
83 RGA papers, MS24863/36:, Council minutes, 5 December 1932, item
2: Appendix A: Eric MacFadyen, Acting Convenor, Malaya Committee,
‘RGA, Representation in Malaya’, Memorandum by the Malaya Committee,
22 November 1932.
84 RGA papers, MS24863/33, Planters’ Association of Malaya (PAM),
Circular to Secretaries and Agents of Rubber Companies from PAM
Acting Secretary H. S. Blacklin, Kuala Lumpur, 11 December 1931.
85 RGA papers, MS24863/34, Council minutes, 6 June 1932, item 10: Report
of Malaya Committee, 24 May 1932.
86 RGA papers, MS24863/34, Council minutes, 6 June 1932, recommenda-
tions of Labour Controller to RGA Malaya representative, 14 April 1932.
87 TNA, CO 717/99/8, CO minute, 23 May 1933.
88 TNA, CO 717/99/8, J. M. Barron note on work and wages during the year
1932, 6 March 1933.
89 TNA, CO 717/99/8, despatch 40, High Commissioner, Singapore, to
Cunliffe-Lister, 20 April 1933, encl. 1: ‘Work and Wages in Johor during
1932’; L2/125/51, A. Heywood-Waddington, Protector of Labour, Kedah,
memo, 15 February 1933; encl. 3, Deputy-Controller of Labour, Perlis,
‘Labour statistics for Perlis, 1932’. An Unfederated State, Johor’s economy
depended on rubber production. During 1932 male South Indian tappers
there earned daily wage rates of between twenty to forty-five cents per day;
female tappers, between twenty and thirty-six. Male field labourers earned
daily wage rates of twenty-five to forty cents and females a maximum of
thirty-two cents. Remuneration on many estates was by results. Most
Chinese labourers were employed on contract or otherwise paid by results,
averaging daily pay rates of up to seventy cents. The situation was similar
in other Unfederated States, although, as seen in the case of Perlis, wages
tended to be lower where no minimum wage agreements were reached with
employers.
90 TNA, CO 717/99/8, ‘Labour statistics for Perlis, 1932’; CO 717/104/2,

despatch 40, encl. 1, F. V. Duckworth, Controller of Labour, Johor, ‘Work
and wages in Johor during 1933’, 27 February 1934. The Malayan gov-
ernment calculated ‘subsistence level’ for Indian labourers at $7.20 per
month for an adult man and $6 for an adult woman.
91 TNA, CO 717/99/8, J. M. Barron note on work and wages during the year
1932 for Controller of Labour, 6 March 1933.
92 Ibid. In 1932 average commodity prices of articles shown in the monthly
Malayan trade returns declined by 17 per cent relative to 1931. But prices
for Rangoon no. 1 rice, the staple for South Indian labourers, remained
almost static averaging $6.31 a bag in 1932 as compared with $6.35 in 1931.
Not until 1933 did average prices of Rangoon rice traded in Singapore
fall significantly – by 18.5 per cent – as compared with 1932: TNA, CO
717/104/2, encl. 3 to FMS despatch no. 186 of 5 April 1934, Controller of
Labour note on work and wages, 1933.
93 As Lenore Manderson has shown, on some estates health conditions
deteriorated in the depression years as cutbacks in housing provision and
anti-malarial work, combined with falling real wages, to make life harder
for remaining labourers, see Sickness and the State, 153–64 passim.
94 TNA, CO 717/118/3, despatch no. 33, Johor Controller of Labour Duckworth,
‘Wages and cost of living in Johor during 1935’, 21 March 1936.
95 TNA, CO 717/99/8, despatch no. 277, High Commissioner, Singapore,
to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, 24 April 1933, including 1932 statistics for
FMS labour relations.
96 TNA, CO 717/112/11, despatch 71, High Commissioner for the Malay
States Colonial Office, 30 March 1935; Foster, Projections of Power, 134–5.
97 TNA, CO 717/112/11, Controller of Labour, Johor, ‘Work and wages in
Johor during 1934’, 14 February 1935.
98 TNA, CO 717/112/11, encl. 3, Controller of Labour, C. D. Ahearne, note
on work and wages during the year 1934, 30 March 1935.
99 TNA, CO 717/125/1, Unfederated Malay States despatch 17, encl. 2,
T. F. Carey, Protector of Labour, Kedah, ‘Memorandum: Kedah and
Perlis’, 19 January 1937.
100 TNA, CO 717/125/1, FMS despatch 73, encl. 3, 26 March 1937.
101 TNA, CO 273/556/18, Crown Agents to Under Secretary of State, Colonial
Office, 22 March 1929: ‘Conditions of service in the Straits Settlements
police force’. As we saw in regard to the Kreta Ayer shootings in March
1927, the Singapore force also contained Malay and Pashtun constables,
but no Chinese uniformed personnel. Numerous Chinese did assist the
CID in intelligence gathering.
102 TNA, CO 273/556/18, Crown Agents to Under Secretary of State, Colonial
Office, 22 March 1929: ‘Conditions of service in the Straits Settlements
police force’.
103 The more senior post of Inspector-General required Malayan govern-
ment approval and was, in 1923, filled by Godfrey Denham, previously
a member of the Indian government’s Intelligence Bureau and then SIS
station chief in Shanghai, see Jeffery, MI6, 256–7.
104 TNA, CO 273/579/1, no. 1599, Annual report on the social and economic
progress of the people of the Straits Settlements, 1931, pp. 77–80.
105 Liew Kai Khiun, ‘Labour Formation, Identity, and Resistance in HM
Dockyard, Singapore (1921–1971)’, International Review of Social History,
51 (2006), 418.
106 Ibid., 422–8, quote at 428.
107 TNA, CO 273/597/6, Singapore dockyard police, CO minute by
P. M. Renison, 21 March 1934.
108 Another wildcat strike occurred in September 1936 after seventy-one
coolie workers downed tools in sympathy with a strike by municipal sani-
tary workers: Liew Kai Khiun, ‘Labour Formation’, 432, n.65.
109 Rhodes House Library, Mss. Ind. Ocn. s. 352, Sir Cecil Clementi Hong
Kong papers, box 2/file 1, Clementi, Governor of Hong Kong, to Leo
Amery, 15 April 1926.
110 TNA, CO 273/534/16, Malayan bulletin of political intelligence no. 38,
April 1926, compiled by the Political Intelligence Bureau, Singapore,
10 May 1926.
111 TNA, CO 273/535/11, Malayan bulletin of political intelligence,
February–April 1927.
112 See, for instance, ibid.
113 TNA, CO 273/535/11, Malayan bulletin of political intelligence, June
1927, pp. 1–4.
114 TNA, CO 273/535/11, Malayan bulletin of political intelligence, July
1927, pp. 1–6.
115 TNA, CO 273/579/1, no. 1599, Annual report on the social and economic
progress of the people of the Straits Settlements, 1931, pp. 79–80. Offences
reported during 1931 numbered 7,486, a fall of 101 compared with 1930.
Arrests were made in 3,744 of the resulting cases from which 2,630 con-
victions were secured. There were 2,069 prisoners in the Colony’s five
prisons (Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Labuan and Christmas Island) at
the start of 1931. A further 21,518 prisoners were admitted during the
year as compared with 20,520 during 1930. 21,701 were discharged over
the same twelve-month period.
116 TNA, CO 273/616/8, ‘Review of communism in Malaya during 1934’,
Special Branch, Singapore, 31 December 1934. For details of concurrent
SIS activities in Shanghai, see Jeffery, MI6, 257–63.
117 TNA, CO 273/616/8, Straits Settlements Special Branch, ‘Report for the
year 1934’, p. 3.
118 TNA, CO 273/616/8, ‘Review of communism in Malaya during 1934,’
Special Branch, Singapore, 31 December 1934, p. 2. For contemporary
British colonial readings of the Java uprising in 1926–7, see CO 273/535/1,
Batavia consulate reports and commentary.
119 TNA, CO 273/616/8, ‘Review of communism in Malaya, 1935’, p. 2.
120 The decline in numbers of raids continued in 1936 during which twenty-
three raids were mounted: eight in Singapore, thirteen in Penang and
two in Malacca: TNA, CO 273/630/7, Straits Settlements police Special
Branch, ‘Report for the Year 1936’, 1 January 1937, pp. 1–2.
year 1935’, p. 3.
122 TNA, CO 273/630/7, Police Intelligence journal supplement no. 1,
‘Review of communist activities in Malaya, 1936’, 1 January 1937.
Year 1935’. Special Branch maintained five discrete sections at this point:
anti-communist section; Japanese section; security section; aliens section;
political section. Their work, inevitably, overlapped. Created in 1935, the
security section was largely concerned with protection and surveillance
of the naval base, while the aliens section returned to special branch con-
trol in that year, passport control and the apprehension of illegal aliens
having previously been the responsibility of the Singapore government
Immigration Department.
124 TNA, CO 717/137/1, Unfederated Malay States despatch 33 of 25 March
1939: C. W. Shorland, protector of labour, Kedah, ‘Memorandum:
Kedah’.
125 TNA, CO 717/137/1, FMS despatch 74, encl. 3, Director of Labour,
‘Labour and industrial conditions in the Federated Malay States during
1938’, 30 March 1939.
126 TNA, CO 273/662/10, Deputy of the Officer Administering the
Government to Lord Lloyd, 21 May 1940, translation of Chinese govern-
ment Overseas Department instruction, ‘The treacherous activities of the
X [Chinese Communist] Party and the measures to counteract them’.
127 TNA, CO 273/662/11, Director Straits Settlements Special Branch,
‘Malaya combined intelligence summary no. 7: policy of the Malayan
Communist Party’, 1 August–30 September 1940.
128 TNA, CO 273/662/10, Sir Shenton Thomas to Malcolm MacDonald,
29 December 1939.
129 TNA, CO 273/662/10, Governor’s minute, ‘Labour and Increasing
Prices’, 3 November 1939.
130 Ibid.
8 c a ning t h e wor k e r s ? p o l ic ing a n d v iol e nc e

in j a m a ic a’ s s ug a r in du s t ry
1 University of Glasgow special collections archive, Jamaica Sugar Estate
Ltd archive, file 94, 1934–5, J. A. Cuthill, General Manager, Golden
Grove estate, to J. Wylie, Guild and Ballantine, Glasgow, 22 February
1934.
2 Caswell L. Johnson, ‘The Emergence of Political Unionism in Economies
of British Colonial Origin: The Cases of Jamaica and Trinidad’, American
Journal of Economics and Sociology, 39:2 (1980), 151–64.
3 Historical trends are capably analysed in the introductions to the relevant
volumes in the British Documents on the End of Empire series: Stephen R.
Ashton and Sarah E. Stockwell (eds.), Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice,
1925–1945, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1996) and Stephen R. Ashton and
David Killingray (eds.), The West Indies (London: HMSO, 1999).
4 The Morant Bay rebellion centred in Jamaica’s eastern third. Prominent

planters were attacked on 11 October 1865 in response to which martial
law was declared. Government retribution was swift. Troops, white mil-
itiamen and Maroon auxiliaries lynched and killed indiscriminately, leav-
ing almost 500 dead. A further 600 were publicly flogged and over 1,000
homes were destroyed. According to Gad Heuman, the form and scale of
this repression amounted to a policy of state terror designed to stifle black
political expression: Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion
in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1994), 143; O. Nigel Bolland, The Politics
of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and
Democracy in the Labour Movement (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), 85–6.
5 For the police’s early history: Howard Johnson, ‘Patterns of Policing in
the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean, 1835–95’, in Anderson and
Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire, 71–91.
6 Governor Eyre statement to Jamaica Legislative Council, 7 November
1865, reported in The Times, 29 November 1865, p. 9, column C, ‘The
Insurrection in Jamaica’. Aline Helg argues that use of white vigilante
forces alongside police plus the manipulation of criminal law to legitim-
ize collective punishment linked the 1865 repression and 1912 massacres
of black supporters of Cuba’s Partido Independiente de Color, see Helg,
‘Race and Black Mobilization in Colonial and Early Independent Cuba: A
Comparative Perspective’, Ethnohistory, 44:1 (1997), 63–4.
7 Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power, especially chapters 1–2, 4–5.
8 Rhodes House Library, Mss. W. Ind. r. 9: Colonel Clive A. Crosbie-Smith,
‘The Jamaica Constabulary Force, 1867–1938’, p. 1.
9 Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led Nor Driven: Contesting
British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston: University of
West Indies Press, 2004), 6.
10 Regarding legal powers and post-emancipation repression, see Michael
Craton, ‘Continuity not Change: The Incidence of Unrest among Ex-Slaves
in the British West Indies, 1838–1876’, Slavery and Abolition, 7:1 (1988),
144–70.
11 Moore and Johnson, Neither Led Nor Driven, 15–16, 27–8, 155–6, 314.
13 Craton, ‘Continuity not Change’, 163. Two exceptions to this social discip-
line were disorders in Kingston in 1912, which compelled Governor Sydney
Olivier to flee an angry crowd, and mob attacks on Chinese shopkeepers in
the capital during 1918.
14 For pros and cons of these approaches, see William Beinart, ‘Political
and Collective Violence in Southern African Historiography’, Journal of
Southern African Studies, 18:3 (1992), 455–7.
15 Killingray, ‘The Maintenance of Law and Order’, 434–5.
16 Kabwegyere, “The Dynamics of Colonial Violence’, 303–5. The converse
of this argument is that indigenous colonial violence against Europeans was
relatively infrequent, particularly in black Africa, see Robert A. DeVine,
‘Anti-European Violence in Africa: A Comparative Analysis’, Journal of
Conflict Resolution, 3:4 (1959), 420–9.
17 TNA, CO 323/771B, Civil Disturbances: Organization, Committee depo-

sitions, 1915 et seq.
18 TNA, CO 111/594/24611, Governor Sir Walter Egerton’s despatch 210 to
Colonial Office, 12 June 1914.
19 TNA, CO 111/594/26509, despatch 243, 29 June 1914, memo by G. C. De
Rinzy, Inspector-general of Police: extra police protection for sugar estates;
CO Minutes, 27 and 29 July 1914.
20 Howard Johnson, ‘The Anti-Chinese Riots of 1918 in Jamaica’, Immigrants
and Minorities, 2:1 (1983), 50–63.
21 John Starling and Ivor Lee, No Labour, No Battle: Military Labour During the
First World War (Stroud: Spellmount, 2009), 242–3; Michael S. Healy, ‘Colour,
Climate, and Combat: The Caribbean Regiment in the Second World War’,
International History Review, 22:1 (2000), 71–2; Richard Smith, Jamaican
Volunteers in the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2004).
22 Cedric L. Joseph, ‘The British West Indies Regiment, 1914–1918’, Journal
of Caribbean History, 3 (May 1971), 94–124; W. F. Elkins, ‘A Source of
Black Nationalism in the Caribbean: The Revolt of the B.W.I.R. at
Taranto, Italy’, Science and Society 33:2 (1970), 99–103; Richard Smith,
‘West Indians at War’, Caribbean Studies, 36:1 (2008), 224–31. See also
TNA, CO 295/521, CO reports on Trinidad disturbances, British West
Indies Regiment, 1919.
23 Glenford Howe, Race, War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians
in the First World War (Oxford: Ian Randle, 2002), 165, also cited in Starling
and Lee, No Labour, No Battle, 245.
24 TNA, CO 137/742/9, Reports on police strike and maintenance of public
order 16 August–September 1920.
25 TNA, CO 323/771B, ‘Report of the committee appointed to prepare
a scheme for dealing with disturbances and to draft instructions to the
Officers engaged’, n.d., 1920.
26 TNA, CO 137/737/79, Governor of Jamaica’s proposal for establishment of
a mounted police detachment in Kingston, 1920.
27 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, 12–13.
28 Bolland, The Politics of Labour, 71–5.
29 Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 6.
30 Heuman, The Killing Time; Craton, ‘Continuity not Change’, 144–70;
Mary Turner, ‘The 11 O’Clock Flog: Women, Work and Labour Law in
the British Caribbean’, Slavery & Abolition, 20:1 (1999), 38–58; Johnson,
‘Patterns of Policing’, 71–83.
31 Bolland, The Politics of Labour, 4, 11–15.
32 St Pierre, ‘The 1938 Jamaican Disturbances’, 171–96; for longer-term
background, see Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour and
Politics in Jamaica and Britain (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1991).
33 Bolland, The Politics of Labour, 19–20, quote at 20.
34 ‘News in brief’, The Times, 20 September 1926, p. 13.
35 Regarding continued use of flogging and other forms of corporal pun-
ishment in the colonial military, see Killingray, ‘The “Rod of Empire”’,
201–16.
36 TNA, CO 884/24, ‘Report by Alexander Paterson, HM Commissioner for

Prisons, of a visit to the Reformatory and Penal Establishments of Jamaica,
British Honduras, Bahamas, Leeward & Windward Islands, Barbados,
Trinidad & Tobago, British Guiana, in the five months of sunshine between
20th December 1936 and 10th May 1937’, 25 May 1937, p. 7.
37 TNA, CO 884/24, ibid., ‘Public opinion on the subject’, pp. 3–5, quota-
tion at p. 3. Paterson calculated the gross annual cost at 1937 values of a
prisoner in the British West Indies at between £36 and £84, the difference
arising mainly from variation in staff salaries. He also lamented the high
proportion of prisoners throughout the British Caribbean, in some islands
over 50 per cent, who were jailed for failure to pay a magistrate’s fine rather
than for more serious offences.
38 TNA, CO 884/24, ibid., pp. 24–7. Paterson commended prison gover-
nors for approving flogging ‘sparingly’, noting that in several islands no
whippings had taken place in 1936.
39 TNA, CO 137/781/13, CO Minute, C. Darnley, 8 September 1926: com-
ments on The Gleaner coverage of the prison floggings.
40 Kent, Aftershocks, 66–7, 71–2. The six youths were strapped to a triangu-
lar whipping post erected in the lane where Sherwood was attacked, also
the location where Dyer’s ‘crawling order’ was implemented. They each
received thirty lashes. Eye witness accounts reported that the boys passed
out after the first four or five strokes.
41 In 1925, the previous ‘normal’ year, five floggings took place in Jamaica’s
prisons: TNA, CO 137/781/13, Leo Amery response to parliamentary
question, 19 November 1926.
42 TNA, CO 137/781/13, ‘Jamaican Prison Riot: Convicts Killed’, The Times
report, 6 September 1926.
43 TNA, CO 137/781/13, Report by Owen F. Wright, Inspector I/C Kingston
Inspector-general of Police, East Queen St, Kingston, 4 September 1926.
44 TNA, CO 137/781/13, CO minutes, 7 September 1926.
45 TNA, CO 137/781/13, CO minutes, 3, 7 and 10 December 1926.
46 TNA, CO 137/781/13, Riot at Kingston Prison, July 1926, Commission
report, Administration of Prisons in Jamaica, 1926, pp. 1–3.
47 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
48 Ibid., pp. 7–11.
49 TNA, CO 137/781/13, CO minute by C. Darnley, 10 December 1926.
Prisoners confined under preventive detention were to have their cases
reviewed once they completed a five-year sentence, the onus being on the
prison authorities to justify further detention beyond that point.
50 See H. A. Will, ‘Problems of Constitutional Reform in Jamaica, Mauritius
and Trinidad, 1880–1895’, English Historical Review, 81:321 (1966),
706–16; Will, ‘Colonial Policy and Economic Development in the British
West Indies, 1895–1903’, Economic History Review, 23:1 (1970), 129–47;
James Patterson Smith, ‘Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and
the “Civilizing Mission” in the Sugar Colonies, 1868–1874’, Albion, 27:2
(1995), 255–9.
51 Moore and Johnson, Neither Led Nor Driven, 1–13.
52 Bolland, The Politics of Labour, 54–7.
53 Jamaica Sugar Estate Ltd archive, Draft Board letter to Treasury Trade
Facilities Act advisory committee, n.d., June 1934.
54 Rebecca J. Scott, ‘Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of
Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation’, American Historical
Review, 99:1 (1994), 83–7.
55 Rick Halpern, ‘Solving the “Labour Problem”: Race, Work and the State
in the Sugar Industries of Louisiana and Natal, 1870–1910’, Journal of
Southern African Studies, 30:1 (2004), 19.
56 Jamaica’s sugar producers had pressed for the introduction of imperial pro-
tectionism to give them preferential access to the British and Canadian
markets, see Jamaica Sugar Estate Ltd archive, Jamaica notebook 91,
AGM minutes, 24 March 1931. Despite Canada’s importance as a reserved
market for Jamaican sugar, it was in the Dominican Republic that the
British Columbia Sugar Company eventually purchased a Caribbean
plantation during the Second World War, see Catherine C. Legrand,
‘Informal Resistance on a Dominican Sugar Plantation during the Trujillo
Dictatorship’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 75:4 (1995), 561–5.
Interestingly, while President Roosevelt’s administration railed against
imperial preference in the early 1930s, federal protection for Florida’s
nascent sugar industry was made available, see John A. Heitmann, ‘The
Beginnings of Big Sugar in Florida, 1920–1945’, Florida Historical Quarterly,
77:1 (1998), 50–7.
57 Jamaica Sugar Estate Ltd archive, file 94, 1934–5, J. B. Cuthill to Wylie
Guild and Ballantine, 17 October 1935; R. Jarrett to J. B. Cuthill, 11
November 1935; file 95, 1936–40, Jamaica Sugar Producers memo, ‘Empire
sugar production’, 16 September 1935.
58 Jamaica Sugar Estate Ltd archive, file 95, 1936–40, Gerard C. Lawson,
company letter to Colonial Office, 14 January 1936.
59 Jamaica Sugar Estate Ltd archive, file 94, R. Jarrett letter to Sir Frederick
MacLeod, 5 May 1934; report on Golden Grove financing, 12 June 1935.
The Company’s flagship Golden Grove estate, was, for instance, leased
over twenty years from the United Fruit Company in 1924 at an annual
rental charge of £3,500 with the option to buy the estate land at £50,000.
60 TNA, CO 111/686/17, Officer Administering the Government, British
Guiana, to Lord Passfield/CO, 26 February 1930.
61 The Jamaica Sugar Estate’s manager wrote in the following terms about
the connection between falling revenues and cutting wage costs in 1933:
‘There is now surplus labour available, which enables us to reduce rates for
most work. Permanent labour is now more assured, as the difficulty of find-
ing work elsewhere has discouraged the native and made him more settled.’
See Jamaica Sugar Estate Ltd archive, R. Jarrett report to Sugar Estates
Ltd Directors, 1933.
62 Avi Chomsky, ‘Afro-Jamaican Traditions and Labor Organizing on United
Fruit Company Plantations in Costa Rica, 1910’, Journal of Social History,
28:4 (1995), 837–55; Barry Carr, ‘Identity, Class, and Nation: Black
Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency,
1925–1934’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 78:1 (1998), 83–116; see
also Marc Macleod, ‘Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers

in Cuba, 1912–1939’, Journal of Social History, 31:3 (1998), 599–623.
63 TNA, CO 318/432/5, Governor Denham report on House of Lords debates
on Jamaican labour conditions, 11 April 1938. Lord Olivier was Governor
between 1907 and 1913.
64 Bolland, The Politics of Labour, chapter four.
65 TNA, CO 111/752/4, British Guiana labour disturbances, extract from
memo by Colonel C. P. Widdup, Commissioner of Police, British Guiana,
21 October 1938. The Commissioner recorded ‘a large number of police
prosecutions for assault and intimidation’ during the Ethiopian War over
the winter of 1935–6.
66 Jason C. Parker, Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the
British Caribbean, 1937–1962 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
18–19; for similar outrage among African-Americans about the Ethiopian
War, see Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and
Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997),
11–17 passim.
67 TNA, CO 111/752/4, ‘Notice of Strikes’, by Acting Colonial Secretary,
W. Bain Gray, 28 June 1938; British Guiana labour disturbances, extract
from memo by Colonel C. P. Widdup, Commissioner of Police, British
Guiana, 21 October 1938.
68 TNA, CO 111/752/4, Governor Jackson, British Guiana, to Colonial
Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, 3 November 1938.
69 TNA, CO 111/752/4, Memo from the Commissioner of Labour and
Local Government, M. B. Laing, to Colonial Secretary, 13 October 1938.
Subject: ‘Stoppages of Work – January–September, 1938’.
70 TNA, CO 111/752/4, Minute by Commissioner of Labour and Local
Government, 19 October 1938. The Commissioner made this telling
observation: ‘The position of the worker on sugar estates in this Colony
is peculiar. He is provided with a free house and medical facilities and on
most estates he is given plots of land and facilities for grazing his cattle. The
disadvantages of the resident estate worker are that he lives under circum-
stances attaching to the regime of the indentured immigrant and does not
possess the sense of independence enjoyed by the casual worker who lives
in the neighbouring village.’
71 TNA, CO 111/752/4, Governor Jackson, British Guiana, to Colonial
Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, 3 November 1938.
72 Bolland, On the March, 132, 137; see also Bolland, The Politics of Labour,
299–333. Foremost among Jamaica’s early unions, the Jamaica Trades and
Labour Union (JTLU) exploited the post-war legislation to build a larger
membership base. Influenced by Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of black self-
reliance, the JTLU was unable to sway government labour policy in the
depression. Born in St Ann’s Bay in 1887, Garvey combined his interest
in Jamaican and US trade union politics with his work as founder of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Deported from the
United States in December 1927, on his return to Jamaica, Garvey focused
less on the JTLU than on consolidating support for the UNIA and the
People’s Political Party founded in September 1929.
73 TNA, CO 137/826/9, ‘Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into

the disturbances which occurred in Jamaica between the 23rd May and the
8th June 1938’, 15 November 1938.
74 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Governor Edward Denham to William Ormsby-
Gore, 25 January 1938.
75 Bolland, On the March, 143–5; and Bolland, The Politics of Labour, 312–
14. The West Indies Sugar Company was incorporated on 22 May 1937.
It also ran the Bluecastle, Friendship, Shrewsbury, Masemure and Mint
estates in Westmoreland, the Prospect estate in Hanover and Monymusk in
Clarendon. The company’s modernization programme totalled £500,000
in investment, a huge amount by Jamaican standards that focused govern-
ment, press and public attention on its estates.
76 TNA, CO 137/826/9, Commission findings on Frome estate police reports,
15 November 1938.
77 Bolland, On the March, 133. According to Bolland, 231,000 of Jamaica’s
404,000 wage labourers (in a total population of approximately 1.2 mil-
lion) were ‘wholly dependent’ on the money they earned day to day.
Banana growing employed more than twice as many as the sugar indus-
try (approximately 100,000 versus 41,000 in 1938) with road building
and dockyards also major sources of work. In many cases wage rates had
advanced little since 1918 but it was the heightened insecurity of agri-
cultural labour provoked by the depression that made matters harder to
bear. The sugar industry also suffered disproportionately because of the
lengthy intervals between cane-cutting during which demand for estate
workers diminished.
78 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Governor Denham tel. 69 to William Ormsby-Gore,
2 May 1938. Police estimated that between four and five hundred labourers
joined the 30 April strike action.
79 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Inspector O’Donoghue report to Inspector-general
Wright, 3 May 1938.
80 Ibid. An added complication was that O’Donoghue’s superior was long-
serving Inspector-General of Police, Owen Wright, who had mishandled
the 1926 prison riots so badly. Wright was criticized by the Colonial Office
inquiry commission subsequently appointed to investigate Jamaica’s labour
rebellions in 1938–9. He was further criticized in 1944 when Jamaica’s
police administration was reviewed. See TNA, CO 137/856/2, T. I. K.
Lloyd, Colonial Office, to Sir John Huggins, KCMG, ‘Report on adequacy
of [Jamaica] police force’, 22 July 1944.
81 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Inspector Higgins report to Inspector-General Wright,
3 May 1938.
82 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Reports by Inspectors O’Donoghue and Higgins to
Wright, 3 May 1938.
83 TNA, CO 137/827/3, O’Donoghue Report to Wright, 3 May 1938.
84 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Inspector-General Wright summary report to
Ormsby-Gore, 5 May 1938.
85 ‘The Jamaica Riots.: Police stoned before firing’, The Times, 5 May 1938,
p. 15.
86 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Higgins report to Wright, 3 May 1938.

87 Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State
Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2009), 80–1.
88 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Wright summary report to Ormsby-Gore, 5 May
1938.
89 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Higgins report to Wright, 3 May 1938; Wright
summary report to William Ormsby-Gore, 5 May 1938.
90 The previously cited reports filed by the two inspectors on 3 May were
consistent with one another in almost every detail.
91 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Wright summary report to William Ormsby-Gore,
5 May 1938.
92 Crosbie-Smith, ‘The Jamaica Constabulary Force’, 31; Bolland, On the
March, 135–7.
93 TNA, CO 137/827/3, no. 296, Governor Denham letter to Lord Harlech,
10 May 1938.
94 Gillian McGillivray, ‘Revolution in the Cuban Countryside: The Blazing
Cane of Las Villas, 1895–1898’, Cuban Studies, 58 (2007), 51, 61–4.
95 House of Lords, Parliamentary Debates, 2 June 1938, vol. 109:70, col-
umns 877–88.
96 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Sir Leonard Lyle letter to Lord Olivier, 7 May 1938;
Olivier reply to Lyle, 9 May 1938.
97 Jeremy Seekings, ‘“Pa’s Pension”: The Origins of Non-contributory
Old-age Pensions in Late Colonial Barbados’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 35:4 (2007), 538; Richard Harris, ‘From Miser
to Spendthrift: Public Housing and the Vulnerability of Colonialism in
Barbados’, Journal of Urban History, 33:3 (2007), 443–9; House of Lords,
Parliamentary Debates, 2 June 1938, vol. 109:70, columns 877–8.
98 TNA, CO 137/827/3, tel. 90, Governor Denham to Colonial Office,
23 May 1938.
99 Bolland, On the March, 132, 137. The Jamaican Workers’ and
Tradesmen’s Union (JWTU) was registered in 1937. It was led by Allan
G. S. Coombs and Hugh Clifford Buchanan, a Marxist trade union-
ist. In November 1937 Coombs began organizing hunger marches in
conjunction with the ex-British West Indies Regiment Association and
the Masons’ Cooperative Union. These were intended to extract con-
cessions from Denham’s government. See George E. Eaton, Alexander
Bustamante and Modern Jamaica (Kingston: FEP International, 1975);
Richard Hart, Towards Decolonisation: Political, Labour and Economic
Developments in Jamaica, 1938–1945 (Kingston: University of the West
Indies Press, 1999); TNA, CO 137/820/13, Police reports on distur-
bances involving ex-British West Indies regiment soldiers, 14 August
1937.
100 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Governor’s tel. to Secretary of State for Colonies,
31 May 1938; tel. 106, Colonial Secretary of Jamaica to Secretary of State
for Colonies, 1 June 1938; tel. 123, OAG Jamaica to Secretary of State for
Colonies, 5 June 1938.
101 Regarding the early official moves towards a development agenda, see
Howard Johnson, ‘The West Indies and the Conversion of the British
Official Classes to the Development Idea’, Journal of Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics, 15:1 (1977), 55–83. For Caribbean-wide compari-
son, see Harris, ‘Making Leeway in the Leewards, 1929–51’, 393–418.
102 TNA, CO 137/826/9, Jamaica Royal Commission report, 15 November
1938, p. 3.
103 Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion and its
Aftermath (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 284, also cited in Bolland,
On the March, 154; Ken Post, ‘The Politics of Protest in Jamaica, 1938:
Some Problems of Analysis and Conceptualization’, Social and Economic
Studies, 18:4 (1969), 374–90.
104 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Ormsby-Gore memo, ‘Proposed Royal Commission
to look into the situation in the West Indies’, n.d., June 1938. See also
Abigail B. Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of
Rebellion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).
105 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Office of the Board of Conciliation, Kingston, to
Officer Administering the Government, C. C. Woolley, 25 June 1938.
106 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Corrigendum to Colonial Office memo, ‘Local
Commissions, Jamaica 1938’, n.d., May 1938.
107 Bolland, On the March, 152–3.
108 Ibid., 148–9. A total of 235 soldiers of the Sherwood Foresters were called
in to assist the 400 police already deployed in anti-protest measures by 28
May 1938. Some 400 ‘Specials’ were initially recruited, but within weeks
their number increased to close on 5,000.
109 Ibid., 150–3. As Nigel Bolland has shown, employers called on Special
Constables to ‘clear out’ strikers, making way for cheaper, strike-breaking
labour.
110 Ibid., 154.
111 Ibid., 153–5.
112 TNA, CO 137/827/3, Ormsby-Gore memo, ‘Proposed Royal Commission’,
pp. 1–2.
113 Ibid., pp. 7, 10.
114 Basdeo, ‘Walter Citrine and the British Caribbean Workers Movement’,
43–59; Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the
End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 96–106.
115 Bolland, On the March, 159–61, quote at 161.
116 Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, 2.
117 Ibid., 14.
118 Again, there is a regional parallel with the racial divides and socio-
economic structures of late colonial Cuba, see Rebecca J. Scott, ‘Race,
Labor, and Citizenship in Cuba: A View from the Sugar District of
Ceinfuegos, 1886–1909’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 78:4 (1998),
688–9, 694–9.
119 TNA, CO 318/435/2, Harold Moody letter to Malcolm MacDonald, 26 May
1938; ‘Record of meeting at the Colonial Office between Sir Henry Moore
(CO) and a deputation led by Dr Harold Moody, President of the League of
Coloured Peoples’, 26 May 1938.
120 TNA, CO 137/827/1, Marcus Garvey letter to Malcolm MacDonald,

26 May 1938.
121 TNA, CO 137/839/10, Governor’s draft proposals for social and economic
reconstruction in Jamaica, November 1939, pp. 1–2.
9 oi l a n d or d e r : r e p r e ssi v e v io l e nc e in
t r ini da d ’ s oi l fi e l d s
1 TNA, CO 295/599/13, naval cypher A, 560, Governor of Trinidad tel. to
Colonial Office, relayed by Admiralty to C. in C. America and West Indies,
20 June 1937.
2 TNA, CO 295/599/13, unnumbered tel., Governor of Trinidad to Colonial
Office, 28 June 1937.
3 TNA, CO 295/600/13, William Ormsby-Gore memo to Sir Henry Moore,
‘Matters arising out of the riots’, 17 December 1937.
4 Rhodes House Library, Mss. W. Ind. r. 7, Howard Nankivell papers,
‘Debates in the Legislative Council of Trinidad and Tobago, minutes,
Friday, 9th July 1937’, p. 249.
5 TNA, CO 295/600/13, joint petition to Ormsby-Gore, 22 December 1937.
The letter in question was signed by seventeen members of the island’s
Chamber of Commerce, the Petroleum Association of Trinidad and an
equivalent group representing the sugar industry.
6 Ibid., pp. 2–4.
7 TNA, CO 295/600/6, tel. 252. Secretary of State for Colonies to Governor of
Trinidad, 20 October 1937; CO 295/600/13, CO minutes for Sir C. Parkinson
and Sir H. Moore, December 1937.
8 ‘West Indies Royal Commission’, minute by Sir John Campbell, Colonial
Office Economic Adviser, 23 May 1938, in A. N. Porter and A. J. Stockwell
(eds.), British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, 1938–64, vol. I: 1938–51
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), doc. 2.
9 Colonial Office officials acknowledged the problem of crippling interest
charges on investment capital for development raised through loans floated
on the London stock market, see Will, ‘Colonial Policy and Economic
Development’, 140–1.
10 ‘West Indies Royal Commission’, minute by Sir John Campbell, point V.
11 Eric Williams, ‘From Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister’,
Callaloo, 20:4 (1997), 705–8. Williams, a path-breaking historian of
Caribbean slavery and Trinidad’s first prime minister after independence,
stressed that, far from contributing to a general rise in prosperity, the oil
industry’s first spate of growth before the depression of the 1930s widened
the gap between haves and have-nots.
12 Brinsley Samaroo, ‘The Trinidad Workingmen’s Association and the
Origins of Popular Protest in a Crown Colony’, Social and Economic Studies,
21:2 (1972), 211; also cited in Susan Campbell, ‘Carnival, Calypso, and
Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad’, History Workshop, 26
(Winter 1988), 21.
13 W. F. Elkins, ‘Black Power in the British West Indies: The Trinidad
Longshoremen’s Strike of 1919’, Science and Society, 33:1 (1969), 71–5.
14 Tony Martin, ‘Revolutionary Upheaval in Trinidad, 1919: Views from British

and American Sources’, Journal of Negro History, 58:3 (1973), 313–26.
15 Ibid., 318–19; for similar regional ‘moral panics’, harsher racial stereo-
typing and resultant white violence, see Aline Helg, ‘Black Men, Racial
Stereotyping, and Violence in the U.S. South and Cuba at the turn of
the Century’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42:3 (2000),
576–604.
16 Kelvin Singh, Race and Class Struggles in a Colonial State: Trinidad 1917–1945
(University of Calgary Press, 1994), 14–40; Campbell, ‘Carnival, Calypso,
and Class Struggle’, 21.
17 Martin, ‘Revolutionary Upheaval’, 319–20. It bears emphasis that
Trinidad’s indentured labourers, a predominantly male workforce of
mostly East Indian origin, were neither supine nor apolitical. Labourers of
both sexes were adept at resisting excessive employer demands on their own
terms, see Kusha Haraksingh, ‘Control and Resistance among Overseas
Indian Workers: A Study of Labour on the Sugar Plantations of Trinidad,
1875–1917’, Journal of Caribbean History, 14:1 (1981), 1–17; Rhoda Reddock,
‘Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and
Tobago, 1845–1917’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20:43 (October 1985),
79–87. In this connection, Indian women’s use of marriage to enhance
their geographic and social mobility is discussed in Shaheeda Hosein,
‘“Until Death Do Us Part”? Marriage, Divorce and the Indian Woman in
Trinidad’, Oral History, 30:1 (2002), 63–72.
18 Campbell, ‘Carnival, Calypso, and Class Struggle’, 3–8. Importation of
Indian indentured labourers began in 1845, seven years after slave emanci-
pation was reluctantly enacted in Trinidad.
19 Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 229–34.
20 Bonham C. Richardson, ‘Livelihood in Rural Trinidad in 1900’, Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, 65:2 (1975), 240–1. The 1911
census recorded the presence of 110,911 Indians in Trinidad (excluding
Tobago).
21 Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 263.
22 There are similarities here with the expanding population of Indian inden-
tured labourers in South Africa’s sugar industry where estate conditions
were especially punishing in the early 1900s, see Halpern, ‘Solving the
“Labour Problem”’, 24–7, 32–5.
23 Rhodes House Library, Mss. W. Ind. r. 7, Nankivell papers, ‘Debates in
the Legislative Council of Trinidad and Tobago, minutes, Friday, 9th July
1937’, p. 253. A 1935 medical survey conducted by the island’s medical
service found evidence of malnutrition and vitamin deficiency among every
hospitalized Indian aged over twenty.
24 TNA, CO 295/599/9, ‘Report by Alexander Paterson, H.M. Commissioner
for Prisons, of a visit to the Reformatory and Penal Establishments of
Jamaica, British Honduras, Bahamas, Leeward & Windward Islands,
Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, British Guiana, in the five months of
sunshine between 20th December 1936 and 10th May 1937’, 25 May
1937, pp. 1–2. Despite his fears, or perhaps because of them, Paterson
wanted to concentrate the training of British West Indies prison officers
at Carrera prison, located on a penal island in the Gulf of Paria just off
the Trinidad coast, see CO 295/599/9, Paterson, ‘Report on treatment of
the offender in Trinidad’, enclosure in Trinidad despatch 239, 10 May
1937.
25 TNA, CO 111/594/24611, Sir Walter Egerton’s despatch 210 to Colonial
Office, 12 June 1914; CO 111/594/26509, Governor’s despatch 243, 29
June 1914, memo of case in which extra police protection was supplied to a
sugar estate, Colonel G. C. De Rinzy, Inspector-general of Police.
26 TNA, CO 111/594/26509, CO minutes, 27 and 29 July 1914.
27 Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 145. For similar patterns of protest in other
Caribbean islands with no British presence, see Scott, ‘Race, Labor, and
Citizenship in Cuba’, 687–728; Carr, ‘Identity, Class, and Nation’, 83–116;
MacGillivray, Blazing Cane, 226–7.
28 TNA, CO 295/599/14, West India Committee letters to Colonial Office,
July 1937. On the ethnic segmentation of Trinidad’s industrial labour force,
see Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘The War in Ethiopia and Trinidad 1935–1936’,
in Bridget Brereton and Kevin A. Yelvington (eds.), The Colonial Caribbean
in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Cultural and Social History
(Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1999), 191–2.
29 Varying proportions of Trinidad’s police constables came from Barbados.
It was common practice in the British Caribbean and elsewhere to select
foreign policemen over locals whose loyalty was liable to be tested by the
requirements of protest policing: TNA, CO 137/827/3, Ormsby-Gore draft
memo, ‘Proposed Royal Commission’, n.d., 1938.
30 Martin, ‘Revolutionary Upheaval’, 320–6.
31 Trinidad was the British Empire’s foremost oil producer. Oil accounted for
over 60 per cent of the island’s export volumes throughout the depression.
But the oilfields were capital intensive, employing around 8,000 workers
next to the 68,000 or so involved in cane-cutting and sugar refining; see
Bolland, On the March, 82–3. Bolland’s analysis of Trinidad’s labour rebel-
lion is reproduced in The Politics of Labour, 250–79.
32 As Kevin Yelvington has argued, ethnicity, class and concepts of ‘black-
ness’ in 1930s Trinidad were mutually constituted, see his, ‘The War in
Ethiopia’, 189–90.
33 TNA, CO 111/686/17, Officer Administering the Government, British
Guiana, to Lord Passfield, 26 February 1930. Demonstrations in
Georgetown, British Guiana’s capital, peaked on 4 February 1930 and
were led by Claude Smith, who styled himself the ‘Chaplain-general of the
Church Army of America’.
34 The extent of women’s involvement in these early demonstrations, as
well as in the 1937 disorders, deserves amplification as it is overlooked
in some standard accounts of industrial protest, see Brinsley Samaroo,
‘Non-Traditional Sources for the Study of the Trinidad Disturbances of
the 1930s’, in Brereton and Yelvington (eds.), The Colonial Caribbean in
Transition, 238, 243.
36 TNA CO 295/599/14 part II, Governor Fletcher to Colonial Office, 5 July
1937.
37 For manifestations of class prejudice in Trinidad, and the stress placed

upon proper comportment in public, see Bridget Brereton, Social Life in the
Caribbean, 1838–1938 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1985), 18–19.
38 Bolland, On the March, 87–8; TNA, CO 295/606/4, Sir Selwyn Grier to
Sir Henry Moore, 12 April 1938. Acting on MI5 intelligence, Grier sug-
gested that Rienzi, who won a seat on Trinidad’s Legislative Council, was
a Comintern agent.
39 TNA, CO 295/606/4, MI5 report, ‘Communism and the West Indian
Labour Disturbances’, based on intelligence available up to 1 June 1938.
Rienzi seems to have come under suspicion largely because of his connections
with Reginald Bridgeman, secretary of the League against Imperialism,
who was, in turn, close to Ben Bradley, head of the Communist Party of
Great Britain’s Colonial Section. MI5 acknowledged that it could find no
evidence of any direct Soviet involvement in the British West Indies.
40 Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962 (Kingston:
Heinemann, 1981), 177.
41 Lord Moyne, ‘The West Indies in 1939’, The Geographical Journal, 96:2
(August 1940), 87–90. Moyne distinguished between the agricultural
under-development and demographic pressures identified as causes of
unrest in Jamaica and British Guiana next to the relative prosperity of more
industrialized Trinidad.
42 Bolland, On the March, 89.
43 Malcolm Cross, ‘The Political Representation of Organised Labour in
Trinidad and Guyana: A Comparative Puzzle’, in Malcolm Cross and Gad
Heuman (eds.), Labour in the Caribbean: From Emancipation to Independence
(London: Macmillan, 1988), 287; TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, unnumbered
tel., Governor to Secretary of State for Colonies, 28 June 1937.
44 Regarding South African managers and their racial slurs, see TNA CO
295/599/14 part II, Governor Fletcher to Colonial Office, 8 July 1937. The
Governor insisted that the downward pressure on wages caused by large
numbers of Trinidadian oil workers returning in search of employment
from the nearby Venezuelan oil industry was a more serious problem.
45 Bolland, On the March, 90.
46 TNA, CO 295/601/2, Trinidad and Tobago Disturbances, 1937, Commission
report, chapter VI, pp. 77–8.
47 Ibid., pp. 57–8.
48 Ibid., pp. 58–9.
49 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, tels. 119/121, Governor Fletcher to Ormsby-
Gore, 22 and 23 June 1937.
50 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, tel. 120, Governor to Secretary of State
for Colonies, 22 June 1937. In a bid to stave off serious clashes in Port of
Spain, all rum shops were closed, press censorship was introduced and
350 Special Constables were hastily enrolled to supplement regular police
numbers. Fletcher also made a public statement expressing the colonial
government’s willingness to discuss a pay settlement based on recognition
of recent increases in the cost of living.
51 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, tel. 117, Governor to Ormsby-Gore, 21 June
1937. See also Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 11–17.
52 Yelvington, ‘The War in Ethiopia and Trinidad’, 196–220.

53 TNA CO 295/599/14 part II, Governor to Colonial Office, 26 June 1937,
p. 7.
54 TNA, CO 295/601/2, Trinidad and Tobago Disturbances, Commission
report, chapter VI, pp. 60–1.
55 The premises in question stood on stilts, making Corporal King’s defenes-
tration especially injurious.
56 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, tel. 116, Governor to Ormsby-Gore, 20
June 1937; Bolland, On the March, 90–1; Samaroo, ‘Non-Traditional
Sources’, 242.
57 For thoughtful discussion of these norms, see Anderson and Killingray,
‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control’, 1–17.
58 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, Notes of a meeting between the Secretary of
State and a West India Committee deputation, Colonial Office, 3 July 1937.
59 TNA, CO 295/600/6, Papers of the Trinidad Commission of Inquiry into
the oilfield riots of June–July 1937, tel. 223, Governor to Secretary of State
for Colonies, 18 October 1937.
60 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, tel. 137, Governor to Ormsby-Gore, 2 July
1937.
61 TNA CO 295/599/14 part II, enclosure no. 2 to A & WT submission
536/686 to Admiralty, Captain C. S. Thomson, ‘Ajax report of proceed-
ings’, 14 July 1937.
62 TNA CO 295/599/14 part II, enclosure no. 1 to ‘Ajax report of proceedings:
narrative of events’, 13 July 1937.
63 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, R. Tweed, Director, Trinidad Petroleum
Development Company Ltd, to Ormsby-Gore, 23 June 1937.
65 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, Administrative Code E, Commodore South
America Division to Admiralty, repeated C in C America and West Indies,
24 June 1937.
66 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part II, Admiralty cipher A, HMS Ajax to C-in-C
West Indies, 8 July 1937.
67 TNA, CO 295/600/7, Trinidad Commission of Inquiry reports, tel. 140,
Governor to Secretary of State for Colonies, 5 July 1937.
68 TNA, CO 295/600/7, tel. 143, Governor to Colonial Office, 7 July 1937;
Bolland, On the March, 94.
69 TNA, CO 295/599/13 part I, tel. 137, Governor to Ormsby-Gore, 2 July
1937
70 ‘Lack of confidence by Oil Industry in Trinidad Mediation Committee’,
Petroleum Times, 7 August 1937.
71 Eric Williams came to prominence during the war years after his appoint-
ment as Assistant Professor at Howard University, America’s ‘black
Oxford’, in 1939. First, Williams successfully lobbied British and US offi-
cials for a place on the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, the body
established in 1942 following the destroyers for bases deal two years earl-
ier. Charged with mapping out reforms and post-war development projects
across the region, the Commission also exemplified the inexorable shift in
the regional balance of power towards US dominance of the Caribbean.
Second, Williams’ economic expertise as a pioneer of dependency theory

and his radical reputation as an anti-colonialist were cemented in 1944
with the publication of his D.Phil. thesis as the book Capitalism and Slavery.
Its central argument that the catalyst to abolition was economic and not
humanitarian caused a sensation beyond academic circles and transformed
the study of Caribbean slavery. See Tony Martin, ‘Eric Williams and the
Anglo-American Caribbean Commission: Trinidad’s Future Nationalist
Leader as Aspiring Imperial Bureaucrat, 1942–1944’, Journal of African
American History, 88:3 (2003), 274–9; Seymour Drescher, ‘Eric Williams,
British Capitalism and British Slavery’, History and Theory, 26:2 (1987),
180–96; Ralph M. Henry, ‘Eric Williams and the Reversal of the Unequal
Legacy of Capitalism and Slavery’, Callaloo, 20:4 (1997), 829–48; Gerard R.
Bosch Jr., ‘Eric Williams and the Moral Rhetoric of Dependency Theory’,
Callaloo, 20:4 (1987), 817–27.
73 Samaroo, ‘Non-Traditional Sources’, 227–34.
74 TNA, CO 295/600/13, Colonial Office memo, ‘Administration of govern-
ment’, n.d., 1937.
75 TNA, CO 295/600/7, Reports of the Trinidad Commission of Inquiry,
June–July 1937. In addition to Forster, the Commission members were Sir
Arthur Pugh, Thomas Fitzgerald, Kenneth Vincent Brown and Gwilyn
Arthur Jones. Brown was a former Judge in Port of Spain and Jones was the
serving Commissioner of Agriculture in the colony.
76 TNA, CO 295/600/6, tel. 227, Governor to Colonial Office, 22 October
1937.
77 TNA, CO 295/600/6, Governor’s letter to Secretary of State, 24 October
1937, referring to a secret despatch sent on 11 October.
78 Chamberlain’s identification with appeasement is, of course, well known,
but in recent years historians have highlighted his decisive influence
over defence spending and strategic priorities as well. For examples, see
R. A. C. Parker, ‘The Economics of Rearmament and Foreign Policy:
The United Kingdom before 1939’, Journal of Contemporary History, 10:4
(1975) 637–48; Scott Newton, Profits of Peace: The Political Economy of
Anglo-German Appeasement (Oxford University Press, 1996); Michael
L. Roi, Alternatives to Appeasement: Sir Robert Vansittart and Alliance
Diplomacy, 1934–1937 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997); Talbot
Imlay, Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in
Britain and France, 1938–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2003), especially
chapters 2 and 6; George C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy:
From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge University Press,
2007), 130–7; Maiolo, Cry Havoc, 1–3, 142–6, 217–19; Keith Neilson,
‘The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, British Strategic Foreign
Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement’, English
Historical Review, 118:477 (2003), 651–84.
79 Inskip’s appointment coincided with personnel changes at the Treasury,
which ensured that Chamberlain still cast a long shadow over Britain’s
senior department of state in matters of defence spending, see George
C. Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy 1906–1959 (Edinburgh

University Press, 2000), 249–51, 288–9.
80 TNA, CAB 24/273, CP 316(37), Inskip memo, ‘Defence expenditure in
future years’, 15 December 1937; Sean Greenwood, ‘“Caligula’s Horse”
Revisited: Sir Thomas Inskip as Minister for the Coordination of Defence,
1936–1939’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 17:2 (1994), 17–38.
81 Much like appeasement, the literature on British defence priorities is
vast. Useful introductions include George C. Peden, British Rearmament
and the Treasury, 1932–1939 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979);
Edgerton, Warfare State; Imlay, Facing the Second World War; Steven
Morewood, ‘Protecting the Jugular Vein of Empire: The Suez Canal in
British Defence Strategy, 1919–1941’, War and Society, 10:1 (1992), 81–107;
Christopher M. Bell, The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the
Wars (London: Macmillan, 2000); Sebastian Ritchie, Industry and Air
Power: The Expansion of British Aircraft Production, 1935–1941 (London:
Frank Cass, 1997).
82 David Omissi, ‘The Mediterranean and the Middle East in British Global
Strategy, 1935–1939’, in Cohen and Kolinsky (eds.), Britain and the Middle
East in the 1930s, 3–20. For background on Palestine, see Kolinsky, Law,
Order and Riots, and on repression, Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, chapter 9;
Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality’, 313–54; Steve Morewood, The British
Defence of Egypt, 1935–1940: Conflict and Crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean
(London: Frank Cass, 2005), chapters 5 and 6.
83 Jason Parker, building on the earlier findings of Fitzroy Baptiste and David
Reynolds, has reiterated the competitive edge to Anglo-American stra-
tegic partnership in the Caribbean from 1937 onwards, see his Brother’s
Keeper, 18, 175n.5, citing Fitzroy Baptiste, ‘The British Grant of Air and
Naval Facilities to the United States in Trinidad, St Lucia, and Bermuda
in 1939 (June–December)’, Caribbean Studies, 16 (1976), 5–43; David
Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–1941: A Study in
Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1982), 64–5. For a wider strategic purview, see Jason Parker, ‘Remapping
the Cold War in the Tropics: Race, Communism, and National Security in
the West Indies’, International History Review, 24:2 (2002), 318–47.
84 J. A. Cross, Lord Swinton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
85 Rhodes House Library, Mss. Afr. s. 1120, Papers of Sir Robert Brooke-
Popham, box III/3. Ormsby-Gore’s imperial affinities emerge in a private
letter of 21 October 1936 to Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham,
soon to be appointed Governor of Kenya.
86 TNA, CAB 27/626, FP(36)22, note by Ormsby-Gore, 22 March 1937;
Dominion Office correspondence, DO 35/551, ‘Statements made by
Dominion spokesmen regarding the return of former German colonies’,
21 March 1938.
87 The now classic study of colonial appeasement is Andrew J. Crozier,
Appeasement and Germany’s Last Bid for Colonies (London: Macmillan, 1988);
see also his ‘Imperial Decline and the Colonial Question in Anglo-German
Relations, 1919–1939’, European Studies Review, 11:2 (1981), 207–42.
88 Martin Thomas, Britain, France and Appeasement: Anglo-French Relations

in the Popular Front Era (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 126–7.
89 Rhodes House Library, Mss. Afr. s. 1120, Brooke-Popham papers, box
III/2, Ormsby-Gore letter, 6 December 1937. Ormsby-Gore explained
his position candidly to Kenya Governor Brooke-Popham: I think
Hitler knows very well that we cannot possibly give up Tanganyika
any more than the Union [of South Africa] will give up South West
[Africa]. Indeed I doubt if he thinks he can ever get anything in East
Africa except as a result of a victorious war – when of course he would
take everything! He is concentrating on West Africa and he knows he
has the sympathy of [South African Prime Minister J. B. M.] Hertzog
there … I have myself a dislike of transferring not merely territory but
human beings from one rule to another against their will – but there it
is. Germany somewhere in West Africa may well be part of the price of
peace; and if she is to have something on strategic, economic or polit-
ical grounds it is better she should have it in West Africa than anywhere
else in the world.
90 Malcolm Smith, ‘Rearmament and Deterrence in Britain in the 1930s’,
Journal of Strategic Studies, 1:3 (1978), 325–33; Greenwood, ‘“Caligula’s
Horse”’, 17–29; Peden, British Rearmament, 134–9; Imlay, Facing the
Second World War, 78–9.
91 Affiliated in 1931, the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, the world’s third
largest oil company in the 1930s and forerunner to Exxon-Mobil, supplied
a higher proportion of British aviation fuel from 1941 onwards. See ‘The
secret fuel that made the Spitfire supreme’, Royal Society of Chemistry
News, 13 May 2009.
92 Frederick Haussmann, ‘Latin American Oil in War and Peace’, Foreign
Affairs, 21:2 (1943), 354–61.
93 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 50–109 passim; Wilder, The
French Imperial Nation-State, 203; Wilder, ‘The Politics of Failure:
Historicising Popular Front Colonial Policy in French West Africa’,
in Chafer and Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire, 33–55; Catherine
Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘The Popular Front and the Colonial Question:
French West Africa: An Example of Reformist Colonialism’, in Chafer
and Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire, 155–69; Thomas, The French
Empire between the Wars, 277–306.
94 John W. Cell, Lord Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism, 1872–1969
(Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robert D. Pearce, Sir Bernard
Bourdillon: The Biography of a Twentieth Century Colonialist (London:
Kensal Press, 1987); Nicholas J. White, ‘The Frustrations of Development:
British Business and the late Colonial State in Malaya, 1945–57’, Journal
of Southeast Asian Studies, 28:1 (1997), 103–20.
95 As a precursor to this shift, see TNA, CO 884/24, ‘Report by Alexander
Paterson, H.M. Commissioner for Prisons, of a visit to the Reformatory
and Penal Establishments of Jamaica, British Honduras, Bahamas,
Leeward & Windward Islands, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, British
Guiana, in the five months of sunshine between 20th December 1936 and
10th May 1937’, 25 May 1937.
96 Imlay, Facing the Second World War, 329–32.

97 TNA, CO 295/600/6, Ormsby-Gore letter to Walter Citrine, 10 July 1937.
98 Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 243–50. Gupta
notes that, although Citrine would be appointed to the West Indies Royal
Commission, the Colonial Office was reticent about TUC involvement in
colonial labour questions.
99 TNA, CO 295/600/6, Ormsby-Gore letter to Walter Citrine, 10 July 1937.
100 Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labour in the English-Speaking
West Indies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 293. At Blades’ invi-
tation Adrian Cola Rienzi became first OWTU president.
101 Bolland, On the March, 97–8, 102; Basdeo, ‘Walter Citrine and the British
Caribbean Workers Movement’, 43–59.
103 TNA, CO 295/600/6, tel. 252, Secretary of State to Governor of Trinidad,
20 October 1937; CO 295/600/13, Criticisms of Sir Murchison Fletcher
over his handling of the oilfield riots of 1937: memo, plus accompanying
minute by Ormsby-Gore to Sir Henry Moore, 17 December 1937.
104 For details, see L. J. Butler, Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State
in Northern Rhodesia, c. 1930–64 (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007),
chapter 1; Elena L. Berger, Labour, Race and Colonial Rule: The Copperbelt
from 1924 to Independence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), chapters 1 to 3;
Henderson, ‘Early African Leadership’, 83–97; Perrings, ‘Consciousness,
Conflict and Proletarianization’, 31–51.
105 Rhodes House Library, Mss. W. Ind. r. 7, Nankivell papers, ‘Legislative
Council minutes, 9th July 1937’, p. 263–4; see also Howard Nankivell
Diary, extract of letter from ‘Greenidge’, n.d., 1937.
106 The industry newspaper, Petroleum Times, said of Nankivell: ‘the tenor
of his recent speech to the Legislative Assembly was of such a socialistic
nature as to invalidate the impartiality of his official position’. See ‘Views
of Trinidad Acting Colonial Secretary need explanation’; Petroleum Times,
31 July 1937.
107 Samaroo, ‘Non-Traditional Sources’, 229.
108 TNA, CO 295/601/1, G. J. F. Tomlinson letter to Sir Shenton Thomas
and others, 7 January 1938.
109 Bolland, On the March, 97; Samaroo, ‘Non-Traditional Sources’, 229.
Nankivell cut a tragic figure when he left office in 1938. He killed himself
months later, jumping from a train en route to London from Milan.
110 TNA, CO 295/601/2, Trinidad and Tobago Disturbances, Commission
report, chapter VI, p. 90.
111 Forty years after he first entered the colonial service, Orde-Brown was
appointed as the first Labour Commissioner in British Africa a year before
his death in 1947.
112 TNA, CO 884/26, Report on Labour Conditions in the West Indies by
Major G. St J. Orde Brown, 1939. These presumptions pervade Orde-
Browne’s report.
114 Roy Thomas (ed.), The Trinidad Labour Riots of 1937: Perspectives 50 Years
Later (St Augustine, Extra-Mural Studies Unit: University of the West
Indies, 1987); Richard Hart, Labour Rebellions of the 1930s in the British
Caribbean Region Colonies, Caribbean Labour Solidarity/Socialist History
Society occasional papers, no. 15 (2002); Sahadeo Basdeo, Labour
Organisation and Labour Reform in Trinidad, 1919–1939 (St Augustine:
University of the West Indies Press, 1983); Yelvington, ‘The War in
Ethiopia and Trinidad’, 189–96.
10 p rofi t s , p r i vat iz at ion a n d p ol ic e : t h e b i r t h

of S i e r r a L e on e ’ s di a mon d in du s t ry
1 TNA, CO 267/664/7, Freetown Daily Guardian article by J. C. Odetumi
Crowther, ‘My reflection on the better administration of the rural areas of
the Police and Headquarters Judicial Districts of the Colony’, 17 September
1938.
2 TNA, CO 267/667/7, tel. 121, Governor Douglas Jardine to Colonial Office,
28 November 1938.
3 TNA, CO 267/664/7, broadcast talk by District Commissioner, Waterloo,
A. B. Mathews, ‘The Colony District and the Rural Areas Administration’,
9 March 1938.
4 TNA, CO 267/648/1, Acting Governor to Colonial Office, 11 July 1934;
CO 267/664/8, despatch 268, Governor Jardine to Secretary of State for
Colonies, 11 May 1938.
5 Phia Steyn, ‘Oil Exploration in Colonial Nigeria, c. 1903–58’, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:2 (2009), 251–7, 267.
6 For parallels with British Sudan, see M. Mollan, ‘Business Failure, Capital
Investment and Information: Mining Companies in the Anglo-Egyptian
Sudan, 1900–13’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:2
(2009), 230–1, 235–41. Licences were granted to fifteen British companies
to mine in Sudan between 1900 and 1905; the Sudan Gold Field Company
emerged as the dominant player by 1913.
7 As Marika Sherwood notes of shipping company Elder Dempster’s many
West African interests, including its ownership of the British Bank of West
Africa: ‘Could any Governor, even if he had wanted to, dare defy a Company
which could withhold his own pay, his mail, his British food and drink supply,
and totally disrupt government business?’ See her ‘Elder Dempster and
West Africa 1891–c.1940: The Genesis of Underdevelopment?’, International
Journal of African Historical Studies, 30:2 (1997), 257–8.
8 Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 85.
9 The late nineteenth-century involvement of African traders in this intra
and inter-colony maritime trade is analysed in Martin Lynn, ‘Technology,
Trade and “A Race of Native Capitalists”: The Krio Diaspora of West
Africa and the Steamship, 1852–1895’, Journal of African History, 33:3
(1992), 421–40.
10 Ibrahim Abdullah, ‘Rethinking African Labour and Working Class
History: The Artisan Origins of the Sierra Leonean Working Class’, Social
History, 23:1 (1998), 84–7; Isaac Land and Andrew M. Schocket, ‘New
Approaches to the Founding of the Sierra Leone Colony, 1786–1808’,
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 9:3 (2008), 1–6; Joseph Bangura,
‘Understanding Sierra Leone in Colonial West Africa: A Synoptic Socio-

Political History’, History Compass, 7:3 (2009), 584–8.
11 Philip Misevich, ‘The Sierra Leone Hinterland and the Provisioning of
Early Freetown, 1792–1803’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 9:3
(2008); Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 52–4.
12 Philip D. Curtin, ‘The End of the “White Man’s Grave”? Nineteenth-
Century Mortality in West Africa’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
21:1 (1990), 63–88; Curtin, ‘Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in
Tropical Africa’,’ American Historical Review, 90:3 (1985), 600–1.
13 TNA, CO 267/649/7, Annual report of the Medical and Sanitary
Department, Sierra Leone, 1933, section II, ‘Causes of invaliding and
deaths of European non-officials’, and ‘Table showing the comparative fig-
ures of the health of African officials for the last ten years’.
14 TNA, CO 267/644/12, CO minute by I. H. Wallace, 12 October 1934. The
infant mortality rate in the colony during 1933 was recorded as 235 per
thousand, and this despite the largest smallpox vaccination programme
hitherto conducted in Sierra Leone.
15 For discussion of links between colonial public health concerns, especially
malarial infection, and early twentieth-century segregation of Freetown’s
European residential quarter, the aptly-named ‘Hill Station’ district, see
Stephen Frenkel and John Western, ‘Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation
and Malarial Mosquitoes in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone’, Annals
of the Association of American Geographers, 78:2 (1988), 211–28; Leo Spitzer,
‘The Mosquito and Segregation in Sierra Leone’, Canadian Journal of African
Studies, 2:1 (1968), 49–61. For a subtle analysis of the limits to British segre-
gation policy, see Odile Goerg, ‘From Hill Station (Freetown) to Downtown
Conakry (First Ward): Comparing French and British Approaches to
Segregation in Colonial Cities at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’,
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 32:1 (1998), 16–18.
16 J. C. Earnest-Parkes to Colonial Secretary, ‘Sierra Leone Frontier Police’,
28 July 1893, cited in Colin W. Newbury, British Policy Towards West Africa:
Select Documents 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), doc. 21, 268–
9. Routine infringements of chiefly authority, arbitrary detention and flog-
ging were commonplace within the Frontier Police.
17 Sierra Leone exemplified the continuing inter-war predominance of
large trading companies and mining consortia within the economies of
Britain’s tropical colonies, a trend identified by Havinden and Meredith in
Colonialism and Development, 153–4.
18 This shift in investment patterns explains why the colony’s economy became
a classic ‘case study’ for dependency theorists, see B. Zack-Williams,
‘Merchant Capital and Underdevelopment in Sierra Leone’, Review of
African Political Economy, 25 (September 1982), 76–82; M. J. M. Sibanda,
‘Dependency and Underdevelopment in Northwestern Sierra Leone, 1896–
1939’, African Affairs, 78:313 (1979), 481–92.
19 R. L. Okonkwo, ‘The Garvey Movement in British West Africa’, Journal of
African History, 21:1 (1980), 107–8.
20 Ibrahim Abdullah, ‘Rethinking the Freetown Crowd: The Moral Economy
of the 1919 Strikes and Riot in Sierra Leone’, Canadian Journal of African
Studies, 28:2 (1994), 198–213; Akintola J. G. Wyse, ‘The Dissolution

of Freetown City Council in 1926: A Negative Example of Political
Apprenticeship in Colonial Sierra Leone’, Africa, 57:4 (1987), 429–30;
H. E. Conway, ‘Labour Protest Activity in Sierra Leone during the Early Part
of the Twentieth Century’, Labour History, 15 (November 1968), 52–8.
21 Sherwood, ‘Elder Dempster and West Africa’, 264–9.
22 David Fashole Luke, ‘The Development of Modern Trade Unionism in
Sierra Leone, part I’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 18:3
(1985), 428–35; Conway, ‘Labour Protest’, 49–51, 59–63.
23 Akintola J. G. Wyse, ‘The Sierra Leone Branch of the National Congress
of British West Africa, 1918–46’, International Journal of African Historical
Studies, 18:4 (1985), 692–4; Wyse, ‘The Dissolution of Freetown City
Council’, 422–34. Its powers circumscribed and its electors confined to
wealthy Krio, from its inception in 1893 Freetown’s city council was none-
theless unusual among British West Africa’s municipal bodies in its pre-
dominantly African membership and responsiveness to local press and
public opinion. This did not save it from official accusations of petty cor-
ruption, inefficiency and ineptitude.
24 Roger Gocking, ‘Creole Society and the Revival of Traditional Culture in
Cape Coast during the Colonial Period’, International Journal of African
Historical Studies, 17:4 (1984), 603–11; Goerg, ‘From Hill Station’,
4–11.
25 Ibrahim Abdullah, ‘Profit versus Reproduction: Labor Protests in the
Sierra Leonean Iron-Ore Mines, 1933–38’, African Studies Review, 35:3
(1992), 15–16.
26 Zack-Williams, ‘Merchant Capital and Underdevelopment’, 78.
27 TNA, CO 267/656/6, Sir Henry Moore, Government House, Freetown,
letter to H. F. Downie, Colonial Office, 9 March 1937. Large numbers
of boys, predominantly from surrounding rural communities, were also
cheaply employed in the diamond and gold mines.
28 Ibid.
29 Abdullah, ‘Profit versus Reproduction’, 16–17; Stephen Constantine, The
Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914–1940 (London: Taylor
& Francis, 1984), 199–201.
30 Abdullah, ‘Profit versus Reproduction’, 18. Delco’s annual iron ore pro-
duction reached a pre-war high of 828,560 tons in 1939.
31 My thanks to David Edgerton for advice on this point.
32 For analysis of the shortcomings of Sierra Leone’s colonial chiefdoms, see
Richard Fanthorpe, ‘Locating the Politics of a Sierra Leonean Chiefdom’,
Africa, 68:4 (1998), 558–65; Fanthorpe, ‘Neither Citizen nor Subject?
“Lumpen” Agency and the Legacy of Native Administration in Sierra
Leone’, African Affairs, 100:400 (2001), 363–86.
33 TNA, CO 267/671/16, O. G. R. Williams, ‘Note of points about Sierra
Leone made by Professor W. M. Macmillan in conversation with Mr Dawe
on 20 January 1939’, 23 January 1939.
34 For discussion of forms of ‘everyday resistance’ by subaltern groups, see
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, especially chapters 6–7; and,
for the idea of adopting particular agricultural practices to escape state
supervision, Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 187–99. In similar vein,
see Peters, ‘Taste, Taxes, and Technologies’, 568–72; Myron Echenberg,
‘Les Migrations militaires en Afrique Occidentale Française, 1900–1945’,
35 Abdullah, ‘Profit versus Reproduction’, 19–35. Major Orde-Brown, a
vociferous critic of colonial employer practices in the British Caribbean,
also criticized Delco’s inadequate housing provision during an investigative
visit to Marampa in 1940: ‘Report on labour conditions in West Africa’, by
Major G. St. J. Orde-Brown, 1940–1; Command paper, 6277, iv.1.
36 For an orthodox Marxist reading of the complicity between Delco and the
colonial authorities in suppressing industrial protest, see Ankie Hoogvelt
and Anthony M. Tinker, ‘The Role of Colonial and Post-Colonial States in
Imperialism – a Case-Study of the Sierra Leone Development Company’,
Journal of Modern African Studies, 16:1 (1978), 67–79.
37 Selection Trust Archive, ST/B/13, Report of the Directors and statement
of accounts, 2 November 1933 to 31 December 1933. With authorized cap-
ital of £2,000,020, Selection Trust’s principal mining interests were in
Northern Rhodesia, Canada, Yugoslavia and West Africa. Its West African
subsidiary, the Consolidated African Selection Trust (CAST) was incor-
porated in late 1924 and began working large alluvial diamond areas in
the Gold Coast and, later, Sierra Leone. In the 1932–3 financial year – the
trough of the depression – CAST registered a net profit of £161,406, and
paid its shareholders a 40 per cent dividend.
38 Originally a holding company for several smaller regional mining con-
cerns, by the 1930s CAST was establishing itself as the principal diamond
mining company in the Gold Coast, see Sarah Stockwell, The Business
of Decolonization: British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000), 19–20.
39 TNA, CO 852/94, file 15201/A26, ‘Economic Survey of the Colonial
Empire – Sierra Leone 1937’, p. 146; also available in ST/additional
material/Box 5, file 12.
40 ST/F/5, D. K. T. MacLachlan, c/o Bank of British West Africa, Freetown,
to Colonial Secretary, ‘Application Special Prospecting Grant’, 26 May
1931; telegram, Secretary, Freetown, to Secretary, Accra, 26 May 1931.
Twenty-three Gold Coast mineworkers were brought in to assist the CAST
engineers.
41 CAST’s interest in an exclusive mining concession and protection of
its West African mining rights would continue beyond the war and into
negotiations with the future independent governments of the Gold Coast
(Ghana) and Sierra Leone. See Stockwell, The Business of Decolonization,
166–71.
42 ST/F/5, W. Hildred to Colonial Secretary, Freetown, 1 December 1931.
43 TNA, CO 583/199/13, G. R. Nicolaus, Selection Trust Building,
Coleman Street, London, to Alex Fiddian, CO, 14 August 1934; tel.
242, Sir Donald Cameron, Lagos, to Secretary of State for the Colonies,
17 August 1934.
44 TNA, CO 583/199/13, A. Chester Beatty to Nigeria Governor Sir Donald
Cameron, 16 August 1934.
45 ST/F/26, The Manager, CAST Ltd., (Sierra Leone), Letter no. 79, ‘D’,
27 December 1933, ‘Government negotiations’. The Colonial Office used
the London law firm, Burchills.
46 ST/F/26, letter to F. M. Mathias, ‘Yengama’, 10 September 1933.
47 TNA, CO 267/644/4, Consolidated African Selection Trust, Grant of
Exclusive Right, CO Minute by A. L. Clayton, 5 May 1934; ST/2009/97,
Minutes of CAST Board Meeting held at the registered office, 2 May 1934.
On 3 April 1934 the Selection Trust issued a subscription for 400,000
shares of 5 shillings each to provide the working capital for SLST.
48 TNA, CO 267/644/3, Attorney-General I. J. Turbett, remarks on ‘The
General Minerals Rules, 1928 to 1930’, n.d., January 1934; J. C. Lamont,
Crown Agents for the Colonies, to Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office,
26 January 1934. Regarding Colonial Office anxiety lest the monopoly deal
violated the more generic ‘Minerals Ordinance’ designed to regulate colonial
mining in Sierra Leone, see CO 267/644/5, Consolidated African Selection
Trust, Grant of Exclusive Right, CO minutes, 7 and 1 November 1934.
49 TNA, CO 267/644/3, Governor’s despatch to Alex Fiddian, Colonial
Office, 6 February 1934.
50 Zack-Williams, ‘Merchant Capital and Underdevelopment’, 78–80; TNA,
CO 267/648/1, Kambia District, notes on deposition of the paramount
chief Bai Sherbro of Mambolo Chiefdom, 1934.
51 ST/F/1, CAST Managing Director to Colonial Secretary, 22 April 1934;
Colonial Treasurer F. A. Mathias, to W. Hildred, Segbwema, Southern
Province, 31 May 1934; Hildred to Mathias, 19 June 1934.
52 ST/F/1, W. Hildred, to A. H. Stocks, Provincial Commissioner, Southern
Province, Kenema, 24 June 1934.
53 ST/F/1, Hildred to Stocks, Kenema, 24 September 1934.
54 ST/F/26, Colonial Treasurer F. M. Mathias, to W. Hildred, 23 July 1934.
Close to Freetown’s police chief, Captain Craig, Mathias pointed out that
Craig’s officers knew the diamond couriers, receivers and buyers in the city
but could not make arrests because so few diamonds were traded owing to
prohibitively high prices for larger stones.
55 TNA, CO 267/644/7, G. R. Nicolaus [sometimes rendered as ‘Nicholaus’],
CAST Manager, to Lieutenant-Colonel H. W. M. Bamford, Inspector-
general of Police, Accra, Gold Coast, 24 March 1934.
56 TNA, CO 267/644/7, CAST Manager to Colonial Secretary, Freetown, 22
April 1934.
57 TNA, CO 267/660/7, OP/1/36, Crown Law Office, Freetown, Report on
the Police (amendment) Ordinance, 1 December 1936.
58 TNA, CO 267/644/7, Nicolaus to Lieutenant-Colonel H. W. M. Bamford,
Inspector-general of Police, HQ, Accra, Gold Coast, 24 March 1934.
59 ST/F/1, no. 268/34/30, enclosure III in Sierra Leone despatch no. 368, 16
August 1934: Acting Governor G. A. S. Northcote to Sir Arnold Hodson,
Governor, Freetown, 7 July 1934.
60 TNA, CO 267/644/7, G. R. Nicholaus to Colonial Secretary, Freetown
Government, C. E. Cookson, 22 April 1934; and reply, c/o Post Office,
Segbwema, 1 May 1934.
61 ST/B/13, Selection Trust Limited, Report of the Directors and statement

of accounts for the year ended 31 December 1934.
62 ST/F/1, H. T. Dickinson, Johannesburg, ‘Memorandum regarding protect-
ive measures and legislation against illicit diamond dealing’, 3 November
1934.
63 Ibid.
64 ST/F/1, GRN/GVW, Letter to A. C. Clarke, Manager, SLST, Yengama,
8 February 1935.
65 ST/F/1, H. T. Dickinson memorandum, 3 November 1934. De Beers
stressed that its nineteen diamond mines in Portuguese Angola bore closer
comparison with SLST’s Sierra Leone mining zone. Theft of Angolan dia-
monds was thought to occur at four points in the mining process: in excavat-
ing and transporting diamonds and gravel from mines to processing plants;
in preliminary ‘washing’ of slurry; during transportation of the concentrates
to a ‘picking station’; and in the final picking of valuable stones.
66 ST/F/5, W. Hildred to Colonial Secretary, Freetown, 17 August 1934.
67 ST/F/5, Acting Colonial Secretary, Freetown, to the Manager, SLST,
18 October 1934.
68 TNA, CO 267/644/7, E. Blackwell, Home Office, to Under Secretary of
State, Colonial Office, 22 August 1934; CO minute, A. L. Clayton, 22 June
1934.
69 TNA, CO 267/648/19, Formation of a Special Mines Protective Police
Force to protect the diamond and gold mining industries of Sierra Leone,
Nov. 1934–Feb. 1935, telegram from OAG of Sierra Leone to Secretary of
State for the Colonies 8 November 1934.
70 TNA, CO 267/648/19, Acting Governor to Colonial Office, 5 December
1934; Maroc Gold Mining initially reneged on their agreement to pay, see
Maroc Limited to CO Under-Secretary, 5 January 1935.
71 TNA, CO 267/648/12, Police Department staff, 1934, Sierra Leone des-
patch, 5 September 1934: Governor’s proposals for reduction of European
personnel; CO minute by J. Fletcher-Cooke, 20 November 1934.
72 TNA, CO 267/648/12, Alex Fiddian note on Police Department staff,
23 November 1934.
73 TNA, CO 267/649/4, Governor Sir Henry Moore report on the mines pro-
tection scheme, 5 June 1935; CO minute summarizing protection force
arrangements in gold and diamond mining areas, 10 July 1935.
74 TNA, CO 267/656/6, CO minute, 17 May 1937; OGR Williams, Record of
Meeting at the Colonial Office with Mr Nicolaus and Mr Mathias, 25 May
1937.
75 TNA, CO 267/649/14, Sierra Leone Courts – sentences imposed, 1935.
76 TNA, CO 267/649/14, Governor Moore letter to Alex Fiddian, 31 July 1935.
77 Ibid., p.1.
78 TNA, CO 267/649/14, CO minutes 11–13 March 1935. Perhaps signifi-
cant, Sir Henry Moore went on to become Kenya’s wartime governor from
1940 to 1944, see Lewis, Empire State-Building, 114–15.
79 TNA, CO 267/656/6, Diamond Mines Police, Yengama mine monthly
reports, 1935 to 1937.
80 ST/F/6, Colonial Secretary, Freetown, to Manager, SLST, Yengama, 31

January 1938.
81 ST/F/6, Colonial Secretary, Freetown, to Manager, SLST, Yengama,
18 November 1939.
82 TNA, CO 267/664/2, CO Minute by R. Turnball, ‘Summary of Sierra
Leone’s financial position’, 17 January 1939.
83 TNA, CO 267/644/12, Annual Reports, 1933, of the Headquarters Judicial
District, Freetown police, Northern and Southern Provinces.
84 ST/F/6, Acting Colonial Secretary, Freetown Government, to Manager,
SLST, Segbwema, 20 December 1938. Moore’s government agreed that
the Mines Protection Force would be supplied with Greener 12-bore shot-
guns, although these weapons were kept in an armoury at the Yengama
compound rather than being carried on a daily basis.
85 TNA, CO 267/656/6, no. 230, Henry Moore report on Diamond Protection
Force to W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, 22 April 1937.
86 ST/F/26, The Manager, SLST, letter no C.27, F, 13 April 1937.
87 ST/F/5, W. S. Davidson, SLST Manager, to Colonial Secretary, Freetown,
10 February 1937, ‘Re: Scarcity of Rice Offerings in Kono District’.
88 TNA, CO 267/656/6, Sir Henry Moore letter to H. F. Downie, Colonial
Office, 9 March 1937. The Governor also admitted to being shocked by
‘the cell-like appearance’ of line accommodation at Yengama mine, where
official preference was for the construction of ersatz ‘native villages’ rather
than serried ranks of concrete barracks to house the workforce.
89 ST/F/6, W. S. Davidson, SLST, Segbwema, to Colonial Secretary, 28
December 1936.
90 Henderson, ‘Early African Leadership’, 83–97; Perrings, ‘Consciousness,
Conflict and Proletarianization’, 31–51; Jane L. Parpart, ‘The “Labor
Aristocracy” Debate in Africa: The Copperbelt Case, 1924–1967’, African
Economic History, 13 (1984), 171–91; and, for the ultra-violent responses
of state and settlers during South Africa’s bloody 1922 Rand revolt, see
Krikler, ‘The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre’, 1051–
75; Jeremy Krikler, ‘The Commandos: The Army of White Labour in
South Africa’, Past & Present, 163:3 (1999), 202–44.
91 ST/B/13, Selection Trust directors’ reports and statements of accounts,
1933–40. CAST net profits by financial year from the inception of com-
mercial diamond mining in Sierra Leone in 1933–4 were as follows:
1933: £161,406; 1934: £234,204; 1935: £236,395; 1936: £335,953; 1937:
£582,406; 1938: £374,444; 1939: £266,054.
92 TNA, CO 267/664/2, Sierra Leone Estimates, 1939, Governor Sir John
Campbell’s Despatch 728, 30 November 1938, Enclosure IV, ‘Sierra Leone
estimates for the year ending 31st December 1939’. Actual receipts from
the diamond industry generated £152,569 in 1939.
93 TNA, CO 267/666/3, Governor Douglas Jardine to Malcolm MacDonald,
28 November 1938. For Krio women’s political engagement, particularly
within the National Congress of British West Africa and the West African
Youth League, see LaRay Denzer, ‘Women in Freetown Politics, 1914–
1961: A Preliminary Study’, Africa, 57:4 (1987), 440–3.
94 Stanley Shaloff, ‘Press Controls and Sedition Proceedings in the Gold

Coast, 1933–39’, African Affairs, 71:284 (1972), 244–5.
95 TNA, CO 583/195/4, minute by Alex Fiddian, 20 January 1934: details
of protests by the League against Imperialism (British Section), the TUC
and the Parliamentary Labour Party against an October 1933 police raid
on Wallace-Johnson’s Lagos office. Wallace-Johnson was, by then, the
Secretary of the African Workers’ Union of West Africa.
96 TNA, CO 267/666/7, The Weekly News, 27 August 1938, ‘On the Governor’s
“Confidential Dispatch” – a preliminary statement’, by Wallace-Johnson.
97 TNA, CO 267/666/3, Governor Jardine to Malcolm MacDonald, 28
November 1938.
98 TNA, CO 267/660/14 and CO 267/664/7, Reports on Administration of
the Police and Headquarters Judicial Districts of Sierra Leone Colony,
27 September 1937 and 9 March 1938. This area referred to the Sierra
Leone Peninsula excepting Freetown municipality. For a contrary Krio
view of this shift, see the full Daily Guardian article by J. C. Odetumi
Crowther cited at the start of this Chapter, 17 September 1938.
99 TNA, CO 267/671/16, OGR Williams, ‘Note of points about Sierra Leone
made by Professor W. M. Macmillan in conversation with Mr Dawe on
20 January 1939’.
100 TNA, CO 267/666/7, Leakages of Governor’s confidential despatches
to the Secretary of State, concerning labour conditions in Sierra Leone;
The Weekly News, 27 August 1938, ‘On the Governor’s “Confidential
Dispatch” – a preliminary statement’, by Wallace-Johnson.
101 TNA, CO 267/669/16, Sierra Leone half-yearly intelligence report for the
period ending 30 June 1939, Military HQ, Freetown, pp. 8–9.
102 TNA, CO 267/669/13, ‘Proclamation issued in accordance with Police
Ordinance, 1934, because tumult, riot or felony are apprehended by the
Acting Governor’, 31 January 1939.
103 TNA, CO 267/669/16, Sierra Leone half-yearly intelligence report for the
period ending 30 June 1939, pp. 1–5, 10. The ordinances were spiked not
just by the strikes but by a short-lived mutiny among a unit of African
artillerymen in Freetown earlier in 1939.
104 For the role of labour demands as war drew near, see LaRay Denzer,
‘Wallace-Johnson and the Sierra Leone Labor Crisis of 1939’, African
Studies Review, 25:2/3 (1982), 159–83.
105 There are interesting parallels here with the role of the Gold Coast author-
ities in bitter pre-war arguments over pricing and production restric-
tions between European trading companies and local cocoa producers,
see Meredith, ‘The Colonial Office, British Business Interests’, 285–90;
Alence, ‘The 1937–1938 Gold Coast Cocoa Crisis’, 77–104. For paral-
lels with the exclusive mining deals made in contemporary, post-civil war
Sierra Leone, see ‘Sierra Leone’s Minerals – Digging for Trouble’, The
Economist, 27 November 2010, 61–2.
106 A. G. Hopkins wisely points out that any idea that colonial governments
and major trading companies systematically ‘colluded’ with one another
is too crude, concealing the central role of local entrepreneurs as well
as the frictions and changing circumstances that affected co-operation

between state and industry in colonial Africa. See his ‘Big Business in
African Studies’, Journal of African History, 28:1 (1987), 126–30; also cited
in Meredith, ‘The Colonial Office, British Business Interests’, 185. The
definitive study of the definitive British trading company is Fieldhouse,
Merchant Capital.
107 TNA CO, 267/669/14, Court Messenger Force, 1939, Governor Jardine
to Malcolm MacDonald, 21 October 1939.
108 Ibid.
11 p o l ic ing a n d p o l i t ic s in nig e r i a : t h e
p ol i t ic a l e c on omy of in di r e c t ru l e , 19 2 9 –39
1 Peter Yearwood, ‘“In a Casual Way with a Blue Pencil”: British Policy and
the Partition of Kamerun, 1914–1919’, Canadian Journal of African Studies,
27:2 (1993), 220–1.
2 Olufemi Vaughan, ‘Chieftaincy Politics and Communal Identity in Western
Nigeria, 1893–1951’, Journal of African History, 44:2 (2003), 285–91;
Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 6–7.
3 For a critical view of indirect rule, see Peter K. Tibenderana, Sokoto
Province under British Rule, 1903–1939: A Study of Institutional Adaptation
and Culturalisation of a Colonial Society in Northern Nigeria (Zaria: Ahmadu
Bello University Press, 1988); Tibenderana, ‘The Irony of Indirect Rule in
the Sokoto Emirate’, 67–92.
4 The royal charter was granted to the company’s predecessor, the National
African Company, on 10 July 1884, but was only applied after the Berlin
Conference of European imperial powers ended: see John E. Flint, Sir George
Goldie and the Making of Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1960), appendix II.
5 Sir George Goldie memo to E. C. H. Phipps, ‘The Upper Niger’, 10 July
1894, in Newbury, British Policy Towards West Africa, doc. 45, 212–14.
7 TNA, CO 583/181/11, ‘Organisation of the Nigeria Police’, memo by Major
G. N. Faux-Powell, n.d., registered at the Colonial Office, 8 December
1931. The Northern Provinces covered some 275,000 square miles; the
Southern Provinces 89,600; and Lagos Colony 1,400. Each province was
subdivided into districts under a district officer who retained limited legal
and police powers. District officers reported to the Residents who were, in
turn, responsible to the Lieutenant-Governors of Northern and Southern
Nigeria, themselves subordinate to the Governor.
8 For discussion of growing pre-war reliance on local intermediaries, see
Philip Afeadi, Brokering Colonial Rule: Political Agents in Northern Nigeria,
1886–1914 (Saarbrücken: Verlag, 2008).
9 Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, 13–15.
10 TNA, CO 583/181/11, ‘Organisation of the Nigeria Police’, pp. 1–3, 7–8.
11 Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, ‘African Intermediaries’, 4.
12 Klein, ‘African Participation in Colonial Rule’, 274–5, citing Frederick
Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 17–18.
13 Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge University Press, 1983), 249–54.
14 Richard Rathbone, ‘Kwame Nkrumah and the Chiefs: The Fate of “Natural
Rulers” Under Nationalist Governments’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 6:10 (2000), 49–50.
15 Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 71–97 passim.
16 Roger Gocking, ‘Indirect Rule in the Gold Coast: Competition for Office
and the Invention of Tradition’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 28:3
(1994), 421–42.
17 Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience
in Malawi and Zambia (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998); Derek R.
Peterson, ‘Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency
in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928’, American Historical Review, 111:4
(2006), 1008–10.
18 Newbury, Patrons, Clients, and Empire, 112.
19 Richard M. Kesner, Economic Control and Colonial Development: Crown
Colony Financial Management in the Age of Joseph Chamberlain (Portsmouth,
NH: Greenwood Press, 1981), 216–17; also cited in Havinden and
Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 86–90. For a sceptical assessment
of Chamberlain’s economic achievements, notably his inability to over-
come the Treasury’s financial conservatism, see Andrew Porter, ‘Joseph
Chamberlain: A Radical Reappraisal’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History, 6:3 (1978), 330–6.
20 Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 99. The growth tra-
jectory of Nigeria’s imports in the years 1900–13 was similar, rising from
£1,735,000 to £6,332,000.
21 Ibid., 100–2.
22 Bob Shenton and Bill Freund, ‘The Incorporation of Northern Nigeria
into the Capitalist World Economy’, Journal of African Political Economy, 13
(September.–December 1978), 14–18.
23 Freund, ‘Labour Migration to the Northern Nigerian Tin Mines’, 74–82;
Morrison, ‘Early Tin Production’, 205–16. Numbers of registered mine-
workers reached an inter-war peak of 39,959 in 1928, but, owing to the
frequency with which workers moved into and out of the mines, Freund
estimates the true overall figure at 350 per cent higher.
24 Morrison, ‘Early Tin Production’, 215.
25 K. Dike Nworah, ‘The Politics of Lever’s West African Concessions, 1907–
26 Before crediting Lugard with too much foresight, it is worth recalling
that in 1906 he initially followed his predecessor, Sir Walter Egerton,
trying – but failing – to introduce plantation-style cotton production
to Northern Nigeria at the expense of its local weaving industry: see
Governor Egerton memo on railway and road construction in Nigeria,
20 June 1906, in Newbury, British Policy Towards West Africa, doc. 25,
510–11; Marion Johnson, ‘Cotton Imperialism in West Africa’, African
Affairs, 73:291 (1974), 178–87; Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and
Development, 354 n.10.
27 David Meredith, ‘Government and the Decline of the Nigerian Oil-Palm

Export Industry, 1919–1939’, Journal of African History, 25:3 (1984), 311–
29. William Lever redirected his attentions to the Belgian Congo, securing
palm oil concessions there in 1911: see D. K. Fieldhouse, Unilever Overseas:
The Anatomy of a Multinational, 1895–1965 (London: Croom Helm, 1978),
499–507. Perhaps recalling the earlier rebuff, Lever later rejected a gov-
ernment request to establish palm oil processing mills in Nigeria, see
Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development, 113, 158. In 1934
Unilever’s United Africa Company did, however, make palm oil seeds from
its N’dian plantation in Cameroon freely available to Nigerian Agricultural
Department agronomists. These were used in the colony’s first start-up
ventures with peasant producers of palm oil: TNA, CO 583/199/8, Palm
Oil Industry, 1934, O. T. Faulkner, Director, Agricultural Department,
Ibadan, to United Africa Company, Plantations Department, Unilever
House, Blackfriars, 2 March 1934; Alex Cowan, Unilever, (aboard M.V.
Accra) to O. T. Faulkner, 28 March 1934.
28 TNA, CO 323/1150/18, G. N. Faux-Powell to Under-Secretary of State,
Colonial Office, 28 October 1931, ‘Memorandum on the organisation of
the Nigerian police’. Apprehension and prosecution of minor offenders in
the North was often conducted by police auxiliaries or dogerai.
29 Ibhawoh, ‘Stronger than the Maxim Gun’, 55–83.
30 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Economic Aspects of Political Movements in Nigeria
and in the Gold Coast, 1918–1939’, Journal of African History, 7:1 (1966),
133–52.
31 Ayodeji Olukoju, ‘Anatomy of Business-Government Relations: Fiscal
Policy and Mercantile Pressure Group Activity in Nigeria, 1916–1933’,
African Studies Review, 38:1 (1995), 23–50.
32 TNA, CO 583/244/21, Captain F. C. Royce (former district officer, Southern
Provinces) letter to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 17 November 1939.
33 Axel Harneit-Sievers, ‘African Business, “Economic Nationalism,” and
British Colonial Policy: Southern Nigeria, 1935–1954’, African Economic
History, 23 (1995), 79–86.
34 In Northern Nigeria, depression-era crime surged ahead following the col-
lapse in tin mining and a halt on railway construction. Recorded incidents
of previously rare practices, such as gang robbery, human trafficking and
child pawning, increased sharply; see Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 72–85.
35 Gocking, ‘British Justice and the Native Tribunals’, 93–5.
36 Ibid., 98–102. Gradual extension of regular police jurisdiction in the Gold
Coast was tied to increasing use of magistrates who required written evi-
dence or police testimony in criminal cases.
37 TNA, CO 583/233/7, Governor, Lagos, to W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, 21
January 1938. Here, again, the parallels with colonial police practice in
other British-ruled African territories is striking; for instance, the use of
Kenya’s regular colonial police to keep order in the colony’s Native Reserves
where a separate Native Reserves Police was maintained, see Wolf, ‘Asian
and African Recruitment’, 407.
38 TNA, CO 583/133/122, despatch 533, Officer Administering the Government
(OAG), Lagos, to Colonial Office, 7 June 1938.
39 Laurent Fourchard, ‘A New Name for an Old Practice: Vigilantes in South-

Western Nigeria’, Africa, 78:1 (2008), 16–24.
40 TNA, CO 583/165/11, CO minute on the arming of native police, n.d.
41 TNA, CO 583/165/11, despatch 432, OAG, Lagos, to Leo Amery, 10 April
1929.
42 Ibid.
43 TNA, CO 583/165/11, CO minutes, 10 May, 28 May, 6 June 1929; red
line note by Passfield, 17 June 1929. Famous for producing the world’s first
‘humane killer’ in 1895 for use in abattoirs, the British gun manufacturer
W. W. Greener was also a designer of specialist shotguns. Designed to spray
the victim with low-velocity shot, the Greener gun was used to suppress
riots in Nigeria’s – and other – colonial prisons.
44 Bastian, ‘“Vultures of the Marketplace”’, 260–81.
45 Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington, IN: Indian
46 Chima J. Korieh, ‘The Invisible Farmer? Women, Gender, and Colonial
Agricultural Policy in the Igbo Region of Nigeria, c. 1913–1954’, African
Economic History, 29 (2001), 121.
47 Korieh, ‘Hegemonic and Negotiated Encounters’, 114–20.
48 Kent, Aftershocks, 164–9.
49 Korieh, ‘The Invisible Farmer?’, 117–62; see also Judith van Allen, ‘“Sitting
on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women’,
50 Cheryl Johnson, ‘Grass Roots Organizing: Women in Anticolonial Activity
in Southwestern Nigeria’, African Studies Review, 25:2/3 (1982), 137–57, at
137–9.
51 Dominic Fortiscue, ‘The Accra Crowd, the Asafo, and the Opposition to
the Municipal Corporations Ordinance, 1924–25’, Canadian Journal of
African Studies, 24:3 (1990), 349–57.
52 Stanley Shaloff, ‘The Income Tax, Indirect Rule, and the Depression: The
Gold Coast Riots of 1931’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 14:54 (1974), 359–
65. An Accra police station and police contingents ordered to keep a low
profile to avoid provoking the demonstrators were targeted in the October
1931 riots.
53 Aside from the Gold Coast example, there is also a strong parallel between
the leading role of women in Southern Nigeria’s 1929 riots and in similar
disorders in French Togo in the early 1930s, see Benjamin N. Lawrance,
‘La Révolte des femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political
Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931–33’, African Studies Review, 46:1 (2003),
43–67.
54 Ben Naanen, ‘Economy within an Economy: The Manila Currency,
Exchange Rate Instability and Social Conditions in South-Eastern Nigeria,
55 Toyin Falola, ‘“Manufacturing Trouble”: Currency Forgery in Colonial
Southwestern Nigeria’, African Economic History, 25 (1997), 121–9.
56 Walter I. Ofonagoro, ‘From Traditional to British Currency in Southern
Nigeria: Analysis of a Currency Revolution, 1880–1948’, Journal of
Economic History, 39:3 (1979), 625, 639–46.
57 On rumour as a historical and, especially, a colonial phenomenon, see

Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anjan Ghosh, ‘The Role of
Rumour in History Writing’, History Compass, 6:5 (2008), 1235–43. The
spread of rumour as substitute for dissemination of official information
occurred in other imperial territories reeling from the depression, see
Lewis, ‘Necropoles and Nationality’, 105–41.
58 TNA, CO 583/168/14, Nigeria Governor’s telegram to Secretary of State,
12 December 1929.
59 TNA, CO 583/168/14, copies of cables from Supervising Agent, Aba,
12 December 1929; CO 583/176/9, Comments by Lieutenant-Governor,
Southern Provinces, on the report of the Aba Commission of Inquiry,
enclosure to confidential despatch of 24 November 1930.
60 TNA, CO 583/168/14, Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State,
‘Disturbances in Ibo country’, 15 December 1929.
61 TNA, CO 583/176/7, CO summary of Aba Commission report, n.d., 1930.
62 TNA, CO 583/168/14, Note by Under-Secretary of State, Dr T. D. Shiels,
17 December 1929.
63 TNA, CO 583/169/14, CO minute by Shiels, ‘Nigeria Shootings’, n.d.,
probably 24 December 1929.
64 TNA, CO 583/176/8, Aba Inquiry Commission Report chapters I–IV;
CO 583/176/9, Comments by Lieutenant-Governor, Southern Provinces,
enclosure to confidential despatch of 24 November 1930; CO 583/176/7,
CO summary of Aba Inquiry Commission report, n.d., 1930.
65 TNA, CO 583/176/10, Extracts from West Africa, 11, 18 and 25 October
1930: comments on Aba Commission report.
66 TNA, CO 583/176/8, Aba Inquiry Commission Report chapter IV: ‘The
origin and causes of the disturbances’, pp. 93–106; and CO 583/176/9,
Comments by Lieutenant-Governor, Southern Provinces, enclosure to
confidential despatch of 24 November 1930.
67 TNA, CO 583/176/18, OAG, Lagos, to Lord Passfield, 3 December 1930.
The plans were drawn up by Nigeria’s Inspector-General of Police and
reviewed by Buchanan-Smith.
68 Ibid.
69 TNA, CO 583/181/11, ‘Organisation of the Nigeria Police,’ memo by Major
G. N. Faux-Powell, n.d., registered with the Colonial Office, 8 December
1931, pp. 3–4, 8–9, 14–18. A similar version of this memorandum is also
available in CO 323/1150/18, dated 28 October 1931. Officer ranks below
Superintendent, including Assistant Superintendent, Chief Inspector,
Inspector, Warrant Officer (Sergeants) and Corporals were filled by West
Africans (principally Nigerians, but also some Ghanaians), many of them
RWAFF ex-servicemen and most of whom rose through the junior ranks.
African constables were initially enlisted for six years with three-year and
six-year options for renewal of service up to a pensionable service term
of eighteen years. From 1930 all African police recruits passed through
training depots at Lagos (for Nigeria colony), Edugu (for the Southern
Provinces) and Kaduna (for the Northern Provinces). Home to the largest
number of police, Lagos was subdivided into four police districts. Training
at all three depots was broken down into eight components: police duties;
elementary law; local ordinances; powers of arrest; foot drill; arms drill;
musketry; traffic control. Basic literacy (to ‘Educational Standard IV’) and
‘reasonable’ spoken English were also required. Constables were issued
with baton, the SMLM rifle and bayonet.
70 Ibid., pp. 4–5.
71 Ibid., pp. 9–12. All Assistant Commissioners were also required to com-
plete four months’ preliminary training at the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s
training centre. Promotion from Assistant Commissioner to Commissioner
was automatic on satisfactory completion of nine years’ service.
72 Ibid., p. 21.
73 TNA, CO 323/1150/18, Major G. N. Faux-Powell to CO Under-Secretary,
28 October 1931.
74 Ibid., pp. 20, 27–30. Faux-Powell dismissed communism and other ‘revo-
lutionary activity’ as virtually non-existent, although the Nigerian police
liaised with Britain’s metropolitan police and customs officials regarding
Nigerian students and merchant seamen, seen as the most likely conduits
for leftist propaganda.
75 TNA, CO 583/171/1, Administration of Justice in Southern Nigeria, 1930,
D. F. Brundrit, Secretary of the Haldane Club, handwritten letter to Lord
Passfield, 2 December 1930.
76 TNA, CO 583/171/1, Brundrit letter, fos. 8–13.
77 TNA, CO 583/171/1, fos. 16–17, Haldane Club Memorandum, n.d.,
December 1930.
78 TNA, CO 583/171/1, Passfield minute, 12 January 1931.
79 TNA, CO 583/178/2, Punishments inflicted on natives, 1931, OAG,
Hemmant, to Lord Passfield/CO, 2 March 1931.
80 TNA, CO 583/178/2, minutes by Fiddian, 26 March 1931 and Shiels,
8 April 1931.
81 TNA, CO 583/178/2, minute by Passfield, 14 April 1931.
82 TNA, CO 583/199/9, OAG, Lagos, to Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, 4 July 1934.
84 Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown, 32–7, 168–73.
85 TNA, CO 583/191/1, C. W. Duncan, ‘Statement of an interview with an
unauthorised deputation of constables and members of the Fire Brigade’,
n.d., April 1933.
86 TNA, CO 583/191/1, Governor of Nigeria tel. to Secretary of State for the
Colonies, 21 April 1933.
87 TNA, CO 583/191/1, Governor of Nigeria tel. to Secretary of State for the
Colonies, 25 April 1933; no. 2106/1, Inspector-general of Police, C. W. Duncan
to Government Chief Secretary, Lagos, 27 April 1933.
88 TNA, CO 583/191/1, C. H. F. Apthorp, Officer in charge, CID, to
Commissioner of Police, Colony, ‘Demonstration by Police and Fire
Brigade in Lagos’, 19 April 1933.
89 TNA, CO 583/191/1, no. 2106/1, C. W. Duncan to Government Chief
Secretary, Lagos, 27 April 1933.
90 TNA, CO 583/191/1, IGP circular to Lagos Police personnel, 24 April
1933.
91 TNA, CO 583/191/1, C. C. Francis, Police Magistrate, Supreme Court

of Nigeria, District Court of Lagos judgement, 28 April 1933. Two other
men received shorter prison terms (four and three months, also with hard
labour) and the remaining ten were fined between £2 and £1. All were
dismissed from the force, to which the fire brigade was attached (eight of
the fifteen were fire brigade members).
92 TNA, CO 583/191/1, Governor Donald Cameron letter to Cunliffe-
Lister, 18 August 1933.
93 Ibid.
94 TNA, CO 583/191/1, CO Minute, Alex Fiddian, 9 September 1933. There
are parallels here with the causes of post-war dissent in the Khartoum
police in British Sudan, see W. J. Berridge, ‘“What the Men are Crying
Out for is Leadership”: The Khartoum Police Strike of 1951 and the
Battle for Administrative Control’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History, 39:1 (2011), 121–42.
95 TNA, CO 583/191/1, quotation from CO minute by C. J. Jeffries,
11 September 1933; see also Brigadier C. Norman minute for Sir Cecil
Bottomley, 12 September 1933.
96 TNA, CO 583/195/10, Cameron to Cunliffe-Lister, 29 December 1933.
Lagos per-ton prices for Nigeria’s four main export staples had fallen as
follows:
1929 (£/shillings per ton) 1932 1933
palm oil 23.10 8.5 5.10
palm kernels 13.10 6.13 4.5
cocoa 34.10 17.7 10.10
groundnuts (Kano price) 9.0 6.0 2.16
97 Malmsten, ‘British Government Policy toward Colonial Development,’,

1270–2; TNA, CO 583/195/10, CO minute by Fiddian, 29 January 1934.
98 TNA, CO 583/195/11, CO minute by Creasy, 5 February 1934.
99 TNA, CO 583/195/11, C. W. Leese to Lagos Government Chief Secretary,
4 January 1934, ‘Economy Committee – first report’.
100 TNA, CO 583/199/6, no. 729, Cameron to Secretary of State for the
Colonies, 17 August 1934.
101 TNA, CO 583/195/11, ‘Economy Committee – first report’, especially
appendices I and II.
102 TNA, CO 583/195/11, minute by Fiddian, 16 February 1934.
103 TNA, CO 583/195/14, Economy Committee report, part B, 3 February
1934.
104 TNA, CO 583/195/15, Lieutenant-Governor, Southern Provinces,
W. Buchanan-Smith, memo on the Economy Committee’s Report ‘B’,
12 April 1934.
105 TNA, CO 583/195/14, Economy Committee report, part B, 3 February
1934, pp. 8–9; CO 583/195/15, Memo by Chief Commissioner, Northern
Provinces, G. S. Browne: comments on Economy Committee Report ‘B’,
25 May 1934. Cameron proposed to make surplus European police officers
available for service with the native administrations to avert redundancies
among European staff. But he dismissed thirty-one African police and
fire brigade personnel, see CO 583/199/6 Retrenchment of staff, Nigerian

police department, 1934–6, no. 729, Cameron to Secretary of State for
the Colonies, 17 August 1934.
106 TNA, CO 583/195/15, CO minute by Creasy, 2 July 1934.
107 TNA, CO 583/195/11, Economy Committee Secretary to Government
Chief Secretary, 4 January 1935.
108 TNA, CO 583/195/13, ‘Note of a discussion in the Secretary of State’s
room at the House of Commons on Wednesday the 13th June 1934 at
5 p.m.’.
109 TNA, CO 583/195/13, Gerald Creasy, ‘Supplementary note regarding
Nigerian loans’, 22 February 1934.
110 The line in question, a 155 kilometre section between Minna and Baro
in central Nigeria, was opened in April 1910 and was largely used to ferry
goods traded by the United Africa Company.
111 TNA, CO 583/195/10, Cameron to Cunliffe-Lister, 5 October 1934.
Cameron and Leese hoped that a Colonial Office grant-in-aid would
relieve Nigeria of its Cameroon outlay, allowing them to close the
budgetary deficit heavily criticized by Whitehall officials over previous
months. The Colonial Office rejected the request, having just rejected
any grant-in-aid to Tanganyika, the largest of its former German
mandated territories in Africa, see minutes by S. Robinson and Alex
Fiddian, 1 and 5 November 1934.
112 Christopher M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘France and the
Disposition of Germany’s African Colonies, 1914–1922’, in Etudes afric-
aines offertes à Henri Brunschwig (Paris: EHESS, 1982), 209–23. Rivalries
between the Allied powers over Cameroon are discussed in Lovett Z.
Elango, ‘The Anglo-French Condominium in Cameroon 1914–1916: The
Myth and the Reality’, International Journal of African Historical Studies,
18:4 (1985), 657–73; also cited in Kenneth J. Orosz, Religious Conflict and
the Evolution of Language Policy in German and French Cameroon, 1885–
1939 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 192–6, 244 n.27–28.
113 Yearwood, ‘“In a Casual Way”’, 221–37. Preoccupied by European dip-
lomacy, the British bargained away their military dominance in wartime
Cameroon in return for French renunciation of any territorial claims on
German East Africa (Tanganyika).
114 TNA, CO 583/195/10, CO minute by S. Robinson, 1 November 1934. For
the depression’s impact in Cameroon, see Jane I. Guyer, ‘The Depression
and the Administration in South-Central Cameroon’, African Economic
History, 10:1 (1981), 67–79.
115 Nicodemus Fru Awasom, ‘Colonial Background to the Development of
Autonomist Tendencies in Anglophone Cameroon, 1946–1961’, Journal of
Third World Studies, 15:1 (1998), 163–5. The British administered 88,036
square kilometres of Cameroonian territory, France 431,845.
116 TNA, CO 583/199/13, G. R. Nicolaus to Alex Fiddian, CO, 14 August
1934.
117 TNA, CO 583/199/13, A. Chester Beatty, CAST Chairman, to Sir Donald
Cameron, 16 August 1934; tel. 242, Cameron to Secretary of State for the
Colonies, 17 August 1934.
118 TNA, CO 583/199/8, OAG, Lagos, to Colonial Office, ‘An Ordinance to

encourage the cultivation of palm oil’, 23 November 1934.
119 TNA, CO 583/223, 5, C5899/5899/18, Chairman, Cameroon Planters’
Union, Moliwe, British Cameroons, to Dr Selwyn-Clarke, Lagos, 21 May
1937.
120 TNA, CO 583/233/5, confidential tel. 35, Governor to Colonial Office,
4 February 1938.
121 TNA, CO 583/233/5, CO minutes 5 and 8 February 1938.
122 TNA, CO 583/244/22, Sir Bernard Bourdillon, ‘Memorandum on the
future political development of Nigeria’, and accompanying minutes,
various dates, October 1939. Bourdillon’s memo was one in a sequence
advocating the delegation of tax-raising powers to the native administra-
tions. He was responding to earlier proposals from Oxford University’s
ex-officio colonial adviser, Margery Perham, and wrote in anticipation of
Lord Hailey’s upcoming tour of British West Africa.
123 Vaughan, ‘Chieftaincy Politics’, 291.
124 TNA, CO 583/244/22. CO minute by G. Eastwood, 12 October 1939;
see also minutes by J. L. Keith, 11 September 1939 (file 244/1), and
O. G. R. Williams, 1 January 1940; West African dept. note, 14
November 1939. As matters stood in 1939, Northern Nigeria’s Fulani
emirates, where native administration went furthest, were unrepresented
in Nigeria’s proto-parliament, the Legislative Council. Only Southerners
were represented alongside the British members who dominated Council
decisions.
125 TNA, CO 583/223/4, Governor Bourdillon to Ormsby-Gore, 17 July
1937; S. J. S. Cookey, ‘Sir Hugh Clifford as Governor of Nigeria – An
Evaluation’, African Affairs, 79:317 (1980), 531–6. Plans for new admin-
istrative buildings at Ibadan, home of the western part of the Southern
Nigeria administration, were made in anticipation of the Southern
Provinces’ division into two from 1 April 1939, see TNA, CO 583/223/4,
CO minute, O. G. R. Williams, 3 June 1938.
126 TNA, CO 583/223/4, Bourdillon to Ormsby-Gore, 17 July 1937.
12 d e p r e ssion a n d r e vo lt: p o l ic ing t h e b e l gi a n

c ong o
1 TNA, CO 323/1150/18, Police Forces, Nigeria, 1931, 2/Org/970, Secretary,
New Scotland Yard, to Under-Secretary of State, Colonial Office, 19
September 1931.
2 Ibid., G. N. Faux-Powell, ‘Memorandum on the organization of the Nigerian
Police’, 28 October 1931.
3 Archives Africains/Afrika-archief, Brussels (AAB), Rapports officiels du
Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi, portefeuille RACB 59/4, ‘Rapport sur
l’administration du Congo Belge pendant l’année 1931 [colonial government
annual report, noted hereafter as ‘Rapport, + year’]: politique indigène –
état d’esprit des populations’.
4 AAB, portefeuille AI/4739/2738/FP, no. 192/pol/B2, Administrateur terri-
torial Van Inthout, Kandale, to Kikwat Administrateur territorial, 5 June
1931; FP/2450/170, ‘Histoire de la Révolte du Kwango’, L’Essor coloniale et

maritime, 13 August 1931. The ‘Satanas’ sect originated in the village of
Lukalama in the Yongo chefferie. The fullest information about it derived,
not from administration or police sources, but from a Kandale-based
Canadian Baptist missionary. See portefeuille AI/4739/2738/FP, Victor
Griffin letter to Administrateur territorial, poste d’Idiofa, 14 June 1931.
5 AAB, portefeuille, FP/2450/170, tel. 17, Governor-general to Colonies,
Cabinet du Ministre, 30 June 1931; tel. 68, Governor-general to Colonies,
9 September 1931. Pieces of the administrator’s body, including his head,
limbs and fingers, were distributed among Satanas devotees, a gruesome
ritual which the administration cited to justify the destruction of villages in
which body parts were discovered.
6 AAB, portefeuille, AI/4741/I, no. 3834/EM-1/FP, Vice-Governor Joseph
Beernaert, Leopoldville, to Minister of Colonies, ‘Troubles Lac Léopold
II’, 3 September 1931; no. 5422/FP1A, Vice-Governor Beernaert,
Leopoldville, to Minister of Colonies, ‘Troubles Sankuru et Lac Léopold
II’, 19 December 1931.
7 AAB, FP/2450/172, ‘Les révoltes du Sankuru et des Dekese’, 13–14 April
1932.
8 The clearest examples of this treatment were Kimbanguism, named after
its self-declared prophet Simon Kimbangu, who was imprisoned for sedi-
tion in 1921, and the Kitawala (Watchtower) charismatic movement, a
transnational evangelical group whose egalitarianism was popular among
Katanga’s mineworkers and cotton cultivators. See Jean-Luc Vellut (ed.),
Simon Kimbangu. 1921: de la prédication à la déportation (Brussels: Académie
Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2005); Osumaka Likaka, Rural Society
and Cotton in Colonial Zaire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1997), 129–30.
9 AAB, AI/4739/44/AO, ‘Note supplémentaire sur la révolte des Bapende’,
annex I and II, 15 February 1932. The worst affected territory was Kandale
where official statistics recorded 238 killed. We need to treat these official
figures cautiously, recognizing that the death toll was, if anything, substan-
tially higher.
10 Connections between the chefferie system, the imposition of the tax regime
and Kibanguism, the largest millenarian movement in the Congo dur-
ing the 1920s, are identified in Wyatt MacGaffey, ‘Ethnography and the
Closing of the Frontier of the Lower Congo, 1885–1921’, Africa, 56:3
(1986), 269–72.
11 Osumaka Likaka, ‘Rural Protest: The Mbole against Belgian Rule, 1897–
1959’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 27:3 (1994), 589–
91, 600–2.
12 Continuities with later millenarian social movements in the Kikwat region
before and after Congolese independence in 1960 are examined in Mark
Traugott, ‘The Economic Origins of the Kwilu Rebellion’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 21:3 (1979), 459, 466–75.
13 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre XII: Rapport sur la prov-
ince du Congo-Kasai’, p. 105; ‘chapitre XIII: Rapport sur la province de
l’Équateur’, p. 140.
14 MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-série: Congo Belge, vol. 8,

Governor General Maurice Lippens, ‘Rapport annuel sur l’activité de la
colonie du Congo belge pendant l’année 1922’, p. 32. For depictions of
Kibanguism and Kitawala, see Marie E. Dunkerley, ‘Education Policies
and the Development of the Colonial State in the Belgian Congo, 1916–
1939’, University of Exeter Ph.D., 2009, 82–4.
15 The Free State’s ruthless exploitation of the Congolese population, par-
ticularly in the extraction of red rubber, is vividly recounted in Adam
Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism
(London: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Less sensationalist, but equally
damning are Martin Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe:
Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath (London: Routledge,
2002); Neil Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and
the Congo, reprint (London: Granta, 1999). The two classic indict-
ments of Belgian actions were written by E. D. Morel, the leader of the
Congo Reform Association in Britain: King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo
(London: Heinemann, 1904) and Red Rubber (London: Unwin, 1906).
However, the idea that the Free State’s excesses were wholly identifiable
with Leopold has been challenged, see Vincent Viaene, ‘King Leopold’s
Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party, 1860–1905’,
Journal of Modern History, 80:4 (2008), 763–80. For international criti-
cism of Free State practices, see William Roger Louis, ‘Roger Casement
and the Congo’, Journal of African History, 5:1 (1964), 99–120; Kevin
Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures,
and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain’; Andrew Porter, ‘Sir Roger
Casement and the International Humanitarian Movement’, both articles
in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29:2 (2001), 27–58 and
59–74.
16 MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-série: Congo Belge, vol. 8, Governor-
general Maurice Lippens, ‘Rapport, 1922’, Governor-general’s introduction.
17 AAB, RACB 59/9, ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre XV: Rapport sur la province
de Costermansville’. The six provinces designated in October 1933 were
Leopoldville, Kasai, Equateur, Katanga, Kivu and Orientale. Their pro-
vincial capitals were, respectively, Leopoldville (Kinshasa), Lusambo,
Coquilhatville (Mbandaka), Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), Costermansville
(Bakuvu) and Stanleyville (Kisangani).
18 Dembour, Recalling the Belgian Congo, 18–20.
19 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and
Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 117–58
passim.
20 Mwelwa C. Musambachime, ‘Military Violence against Civilians: The
Case of the Congolese and Zairean Military in the Pedicle, 1890–1988’,
International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23:4 (1990), 643–64.
21 AAB, portefeuille RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre IX: Force
publique’.
Governor-general E. Henry, ‘Rapport, 1919’, submitted to Brussels Cham
ber of Representatives on 7 October 1920, pp. 154–5. The Force publique by
then counted 267 European officers and NCOs, plus 334 European other
ranks. New guidelines for the classification and promotion of officer grades
stipulated four criteria: seniority and position within metropolitan army;
length of African service; war service; senior officer’s recommendation.
23 Efforts were also made to professionalize the rank and file. The colony’s
military training schools introduced courses for African NCOs. Literacy
classes, as well as practical instruction in typing, record-keeping and basic
legal procedure were also rolled out in the decade ahead. See MAE, série
K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-série: Congo Belge, vol. 8, Governor-general
Lippens, ‘Rapport, 1922’, p. 31.
Governor-general Martin Rutten, ‘Rapport, 1923’, p. 29. 403 African
troops took training courses at Lisala in 1923.
25 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 85. The
first civilian city police forces were established by decree on 22 November
1926 but, in the interior, most police units were paramilitary, combining
white European police officers, former Force publique recruits, and current
African rank-and-file soldiers.
Governor-general Maurice Lippens, ‘Rapport sur l’administration belge
du Ruanda-Urundi pendant l’année 1928 présenté aux Chambres par le
Premier Ministre, Ministre des Colonies, Henri Jaspar’, pp. 1–42. Former
German colonies effectively under Belgian control from 1916, colonial
troops were required to maintain order in Ruanda-Urundi under the terms
of the League of Nations type B mandate conferred in 1924. To that end,
fifty-seven policemen were recruited in Ruanda during 1928, while another
199 policiers indigènes were trained at the Force publique garrison in Urundi
from November 1926. On 31 December 1928 total black troop strength in
the two territories was 604, commanded by four European officers and six
European NCOs.
27 Ibid. In December 1931, 60 per cent of Force publique reservists were public
servants.
28 MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-série: Congo Belge, vol. 8, Governor-
general Maurice Lippens, ‘Rapport, 1922’. The registered European popu-
lation of Belgian Congo rose by 615 during 1922 from 9,631 to 10,246. Of
these, 5,915 were Belgian (57.7 per cent). By 1 January 1925, the European
population had grown to 12,674 (of whom 7,646 were Belgians), among an
estimated total population of 7.5 million. See TNA, FO 629/8, ‘Economic
Situation in the Belgian Congo’, June 1926, appendix 1.
29 At War Office suggestion, in 1927, Captain E. W. F. Salis, then serving with
the British King’s African Rifles, inspected Force publique units. He described
the troupes en service territoriale as ‘primarily a police force’ completely distinct
from the frontline troupes campées. The troupes territoriales, he noted, attracted
poorer recruits and disciplinary standards were more relaxed: TNA, CO
822/5/14, Report on the Congo Belge, March and April 1927 for Inspector-
general, K. A. R., 30 May 1927. For the origins of the Force publique’s role in
colonial governance, see L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian
Africa, 1884–1914 (Princeton University Press, 1979), 45–84 passim.
30 MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-série: Congo Belge, vol. 8, ‘Rapport,

1919’, pp. 15–17.
31 The Congo Council of Government held six sessions in 1919 during which
forty-eight discrete subjects were addressed. Prominent among them were
measures against vagabondage, segregation and the policing of urban space,
the legal powers assigned to chiefs and to Tribunaux de police, shortages of
qualified administrative personnel, greater autonomy for the eastern mining
province of Katanga, employers’ tax liability, sleeping sickness and public
health and rice exports. See MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–40, sous-série:
Congo Belge, vol. 8, Governor-general Eugène Henry, ‘Rapport, 1919’,
submitted to Brussels Chamber of Representatives on 7 October 1920.
32 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre XIII: Rapport sur la province
de l’Équateur’, p. 139. Renewed violence in the Lake Leopold district of
Equateur province in September 1932 bore this out.
33 Contemporary and historical commentators have suggested that taxation
was a key weapon in official attempts to establish a monetary economy
of colonial wage-earners compelled either to seek paid work or to grow
cash crops, see David N. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World
Intervention: Mines, Money, and US Policy in the Congo Crisis (University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 52–6.
34 The term ‘king of the bush’ was coined by former French West African
governor, Hubert Deschamps, Roi de la brousse: Mémoires d’autres-mondes
(Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1975).
35 Dembour, Recalling the Belgian Congo, 100–2.
36 The revolt is analysed in Louis-François Vanderstraeten, La répression de
la révolte des Pende du Kwango en 1931 (Brussels: Académie Royale des
Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2001).
37 AAB, portefeuille FP/2450/170, 1ère Direction générale note, ‘Révolte
au Kwango: emploi de la Force publique’, 27 June 1931; ‘La révolte au
Kwango’, L’Essor colonial et maritime, 30 July 1931.
38 AAB, portefeuille FP/2450/170, Ministry of Colonies, Ière Direction-
générale note, ‘Maintien de l’ordre’, n.d., July 1931.
39 AAB, portefeuille AI/4739/2738/FP, pol. 493, Administrateur territorial,
Kikwat, to Commissaire de district du Kwango, Bandundu, 29 May 1931.
40 AAB, AI/4739/2738/FP, Administrateur territorial to Commissaire de dis-
trict, Kikwat, ‘Mouvement anti-européen, région de la Lutshima’, 30 May
1931.
41 AAB, AI/4739/2738/FP, 1955 and 1957/pol/E2, Commissaire Vanderhallen
to Administrateur, Kikwat, 3 June 1931; FP/2450/270, ‘Ordonnance, 30
juillet 1931 no. 58/J. plaçant les territoires de Kikwat et de Kandale sous le
régime militaire mitigé’, Bulletin administratif, no. 16, 25 August 1931.
42 AAB, FP/2450/170, Ministry of Colonies, Ière Direction-générale to
Governor-general, ‘Maintien de l’ordre’, n.d., July 1931.
43 AAB, AI/4739/56/AO, Colonel Servais, Leopoldville, to Congo-Kasai
Governor, ‘Opération militaire du Kwango’, 8 July 1931.
44 AAB, FP/2450/170, tel. 25, Governor-general to Cabinet du Ministre, 16 July
1931.
45 AAB, AI/4739/66/AO, Commissaire Vanderhallen, ‘Rapport sur les

opérations du 18 au 20 juillet et aperçu sur la situation’, 20 July 1931;
Vanderhallen, ‘Rapport sur les opérations du 21 juillet au 4 août et aperçu
sur la situation’, 4 August 1931.
46 AAB, AI/4739/70/AO, Vanderhallen, ‘Rapport sur les opérations du 4 août
au 15 et aperçu sur la situation’, 15 August 1931; portefeuille AI/4739/3446/
FP, EM-FP1, no. 3446, Governor-general Tilkens to Colonies, 10 August
1931. Troops used bicycles to move between villages and, according to the
Governor, were occasionally fired upon with bows and arrows or ‘insulted’
by the local population.
47 AAB, FP/2450/170, tel. 67, Governor Beernaert to Colonies, 6 September
1931. The Governor noted approvingly that, after the events at Mukuku,
villagers in the Kandale region resumed commercial farming to prove their
loyalty and fund their taxes.
48 AAB, FP/2450/170, tel. 70, Beernaert to Colonies, 11 September 1931.
49 AAB, AI/4739/70/AO, Vanderhallen, ‘Rapport sur les opérations du 15
août au 27 et aperçu sur la situation’, 27 August 1931; AAB, portefeuille
AI/4739/75/AO, Vanderhallen, ‘Rapport sur les opérations du 28 août au 8
septembre et aperçu sur la situation’, 8 September 1931.
50 AAB, AI/4739/70/AO, Administrateur territorial Weeckx, district du
Kwango, territoire de Kikwat, ‘Journal de route’, 16 to 29 June 1931;
Vanderhallen, ‘Rapport sur les opérations du 15 août au 27 et aperçu sur la
situation’, 27 August 1931.
51 In fact, larger numbers of chiefs in Congo-Kasai were inducted into the colo-
nial system of revenue collection over the previous year, exposing them to
harsher criticism within their communities, see AAB, RACB 59/4, ‘Rapport,
1931, chapitre XI: Rapport sur la province du Congo-Kasai’, p. 1.
52 AAB, AI/4739/70/AO, Commissaire-général Wauters, instruction issued
on behalf of Governor Tilkens, ‘Méthodes politiques – région Bapende’,
10 September 1931.
53 AAB, FP/2450/170, ‘Révolte au Kwango: renseignements extraits des
dossiers’, 12 August 1931; AI/4739/44/AO, ‘Note supplémentaire sur la
révolte des Bapende’, 15 February 1932.
54 AAB, AI/4739/57/AO, ‘Rapport du Commissaire de district adjoint
de Williamort en date du 24 juin 1931’. The long-term decline of wild
r ubber tapping is described in Robert Harms, ‘The End of Red Rubber: A
Reassessment’, Journal of African History, 16:1 (1975), 76–88.
55 AAB, AI/4739/44/AO, ‘Note supplémentaire sur la révolte des Bapende’,
15 February 1932.
56 ‘Comment Mr. Ballot a été assassiné par les noirs révoltés au Kwango’,
La Nation Belge, 23 August 1931; ‘Au Kwango, avant la Révolte’, La Libre
Belgique, 27 August 1931; ‘La technique d’une Révolte’, L’Essor colonial
et maritime, 3 September 1931; Le Conseiller congolais, no. 10, October
1931.
57 AAB, AI/4739, correspondence between Émile Vandervelde, President of
the Belgian Labour Party (Parti Ouvrier Belge), and the Ministry of Colonies
linking the disorders to forced labour practices.
58 Otto Roesch, ‘Migrant Labour and Forced Rice Production in Southern

Mozambique: The Colonial Peasantry of the Lower Limpopo Valley’,
Journal of Southern African Studies, 17:2 (1991), 239–45; Allen Isaacman,
‘Coercion, Paternalism and the Labour Process: The Mozambican Cotton
Regime, 1938–1961’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18:3 (1992), 487–
526; Isaacman, ‘Peasants, Work and the Labor Process’,815–55.
59 Buelens and Marysse, ‘Returns on Investments’, 138–9; Jean Stengers,
Combien le Congo a-t-il coûté à la Belgique (Brussels: La Louvière, 1957).
60 Buelens and Marysse, ‘Returns on Investments’, 142–7, 159–60. New com-
panies established in the decade after 1918 included the Société Minière du
Bas Congo (diamonds, 1919), the Société des Mines d’Or de Kilo-Moto (gold,
1926), as well as breweries, cement-makers, cotton and textile manufactur-
ers. For background on the mining and palm oil industries, see Jean-Luc
Vellut, ‘Mining in the Belgian Congo, 1910–1960’, in David Birmingham
and Phyllis M. Martin (eds.), History of Central Africa, 2 vols. (London:
Longman, 1983), vol II, 126–63; Jules Marchal, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts:
Colonial Exploitation in the Congo (London: Verso, 2008).
61 Treatments of the Congo’s forced labour regimes include David Northrup,
Beyond the Bend in the River: African Labour in Eastern Zaire, 1865–1940
(Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1988); William J. Samarin, Black
Man’s Burden: African Colonial Labour on the Congo and Ubangi Rivers,
1880–1900 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989); Likaka, Rural Society and
Cotton in Colonial Zaire; Jules Marchal, Forced Labour in the Gold and Copper
Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910–1945 (Popenguine: Per
Ankh, 2005), Marchal, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts.
62 Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 142.
63 By a law of 13 July 1914 the government of French Equatorial Africa secured
a loan of 171 million francs for public works, including 93 million set aside
for construction of a railway line from Brazzaville to the sea. Because of
wartime inflationary pressures the project was revalued in 1924, when 370
million was allocated over eight years to build the so-called ‘Congo-Ocean
line’. The French colonial lobby group, the Comité de l’Afrique Française,
tried to stimulate investor interest in the project by highlighting French
Equatorial Africa’s crippling trade dependence on the existing Belgian and
Portuguese colonial railway networks in central and southern Africa. It was
this assertion that the Belgians contested. Successive Brussels governments
insisted that French problems stemmed from a shortage of merchant ship-
ping, not the freight costs involved in using Belgian Congo railways. The
Belgians also claimed that improvements to their Leopoldville-Matadi line
would benefit French exporters: MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-
série: Afrique Equatoriale Française, vol. 10, K-12–1, M. Fiez, French
Consul in Belgian Congo, to Raymond Poincaré, Foreign Minister and
Premier, 12 July 1922: ‘A/S du Chemin de fer Brazzaville-Pointe Noire’;
Direction des affaires politiques, to sous-direction d’Afrique, 8 March
1923; no. 850 Chambre des Députés, treizième legislature, Session extra-
ordinaire de 1924, Projet de loi, 10 December 1924.
64 MAE, série K, sous-série: AEF, vol. 10, Direction Afrique-Levant note:
interpellation de M. Auguste Brunet’, 3 August 1929.
65 Belgian methods were also redolent of the coercion used to supply the
vast Office du Niger project. But they contrasted sharply with French prac-
tices elsewhere in West Africa, where the regulation of commercial and
agricultural activity in heavily commercialized areas, such as the Côte
d’Ivoire, encouraged the local population to keep farming in areas in which
French trading companies set up operations. Seen from the official per-
spective, the one prerequisite was that traditional economic activity should
not directly interfere with trading company operations. See ANOM,
Henri Félix de Lamothe papers, 4PA/2, Sous-dossier: Congo, 1898–99,
Commissaire Général du Gouvernement, Henri de Lamothe, to Messieurs
les Administrateurs de Région et de Cercle, ‘Au sujet des droits des tiers
et des indigènes dans les territoires concédés’, 7 April 1900; Émile Bélime,
‘Fondements naturels, politiques et moraux des travaux Nigériens’, Outre-
Mer, 6:2 (1934), 177–87; Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, chapter 11; Fall,
Le Travail forcé en Afrique occidentale française; Echenberg and Filipovich,
‘African Military Labour’, 533–51; Filipovich, ‘Destined to Fail’, 239–60.
66 TNA, CO 822/26/2, 271/258/1/30, Nevile Bland, Brussels, to Arthur
Henderson, 28 March 1930.
67 Ibid., 353/258/3/30, Granville, Brussels, to Arthur Henderson, 25 April 1930.
68 Ibid., W6696/34/52, Bland to Henderson, 1 July 1930.
69 Ibid., 637/358/10/30, Granville to Henderson, 15 July 1930.
70 Ibid., CO Minute by Eastwood, 5 May 1930.
71 Beginning with Henri Carton de Tournai in 1924 and ending with Albert
de Vleeschauwer, still at the Ministry when Belgium fell to Germany in
1940, Paul Crokaert, who took office in mid-August 1931, was one of eight
Catholic Union politicians to serve as Minister of Colonies between the
wars. Only Édouard Pecher, the Liberal Party President, who held the
portfolio for a year from November 1926, broke this sixteen-year period of
otherwise uninterrupted Catholic Union control.
72 AAB, FP/2450/161, Minister of Colonies to Governor-general, ‘Maintien
de l’ordre dans la Colonie – Mesures préventives’, 15 September 1931.
73 AAB, FP/2450/170, tel. 82, Governor Beernaert to Cabinet du Ministre
(relays Jungers’ opinions), 20 October 1931.
74 AAB, FP/2450/170, Jungers telegram sent from Tshikapa to Cabinet du
Ministre; transmitted, via Leopoldville, on 19 November 1931.
75 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre III: Finances’ ; RACB 59/6,
‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre III: Finances – exercice 1931’. Customs receipts
fell from 228,165,000 francs in 1930 to 193,314,400 in 1931.
76 Belgium did, in fact, purchase the lion’s share of the Congo’s raw material
exports in the early 1930s. Figures peaked in 1932 when domestic pur-
chasers swallowed 76.8 per cent by value of the colony’s exports. AAB,
RACB 59/8, ‘Rapport, 1933: chapitre VII: Situation économique’, p.
84; Jean-Philippe Peemans, ‘Capital Accumulation in the Congo under
Colonialism: The Role of the State’, in P. Duignan and L. H. Gann (eds.),
Colonialism in Africa, vol. 4: The Economics of Colonialism (Cambridge
77 Colonial taxes were reduced in 1932 but Territoriale officials worried that
the beneficial social effects of these reductions might be nullified by local
chiefs determined to extract the maximum possible within their chefferie,

see AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitres XII, XIII and XV’: prov-
ince reports for Congo-Kasai, Équateur, and Katanga, pp. 104, 139, 208.
78 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre VII: Situation économique’,
pp. 1–2.
79 AAB, AI/4741/I, no. 162, Governor Duchesne, ‘Révolte Dengese’, 22
September 1931.
80 AAB, AI/4741/II, Administrateur territorial A. Aerts, ‘Journal des évène-
ments: Territoire des Dengese. Opération militaire’, 7 November 1931.
81 AAB, AI/4741/II, J. Paermentier, chef du service des affaires indigènes/
main d’œuvre, ‘Rapport des évènements du 9–12 au 15–12–31’, 15
December 1931.
82 AAB, FP/2450/170, tel. 87, Governor Beernaert to Colonies, 29 October
1931.
83 AAB, FP/2450/170, tel. 29, Governor-general Tilkens to Colonies, 25
February 1932.
84 AAB, AI/4741/II, no. 44/AI, Commissaire de district Van Hoeck to
Governor Beernaert, ‘Coupables révolte Dengese’, 25 February 1932. All
thirty-two detainees were male and two were former village headmen.
85 Governor-general Tilkens spent most of April to June and October to
December 1931 in Brussels, where he discussed planned budget cuts and
administrative reforms with the Ministry of Colonies: AAB, RACB 59/5,
‘Rapport, 1931’, p. 1.
86 AAB, AI/4741/I, no. 2672/AIMO, Commissaire-général Constant Wauters
to Governor-general, 20 October 1931; Congo-Kasai ordinance, 20
October 1931. The five chefferies, all in Kole territory, Sankuru district,
were thinly inhabited. Ethnographically classified as Basongo-meno, their
registered populations were as follows: Intola (279); Ntono (1,363); Djoka
(909); Impete (459); Ishenga (365).
87 AAB, AI/4741/I, no. 2/R, Commissaire de district Wenner, ‘Révolte
Dekese’, 8 November 1931.
88 AAB, AI/4741/I, Commandant de la Companie de marche du Sankuru,
Colmant, to Wenner, ‘Rapport sur la révolte en territoire de Kole’,
15 October 1931; no. 5296/FPIA, Governor Beernaert to Minister of
Colonies, ‘Troubles Lac Léopold II et Sankuru’, 13 January 1932.
89 AAB, AI/4741/I, no. 5636/FPIA, Tilkens to Minister of Colonies, 31
December 1931. Additional restrictions were, however, reintroduced
in some Dengese areas in February 1932 at the behest of the territory
administrator. These remained in force until 28 April, the Force publique
having apprehended three suspected ringleaders. See AAB, AI/4741/II,
Administrateur territorial Roquet, ‘Rapport sur l’opération militaire’, 17
February 1932; no. 42/AO, Tilkens to Minister of Colonies, 28 April 1932.
90 AAB, AI/4741/I, Frères de la charité, École professionnelle de Kabinda,
to M. Louwers, Minister of Colonies chef de cabinet, 21 January 1932.
91 AAB, AI/4741/II, no. 19/AO/E4, Tilkens to Minister of Colonies, 13
March 1933; ‘Rapport au sujet des exactions signalées dans l’ancien
territoire de Kole’ n.d., filed in March 1933.
92 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport au sujet des exactions signalées dans l’ancien

territoire de Kole’; ‘Rapport sur les instructions faites au sujet d’exactions ou
prétendues exactions commis en territoire des Dengese avant la révolte de
1931’; ‘Rapport sur les causes de la révolte chez les Dengese et les Basongo-
meno’; ‘Rapport sur les «meurtres» ou usages abusifs d’armes commis par
des soldats ou gardes noirs de troupes coloniale lors de l’opération militaire
en territoire des Dengese’. All four reports filed in March 1933.
93 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport sur les instructions faites au sujet d’exactions
ou prétendues exactions commis en territoire des Dengese avant la révolte
de 1931’, pp. 4–5.
94 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport sur les “meurtres” ou usages abusifs d’armes
commis par des soldats ou gardes noirs de troupes coloniale lors de
l’opération militaire en territoire des Dengese’, p. 5.
95 Forced cotton cultivation, often involving the police and Force publique,
became a key mechanism of colonial social control in the inter-war years,
see Likaka, Rural Society, 45–51.
96 The abuse of women and summary punishment of civilians were embedded
in the Force publique’s institutional culture according to Musambachime,
‘Military Violence against Civilians’, 646–50.
97 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport au sujet des exactions signalées dans l’ancien
territoire de Kole’, pp.1–3.
98 Ibid., pp. 4–6.
99 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport sur les instructions faites au sujet d’exactions
ou prétendues exactions commis en territoire des Dengese avant la révolte
de 1931’, pp. 2–3.
100 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport sur les causes de la révolte chez les Dengese et
les Basongo-meno’, p. 3.
101 Ibid., p. 2.
102 The tax burden on the Dengese was finally reduced in 1933, the beneficial
effects of which allowed the replacement of the local military regime with a
less rigorous police occupation in December 1932, see AAB, RACB 59/9,
‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre XVII: Rapport sur la province de Lusambo’.
103 For a doctrinaire, class-based analysis of the Congo’s millenarian social
movements as forms of peasant revolt, see Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ‘Political
Consciousness among African Peasants in the Belgian Congo’, Review
of African Political Economy, 19 (September–December 1980), 23–8. A
subtler reading of peasant strategies of dissent is Likaka, ‘Rural Protest’,
597–602.
104 AAB, AI/4741/II, ‘Rapport sur les causes de la révolte chez les Dengese
et les Basongo-meno’, p. 3. Maffei, for instance, concluded that the
Basongo-meno revolted out of ‘hatred’ for the European, not because
labour demands or taxes were excessive, nor because their cultural prac-
tices were threatened.
105 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932’, p. 1.
106 SG also controlled Forminière, the colony’s largest diamond-mining con-
cern, and the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga, which
focused on rail freight services for the mining sector. By 1932 SG was
the largest of four corporate investors whose combined capital accounted

for over 75 per cent of Congo investments. See Buelens and Marysse,
‘Returns on Investments’, 141.
107 John Higginson, A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor
Policy, Private Enterprise, and the African Mineworker, 1907–1951 (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 19–20, 29–31, 38–9; Sally
Herbert Frankel, Capital Investment in Africa: Its Course and Effects, Royal
Institute of International Affairs, African Research Survey (Oxford
University Press, 1938), 292–4, also cited in Gibbs, The Political Economy
of Third World Intervention, 60.
108 John Hillman, ‘Chartered Companies and the Development of the Tin
Industry in Belgian Africa, 1900–1939’, African Economic History, 25 (1997),
149–52.
109 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931: politique indigène et main d’œuvre’, pp.
10–11.
110 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre XIV: Rapport sur la province du Katanga’.
111 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre VII: Situation économique – firmes et
établissements’.
112 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1931: Politique indigène et main d’œuvre’, p. 11.
113 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931: Politique indigène et main d’œuvre’,
pp. 10–15; ‘Rapport sur la province du Katanga’. Estimated unemploy-
ment rates were calculated on the basis of local, itinerant and migrant
workers, and varied between provinces. Katanga’s mining industry saw
the sharpest declines but the province was less heavily populated than
Congo-Kasai or Orientale.
114 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre XV: Rapport sur la province
du Katanga’, p. 208.
p. 1; AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre I: Politique indigène et
main d’œuvre’, p. 9.
116 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 85.
‘Rapport, 1923’, Governor-general Martin Rutten’s introduction.
118 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1926’, Governor-general Rutten’s introduction.
119 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931: Politique indigène’, pp. 4–5; AAB,
RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre I: Politique indigène et main
d’œuvre’, p. 10.
120 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 85. In
1932, for instance, the harvest cultivated by soldiers at Force publique mili-
tary camps was valued at 112,000 francs. Troops hunted 225,000 francs
worth of bush-meat in the same year.
121 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 85;
RACB 59/9, ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 109. The
line between troops’ participation in public works and their supervision of
labour gangs thus engaged is never clarified in the colonial government’s
annual reports.
122 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 85.
123 Ibid.
124 AAB, RACB 59/9, ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 108.
Volunteer units were, by then, organized in Elisabethville, Jadotville,
Albertville, Kongolo, Luebo, Kabinda, Leopoldville, Matadi, Boma,
Thysville, Banningville, Inongo, Coquilhatville, Stanleyville, Irumu,
Kasongo and Buta.
125 AAB, RACB 59/5, ‘Rapport, 1931, chapitre IX: Force publique’, pp.
86–7.
126 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre XV: Rapport sur la province
du Katanga’, p. 208. Katanga’s registered black workforce fell from an
estimated 86,000 in 1928 to 44,000 by 1 January 1933. Approximately
2,000 of these were thought to be former domestic servants employed by
white returnees formerly resident in Elisabethville and Jadotville, towns
whose black populations fell sharply as a result.
127 AAB, RACB 59/6, ‘Rapport, 1932, chapitre I: Politique indigène et main
d’œuvre’, pp. 11–12.
128 Buelens and Marysse, ‘Returns on Investments’, 142.
129 TNA, CO 795/49/12, ‘A review of conditions existing in the mining camps
of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga’, n.d., July–August, 1932, pp. 1–2,
5. Cleaner water supply was a welcome, but recent innovation. Previously
inadequate provision led to typhoid and dysentery outbreaks during and
after the First World War. They were compounded by the 1919 influenza
epidemic, which pushed mineworker mortality rates to record highs, see
Higginson, A Working Class, 33–5.
130 Higginson, A Working Class, 54–7.
131 Buelens and Marysse, ‘Returns on Investments’, 143.
132 For a survey of labour regulation, see Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ‘The Great
Depression and the Making of the Colonial Economic System in the
Belgian Congo’, African Economic History, 4 (Fall 1977), 153–76.
Rutten, ‘Rapport, 1926’, p. 29.
134 TNA, CO 795/49/12, ‘A review of conditions existing in the mining
camps of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga’, n.d., July–August, 1932;
Higginson, A Working Class, 26–8, 40–51. Particularly effective was the
much-feared private recruiting agency, the Portuguese Angolan firm,
Correa Frères, which ‘ran a virtual fiefdom in Lulua district’ (Higginson,
quote at 48).
135 Bruce Fetter, ‘The Union Minière and its Hinterland: A Demographic
Reconstruction’, African Economic History, 12:1 (1983), 68–9.
136 Higginson, A Working Class, 94–5.
of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga’, pp. 29–36: H. de Boer, UMHK
deputy-director of sanitary services, ‘Notes on the pathology of the native
in the industrial camps of the UMHK’, n.d.
138 Higginson, A Working Class, 40.
139 Maryinez Lyons, ‘From “Death Camps” to Cordon Sanitaire: The
Development of Sleeping Sickness Policy in the Uele District of the
Belgian Congo, 1903–1914’, Journal of African History, 26:1 (1985),

69–91; Mwelwa C. Musambachime, ‘The Social and Economic Effects
of Sleeping Sickness in Mweru-Luapula 1906–1922’, African Economic
History, 10 (1981), 151–4.
140 Similar, although less regimented, movements of women and families to
accompany the male workforce took place in Northern Rhodesia’s cop-
per-belt, see Jane L. Parpart, ‘“Where is your mother?” Gender, Urban
Marriage, and Colonial Discourse on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1924–
1945’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 27:2 (1994),
247–50. Company involvement in the process is analysed in George
Chauncey Jr., ‘The Locus of Reproduction: Women’s Labour in the
Zambian Copperbelt, 1927–1953’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 7:2
(1981), 135–53. The Rhodesian branch of the Selection Trust contin-
ued to invest in ‘aid’ for rural communities in Northern Rhodesia and
Nyasaland that supplied the bulk of the copper-belt workforce in the
1950s, see Nicholas J. White, ‘Decolonisation in the 1950s: The Version
According to British Business’, in Martin Lynn, The British Empire in
the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006),
102.
of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga’, n.d., July–August, 1932, pp. 3–6,
UMHK, central medical service order no. 42, pp. 19–26.
142 Ibid., pp. 9–12, 37.
143 Ibid., p. 13.
144 Higginson, A Working Class, 93–129 passim.
145 Perrings, ‘Consciousness, Conflict and Proletarianization’, 31–51; Cooper,
Decolonization and African Society, 50, 58–9. It is also worth noting that,
while Northern Rhodesia’s labour unrest did not result in the recognition
of collective bargaining, the subsequent official inquiry yielded improve-
ments in mineworkers’ pay scales, see R. J. Moore, ‘The Disturbances in
the Copperbelt: The Forster Commission Report’, Journal of the Royal
African Society, 41:162 (January 1942), 43–5. The author of this article, the
missionary R. J. B. “Mike” Moore was particularly well informed about
copper-belt conditions, see Sean Morrow, ‘“On the Side of the Robbed”:
R. J. B. Moore, Missionary on the Copperbelt, 1933–1941’, Journal of
Religion in Africa, 19:3 (1989), 244–63.
pp. 8–15. The impact of economic conditions in Katanga’s mining sec-
tor on Elisabethville’s growth and segmentation is discussed in Bruce
Fetter, The Creation of Elisabethville, 1910–1940 (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution, 1976).
147 AAB, RACB 59/8, ‘Rapport, 1933: chapitre III: Finances’, p. 29.
148 AAB, RACB 59/8, ‘Rapport, 1933: chapitre VII: Situation économique’,
pp. 83–4.
p. 85. In 1933 the Katanga administration opened a ‘European Labour
Bureau’ in Elisabethville to try and reverse the trend.
150 AAB, RACB 59/8, ‘Rapport, 1933: chapitre IX: Force publique’, p. 110.
151 Ibid. For the occupation regime in Kwango, see AAB, RACB 59/8,
‘Rapport, 1933: chapitre XII: Rapport sur la province de Léopoldville’,
pp. 129–30.
p. 111.
153 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre I: Politique indigène et main d’œuvre’, p. 10.
154 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre XII: Rapport sur la province de
Léopoldville, chapitre XV: Rapport sur la province de Costermansville’,
pp. 131, 229.
155 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre XVII: Rapport sur la province de Lusambo’,
p. 307.
156 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre XII: Rapport sur la province de Léopoldville,
chapitre XVI: Rapport sur la province d’Elisabethville’, pp. 131, 267.
157 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1934: chapitre I: Politique indigène et main d’œuvre’,
pp. 8–10.
pp. 111–13.
159 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1935: chapitre III: Finances’, pp. 43–6; AAB, RACB
59/11, ‘Rapport, 1936: chapitre III: Finances’, pp. 50–3.
160 Ibid., ‘Rapport, 1935: chapitre I: Politique indigène et main d’œuvre’, pp.
1–2; Ryckmans’ approach to colonial administration is explored by his
biographer, Jacques Vanderlinden, Pierre Ryckmans (1891–1959): Coloniser
dans l’honneur (Brussels: De Boeck-Wesmael Université, 1994). The con-
tradictions inherent in Ryckmans’ approach are discernible in the title of
his 1948 memoirs: Dominer pour servir.
161 AAB, RACB 59/12, ‘Rapport, 1937: chapitre I: Politique indigène’, p. 6.
162 AAB, RACB 59/11, ‘Rapport, 1936: chapitre III: Finances – exportation’,
p. 63.
163 Higginson, A Working Class, 113–29; Butler, Copper Empire, chapter 1.
164 AAB, RACB 59/12, ‘Rapport, 1937: chapitre I: Politique indigène’, p. 6.
165 AAB, RACB 60/1, ‘Rapport, 1938: chapitre I: Politique indigène’, pp. 7–9.
166 AAB, RACB 59/11, ‘Rapport, 1936: chapitre I: Politique indigène et main
c onc l u sion
1 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 465; Cooper, Africa Since 1940,
chapters 7–8.
2 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 140.
3 ‘Police reform – Power to the People’, The Economist, 4 December 2010, p. 36.
4 TNA, CO 583/195/10, Donald Cameron, Governor of Nigeria, to Secretary
of State for Colonies, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, 29 December 1933: ‘Nigeria,
financial position, 1934’; CO 267/664/2, CO minute by R. Turnball,
‘Summary of Sierra Leone’s financial position’, 17 January 1939.
5 John Horne, ‘Defining the Enemy: War, Law, and the levée en masse from
1870 to 1945’, in Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron (eds.), The People in
Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114.
6 Brocheux, ‘Le Prolétariat des plantations d’hévéas au Vietnam méridional’,
55–86; Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, 43–90 passim.
7 AAB, RACB 59/10, ‘Rapport, 1935: chapitre I: Politique indigène et main
8 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 40–50; and Frederick Cooper,
On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in
Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
9 Berman and Lonsdale, ‘Crises of Accumulation’, 62–3.
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Index
agricultural production, 28–9 Belgian Chamber of Representatives,

Al Azhar University (Cairo), 199 311
Algeria Belgian Congo
gendarmerie, 93–5, 102 administrative reorganization, 318, 324
Algiers headquarters, 102 capital investment in, 309
‘limited Algerianization’, 104 Congo-Ocean railway line, 309–10
patrolling, 103–4 depression conditions, 308–9, 313,
political violence and, 107–8 321–3, 332
poor relations with the police, 102 economic recovery after depression,
rural policing, 103–4 323–4
police intelligence gathering, 125 emergency restrictions, 302, 307, 314,
policing, 105 323
railway network, 101 European population, 306, 319
use of army to keep order, 115–16 Force publique, 302
Ali, Mohamed, 121 cutbacks to, 318–19
Amery, Leo, 30, 62 policing of labour, 317–18
Amritsar massacre (1919), 105 reform, 305
Anarchical and Military Crimes Act reorganization, 322
(1919), 67 suppression of Kwango revolt, 307
Anglo-Irish War, 69, 70 use of chicotte, 312
Apex Oilfields, 241–2, 243, 246 work alongside police, 305–6
army forced labour, 309–12
French instances of rape, 315
call-outs in support of Algerian Kwango revolt, 301–3, 306–9, 333
police, 115–16 chiefs blamed, 308
call-outs in support of Tunisian recriminations over, 312–13
police, 131, 133–4 local government, 303–5
imposes martial law in Tunisia chefferie system, 302, 318, 324, 332
(1938), 136 mining industry, 316–17, 319–21, 324,
occupation force in Tunisia, 117 333
repression of Vietnamese rebellions labour supply, 316–17, 321
(1930–1), 156 police
Assam tea planters, 76 Nigeria-style reforms, 301
Association of reformist ‘ulama, 100 punishments, 69–70
Aubert, General Charles, 157, 160 training, 305
use of auxiliaries, 319
Bank of Indochina, 4, 148, 161 Red Cross and forced labour, 311
relations with government, 163–5 religious sects, 302–3, 324, 333
Barbusse, Henri, 171 Sankuru disorders, 312–16
Bazin, Hervé, 150, 151 ‘Satanas’ sect, 302–3
Beatty, Sir Alfred Chester, 264, 298 security force abuses, 314–16
Beernaert, Joseph, 314 taxation, 313, 324
517
518 Index
Belgian Congo (cont.) Cipriani, Captain Arthur, 241

Territoriale (colonial administrative Citrine, Walter, 252–3
service), 303, 306, 318, 324 Claudel, General Henri, 46
Bélime, Emile, 24–5 Clifford, Sir Hugh, 299
Beltjens, Baron, 301 colonial banking, 4
Berber dahir (1930), 114 colonial development, 30–1
Berenger, Henry, 130 Colonial Development Act (1929), 30
Bessière, General Jean, 136 Colonial Office
Blanc, Urbain, 107 and policing, 57
Blum, Léon, 126, 129 Commissions of Inquiry, 72, 216–17,
Bourdarie, Paul, 22 226–7, 231, 232, 253–4, 289
Bourdieu, Pierre, 7 policing regulations, 64
Bourdillon, Sir Bernard, 83, 299 West Africa Department, 256, 263,
Bourguiba, Habib, 127, 128, 138 268, 269, 295–6, 299
protest strategy, 135 colonial police. See police; colonial
Brévié, Jules, 173–4 policing
Briand, Aristide, 31 colonial police forces, 326–7
British Guiana, 213, 239, 241, 268 and morale, 58
1930 protests, 219 and training, 62–3
1938 protests, 221 British
British West India Regiment (BWIR), Ceylon, 62
209, 237 entry requirements, 69–70
mutiny, 211 in Cyprus, 78–9
Buchanan-Smith, Captain Walter, 289, in India, 69–70, 105
296 in Jamaica, 210–13, 230, 330
bureaux arabes (Algeria), 95 in Kenya, 69–70
Burma in Malaya, 179, 182, 197
impact of depression on, 37–8 in Nigeria, 69–70, 283–5, 289–90,
prison population, 82 294–5
taxation levels, 35 in Sierra Leone, 260, 266–9, 276
Bustamante Industrial Trades Union in Singapore, 197, 200
(BITU), 228 in South Africa, 69–70
Bustamante, Alexander, 208, 228, 229, Irish influence and, 69–70
330 race riots and, 68
Butler, Tubal Uriah ‘Buzz’, 235, 243, 246 Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP),
and 1937 labour protests, 243–5 69–70, 76, 77
Straits Settlements police, 77–8
Cameron, Sir Donald, 55, 294–5 French
Cameroon (British mandate), 283–4, and Yen Bay mutiny (1930), 156–7
297–8 French Indochina, 69–70
Campbell, Sir John, 236–7 French North Africa, 103–4
Carde, Jules, 23, 114 in Algeria, 105
Carnet B counter-espionage system, 105 in Indochina, 149, 159–61, 163
Centre d’information et d’études (CIE), 125 in Morocco, 59
Ceylon in North Africa, 61
police training school, 62 in Tunisia, 105
riots (1915), 66–7 North African
Chakhotine, Serge, 71 after First World War, 103–4
Challaye, Félicien, 171 North African gendarmerie, 103–4,
Chamberlain, Joseph, 280 129
Chamberlain, Neville, 248 Tunisian gendarmerie, 116–20
and colonial appeasement, 250 in Belgian Congo, 69–70, 305–6, 319
Chancellor, Sir John, 238, 239–40 in British West Africa, 69–70
chicotte (whip) used in Belgian Congo, riot control and, 80, 105
312, 315 colonial policing
Churchill, Winston, 184 and morale, 93
Index 519
and North African nationalism, 138 Cyprus

and prisons, 84, 214–18 1931 disorders, 78–9
and sugar estate disorders, 221–30
and vigilantism, 239–40 Daladier, Edouard, 130, 135
business and, 5 government declares martial law in
‘coercive networks’ of, 50 Tunisia, 136
decolonization and, 105 visits Tunisia (January 1939), 137–8
depression and, 35 Defence of India Act (1915), 67
employer interests and, 74, 105 Delbos, Yvon, 127
ethnic composition of forces, 18, 105 Denham, Sir Edward, 222, 226–7, 228
historical precedents and, 73 depression
in settler societies, 115 as inter-war ‘hinge’, 32
indigenous auxiliaries and, 90, 123 colonial export production and, 37–8
institutional cultures of, 105 government financial policies and, 32
language competency and, 95, 104, impact in South East Asia, 37–8
118, 328 impact on British Empire trade, 37–8
legal regulations and, 76, 86, 92, Diagne, Blaise, 24
142 diamond mining. See Sierra
lethal force and, 72 Leone:mining industry
‘minimum force’, 73, 86 district officers, 4, 34
national traditions, 6 Doumer, Paul, 84–5
nature of, 105 Dowbiggin, Inspector-general Herbert, 62
new social sciences and, 70–1 and colonial police training, 62–3
on rubber estates, 168 Duchesne, Charles, 313–14
privatization and, 266–9 Duncan, C. W., 294–5
protests and, 80 Durkheim, Emile, 70
riot control and, 289 Dutch Indonesia
use of aerial bombardment, 160 communist uprising, 199
colonial states Duy Tân Hô ̣i (Vietnam Reformation
agricultural production in, 28–9 Society), 158
economic characteristics, 26–7 Dyer, General Reginald, 75
features of, 2, 326
nature of policing in, 26–7, 326–7 Egerton, Sir Walter, 210
violence and, 210 Elder Dempster shipping conglomerate,
committee for the amnesty of 258, 261
Indochinese political prisoners, Etoile Nord-Africaine, 100
171
communism Fanon, Frantz, 41
in Singapore, 200–2 Faux-Powell, Major G. N., 290, 301
Confédération générale des travailleurs Federated Malay States (FMS).
tunisiens (CGTT), 116, 121 See Malaya
following ban on Neo-Destour, 123 Fiddian, Alex, 54, 269, 295–6
Consolidated African Selection Trust First World War
(CAST), 264–8, 298 colonial disorders and, 66
Constantine riots (1934), 115, 125 colonial violence in aftermath of, 72
police intelligence overhauled after, India and, 67
125 Fletcher, Sir Murchison, 235–6, 244,
Contrôleurs civils, 95, 118, 120, 121, 123, 246–8, 253, 331
135 Force publique. See Belgian Congo: Force
and army call-outs (1937), 133–4 publique
Convention of Associations (Kenya), 48 Foreign Legion
Creasy, Gerald, 296–7 in Indochina, 156, 157
Criminal Procedure Code (Kenya), 48 Foucault, Michel, 42
Crokaert, Paul, 312, 314 Freetown, 256–7
Cunliffe-Lister, Philip (Lord Swinton), early settlement, 258–60
57, 249, 297 Krio elite, 261
520 Index
French Communist Party, 126 arrest of ICP leaders in, 160

French Indochina. See Indochina Huang Hoa Tham, 142
garde indigène, 69–70. See Indochina: Igbo women’s war, 285–6, 287–8, 332
police Indian Immigration Committee (IIC),
Garde républicaine mobile (GRM), 96, 112, 186–7, 188
118, 170 Indian indentured labour in Trinidad,
and Sadiki College protests (1938), 238–9
136 Indian migrant labourers. See rubber
and Tunisian mining strikes, 130 industry: Malaya
North African force expansion, 129 Indian Tea Assocation, 74
Garvey, Marcus, 233, 237–8, 260 indigénat legal code, 22
gendarmerie Indochina
Algerian, 103–4 economy, 149–50
and judicial system, 103 famine, 35
ethnic composition, 103–4 Nghê ̣–Tı̃nh soviet movement, 142
morale, 93 police, 36, 149
political violence and, 107–8 police reorganization, 84–5
rural policing, 103–4 prisons, 84–5
workloads, 103–4 rubber industry
French North African, 59, 103–4, 328 relations with government, 329
after First World War, 103–4 Vietnam
as guarantors of internal order, 96 1908 Hanoi poison plot, 142
counter-espionage work, 105 1930–1 rebellions, 157–61
distinctiveness, 103–4 abuses criticized in France, 171
housing, hygiene and health, 96 agricultural modernization, 162
mobility, 96 Cochin-China disorders (1930), 157
over-stretched, 108–9 Dâù-Tiêng plantation disorders,
riot control and, 109 167–71
security screening, 99 depression conditions, 162–4
historical perspectives on, 103–4 French-language press, 149
in French North Africa, 103–4 labour inspectorate, 153, 162, 167,
transfers between forces, 125–6 168, 170, 173
Tunisian, 1, 133–4 Nghê ̣ An province, 157–8
accusations of brutality, 120 Nghê ̣–T ı̃nh soviet movement, 151
entrance and promotion, 119 police repression of ICP, 159–61
ethnic composition, 119 policing, 145, 329
language competency, 118 political prisoner releases, 172
reorganization, 116–20 political violence and preventive
Turkish, 91 detention, 142
Goldie, Sir George Taubman, 277 Popular Front-era protests, 172–4
Gourou, Pierre, 144 prison abuses, 84–5, 142
Guillon, Armand, 119, 126–7, 128, 135, prisons, 142
137, 138 proto-nationalist groups, 141
rubber. See rubber industry:
Hadj, Messali, 129 Vietnam
Haldane Club, 291 rubber industry boom, 161
Hanote, General Charles, 130 rural conditions and political
and background to martial law in opposition, 144
Tunisia, 135 Saigon strikes (1936–7), 173–4
Henry, Eugène, 306 Yen Bay mutiny (1930), 38, 156–7
Herbart, Pierre, 142, 160 Indochinese Communist Party (ICP),
Hildred, William, 264, 266, 268 141, 144
Ho Chi Minh, 158 and Nghê ̣–Tı̃nh soviet movement,
Hodson, Sir Arnold, 264–5 158–61
Hong Kong and Popular Front-era protests, 172–4
Index 521
and rubber industry strikes, 152 James, C. L. R., 214

industrial unrest Jardine, Sir Douglas, 274, 276
in Britain, 66 Jaspar, Henri, 311, 312
industrialization, 28, 29 Joseph, Gaston, 155
fear of, 3, 144 Julien, Charles-André, 130
Inskip, Sir Thomas, 249, 251 Jungers, Eugène, 312
International Labour Organization
(ILO), 23 Kaduna conference, 284
and Belgian Congo, 309–12 kangani recruiters. See rubber industry:
Philadelphia declaration (1944), 22 Malaya: labour supply
International Labourers’ Help Kenya
Committee, 199 penal codes, 48
Ireland policing, 105
police emergency powers and, 105 Khairallah, Chadly, 124
policing and, 70 Krautheimer, Jean-Félix, 152, 154
Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6), 220, 244 Krestintern (Peasants’ International),
199
Jamaica Kuomintang (KMT), 77
Board of Conciliation, 229 and outbreak of Sino-Japanese War
crop burning as protest, 227 (1937), 203
economic migration, 206, 219 Singapore ethnic Chinese support for,
Kingston 199, 200
1918 riots, 210 Kwango revolt (Belgian Congo), 301–3,
General Penitentiary (GP), 214–17 306–9, 333
general strike (May 1938), 229 recriminations over, 312–13
labour protest, 206, 221–30, 233
Legislative Council, 217, 220, 225 La Lutte (The Struggle) Saigon newspaper,
relations with government, 229 172
Morant Bay rebellion, 73, 215, 217 Labonne, Eirik, 137
‘plantocracy’, 218 and Neo-Destour, 137–8
police (Constabulary), 209, 210, labour
221–30, 330 abuse of coolies in Vietnam, 167–8
Special Constables, 230, 232 depression and, 28
police killings, 224–5 forced, 4, 306, 315
political economy of, 208, 209–10 in Belgian Congo, 309–12
prison system, 214–18 on Congo-Ocean railway line,
protest policing, 210–13 309–10
public flogging, 215 introduction of French colonial factory
racial tensions, 209, 213 inspectorate, 130
reactions to Italo-Ethiopian War Malaya rubber industry
(1935–6), 220 health of workers, 186
right of assembly denied, 212 wage rates, 187–91, 193, 194–5
riots (1902), 73 migration, 28
sugar industry, 206–8 policing and, 5
depression conditions in, 218–20 rebellions (Caribbean), 11
estate disorders, 221–30 recruitment
Frome estate protests, 227 to Malaya rubber industry, 187
Islington estate protest, 230 recruitment to Vietnam rubber
labour discipline, 218 industry, 152–4
Serge Island estate protests, 222 restrictions on movement of, 4
wage rates, 223 rights of workers, 28
sugar production and, 32 rubber industry wage rates, 166
trade unions, 221 supply for Vietnam rubber industry,
white vigilantism, 214 150
Jamaican Workers’ and Tradesmen’s labour revolts. See Jamaica: labour
Union (JWTU), 228 protest; Trinidad: labour protest
522 Index
Lachevrotière, Henri de, 149 tin industry, 203

Laval, Pierre, 165 Malayan Communist Party (MCP),
Le Beau, Georges, 125 200–3
Le Bon, Gustave Manceron, François, 122
crowd theory, 70 Manley, Norman, 208, 229, 330
Le Fol, Aristide, 157 Margueritte, Victor, 171
League against Imperialism, 309 Maroc Gold Mining, 268
League of Asiatic Races, 199 Marty, Louis, 149
League of Nations, 72 Mateur (Tunisia) riots (1937), 133
scrutiny, 52 Maxwell, George, 166
Slavery Convention (1926), 309 Memmi, Albert, 58
Lépine, Louis, 70 Metlaoui, 131. See also Tunisia: mine-works
Ligue international des combattants de la Michelin rubber company, 141, 148
paix (LICP), 30 Cochin-China plantations, 151
Long, Walter, 64, 67, 71, 73, 76, 252, Dâù-Tiêng plantation, 151
287, 330 Dâù-Tiêng plantation disorders,
Lugard, Lord Frederick, 277–8 167–71
opposes plantation development in first investments in Indochina, 161
Nigeria, 281 French factory strikes (1936), 127–8
in the depression, 165
MacDonald, Ramsay Phu-Riêng plantation strike (1930),
second Labour government, 31 151–4
Macready, General Sir Cecil Frederick policing demands, 154
(Neville), 70 relations with government, 154–5,
malaria 169–70
and Malaya rubber workers, 186 treatment of plantation workforce,
Malaya 169–70
and outbreak of Sino-Japanese War migrant labour
(1937), 203 Indian, 34
communal politics, 177–81 mining
Communist Party, 200–2 British West African, 12
export industry, 179 Moknine (Tunisia), 123–4
heightened police repression on eve of Monnerville, Gaston, 130
war, 203–4 Montpazet, Marquis Henri de, 162
identities in, 6 Moody, Harold, 233
impact of depression, 184–5, 190, Moore, Sir Henry, 268, 269–70, 272
191–3, 196, 197 ‘moral panic’, 40
land tenure, 182 Morant Bay rebellion. See Jamaica:
Malay culture and economic Morant Bay rebellion
migration, 185 Morocco
migrant labour in, 36–7 gendarmerie
police admission restrictions, 179 discipline and abuses, 107
political conditions, 177–81 gendarmerie (Force publique), 102,
prison population, 84 107
rice crisis (1919–21), 181 accommodation and standards, 107
rubber industry, 183–97, 203 policing, 105
health of estate workforce, 186 Moutet, Marius, 127
Labour Department, 190–1, 194, and Indochina, 172
195–7, 205 Moyne Commission, 232, 234, 242
labour supply, 186–7, 329–30
relations with government, 192–6, Nankivell, Howard, 235, 246–7, 253, 331
329–30 Natal. See colonial police forces: British:
wage rates, 194–6 in South Africa
wages and labour supply, 187–91 National Government
rural conditions, 185 Cabinet divisions, 249
Straits Settlements police, 197–8 defence review (1937), 249, 251
Index 523
Native Labour Codes. See International prison system, 83–4

Labour Organization (ILO) Protectorate Legal Reform Club, 291
naval mutinies (French, 1919), 117 provincial government, 277–8, 283
Negro Welfare Cultural and Social taxation, 281, 289
Association (NWCSA), 241 protests against, 286–7
Neo-Destour, 116 women and customary trade, 286–7
ban imposed, 122, 136 women’s involvement in protest, 285–9
campaign against ‘naturalization’, 122 Nigeria Bitumen Corporation, 258
civil protests and, 121–6, 132–4 Nyasaland, 50
inter-party rivalry with Old Destour,
132–3 Office du Niger, 24–5
protest campaigns after 1936, 126–9 Old Destour, 132–3
repression intensified, 124 Olivier, Lord Sydney, 220, 227
support for mining sector strikes, 130 Orde-Brown, Sir Granville St John, 254
Nghê ̣–Tı̃nh soviet movement, 142, 156–61 Oriental Congress of Oppressed
Nigeria Nationals, 199
Aba Commission, 289 Ormsby-Gore, William, 231–2, 236,
absence of plantation development, 281 249–51
administrative reform, 299–300 becomes 4th Baron Harlech, 249
budgetary position, 295–8 Colonial Office career, 250
corporal punishments, 292 contacts with British trade union
cost of administering Cameroon, leaders, 252–3
297–8 Orts, Pierre, 311
court system, 283, 291–2 Outrey, Ernest, 149
depression conditions, 32, 293, 295–8
disorders, 12 Pages, Pierre, 169, 174
economic development, 280–1, 282 Palestine
focus on export production, 282–3 inter-communal violence, 72
Igbo women’s war, 285–6, 287–8, 332 revolt (1936), 81
importance of trading companies, 282 Palestine High Commission, 80
Kaduna conference, 284 Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), 129
martial law (1929), 288 Pasquier, Pierre, 151–2, 155, 160–1,
mining industry, 281–2, 298–9 165–6, 168–71
strikes, 298 Passfield, Lord (Sidney Webb), 220,
Native Administration Ordinances, 284–5, 291–2
283 Paterson, Alexander, 215, 239
nature of indirect rule, 277–80, 281, patronat, 128
296–7 Peel, Sir Robert, 326
bargains of collaboration, 279 Peyrouton, Marcel, 122–3
gender aspect, 285–6 repression of Neo-Destour, 124
police, 283–5 Phan Bô ̣i Châu, 158
1930 reforms, 289–90 Piétri, François, 152
Africanization of, 290 Planters’ Association of Malaya (PAM),
arming of, 284–5 194–6
Criminal Investigation Divisions police
(CID), 291 British
in Northern Provinces, 284 in Trinidad, 244–5
involvement in Cameroon, 283–4 paramilitarism and, 211, 284–5, 305
killings (1929), 287–9 riot control and, 287–9
Lagos police ‘mutiny’, 293–4 police spéciale, 89, 135
Police Investigation Bureau, 291 surveillance of communists, 117
Preventative Service Branch (PSB), policing
291 and colonial modernity, 105
retrenchment, 296 and Commissions of Inquiry (British),
policing, 83–4, 332 53, 289
politial violence in, 285–9 and ‘repressive consensus’, 65
524 Index
policing (cont.) Richards, Sir Arthur, 234

and Vietnam rubber industry strikes, Rienzi, Adrian Cola, 241, 243
152 Riot Act, 68, 212, 288
Anglo-Irish War and, 105 riots
customary authorities and, 105 Hosein riots (Trinidad), 74
economic activity and, 92, 97, 103–4, in Bombay, 75
115, 317–18 in Cyprus (1931), 78–9
First World War disorders and, 66 in Zanzibar (1936), 79–80
French employers’ organizations and, inter-ethnic, 40, 115, 125, 211, 233
128 prison, 216
in settler societies, 105 Trinidad Water Riots (1903), 238
intelligence gathering, 90, 99, 105, Tunis (1938), 136
108–9, 117, 120–1, 123, 125, Rivet, Paul, 130
154, 159–61, 182, 185, 199, Rowlatt, Judge S. A. T., 67
200–2, 290 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 70
language competency and, 107 Royal Navy
legal regulations and, 65, 105 and policing, 213, 239–40
paramilitarism and, 52, 68, 245 Royal Niger Company, 277
political economy Royal West African Frontier Force
use of as explanatory tool, 325, (RWAFF), 275, 294
326 Ruanda-Urundi (Belgian Mandate
practices, 105 territories), 306
punishment and, 105 Rubber Growers’ Association (RGA),
riot control and, 105 166, 183–4, 193–4
routines, 105 rubber industry
segregation and, 105 Dutch Indonesian, 184
urban disorders in India, 105 Malaya, 183–97, 203
political economy Chinese estates, 188
use of as explanatory tool, 25–7, coolie abuses, 190–1
325 health of estate workforce, 186
Political Intelligence Bureau (PIB), 182, impact of depression, 191–3
199 Labour Department, 190–1, 194,
Popular Front, 126–9 195–7, 205
and French industrial strikes, 127–8 labour supply, 186–7, 195–6
and Indochina, 171–5 relations with government, 184,
attitudes to colonial reform, 126 192–6
‘colonial humanism’ and, 128 response to the depression, 193–4
Matignon accords (1936), 127 support for production restrictions,
prestation (labour requisition), 23 183–4
prisons wage rates, 194–6
abuse of women, 84 wages and labour supply, 187–91
gender dynamics, 84, 217 production restrictions. See Stevenson
in Burma, 82 restriction scheme
in Jamaica, 214–18 Vietnam, 141
in Trinidad, 239 1920s boom, 161
policing and, 84 coolie abuses, 167–8, 171, 174–6
politicization and, 81 coolie recruitment, 151
punishment regimes, 83 coolies, 152–4
punishments, 214–17 Dâù-Tiêng plantation disorders,
Vietnamese, 142 167–71
depression-era wage rates, 166
Rand miners’ strikes (1922), 72 economic importance, 145
rebellion estate ownership, 145–7
in Southeast Asia, 37–8 government support, 165–6
Renseignements généraux (RG), 95 labour attrition, 153
Reynaud, Paul, 130, 148 labour inspectorate, 169
Index 525
plantation policing, 154 trade unions, 261

relations with government, 150, village headmen, 257
154–5, 162–4 Sierra Leone Development Company
strike disorders, 151–4 (Delco), 262–4, 275
wages and payments, 153 Sierra Leone Goldfield Limited, 268
women workers, 168 Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST),
Rubber Planters’ Union (Vietnam) 264–8, 270, 272–3, 276, 331
(Union des planteurs de caoutchouc), Sighele, Scipio, 70
165 Singapore
Ryckmans, Pierre, 323–4 allegiances among Chinese
community, 205
Sadiki College (Tunis), 135 Chinese community, 77–8
Saigon demonstrations (1927), 200
police force, 46–7 Kreta Ayer disorders (1927), 77–8
Saint, Lucien, 117, 118 Special Branch anti-communism, 200–2
Saint-Chaffray, Jean Bourcier, 142 Singapore dockyard, 198
Sarraut, Albert, 24, 84–5 police, 198
as Indochina Governor-general, 142, workforce, 198
148–9, 161 Société des plantations des terres rouges
Section Autonome de l’Union des Planteurs (SPTR), 148
de Caoutchouc de l’Indochine Société Générale de Belgique (SG), 4, 316
(Indochina Rubber Planters’ Société indochinoise des plantations de
Union), 147 hévéas (SIPH), 148
Senegal South Africa
agricultural production, 31 police, 105
Service des renseignements généraux (SRG), Rand violence (1922), 72
60 Steeg commission, 130
Sétif uprising (1945), 109 Steeg, Théodore, 129
Shanghai Stevenson restriction scheme, 148, 183–4
arrest of ICP organizers in, 161 Stoler, Ann Laura, 39
Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP). ‘imperial formation’ idea, 7
See colonial police forces:British Straits Settlements
‘Shanghailanders’, 49, 76 policing, 200–2
Sierra Leone strikes, 2
budgetary position in 1930s, 271–2, French, 127–8
273 in Britain pre-1914, 66
Circuit Courts, 270 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, 261
crime rates, 257 in Malaya, 192, 203–5
depression conditions, 257, 260 in Nigeria, 298
Diamond Protection Force, 269 in Saigon (1936–7), 173–4
labour protest, 263, 275 in Sierra Leone, 263, 275
Legislative Council, 275 in Tunisian mining sector, 130, 131,
mining industry, 257–8, 260, 261–70, 138–40
276, 331 Jamaican, 223, 226
Delco, 262–4 ringleaders of, 1, 212
labour supply, 272–3 Trinidadian, 235, 243, 246
licensing system, 264–5 Tunisian, 123–4
smuggling and black market, 265–6 sugar industry. See Jamaica: sugar
tributor system, 261–2 industry
Mobile Mines Force, 266–9, 331 suicides on rubber plantations, 175, 191
tax collection and, 270 Supreme Colonial Council (French), 310
police, 260, 276 Sûreté Générale. See colonial police forces:
used against strikers, 263 French
protest movements, 273–5
settlement and population, 258–60 Taalbi, Sheikh Abdelaziz, 132–3
tax collection, 274–5 Tarde, Gabriel, 70
526 Index
Tate & Lyle, 222–4 Tschoffen, Paul, 316

tear gas Tunisia
use of, 80–1 depression conditions, 112, 116, 121
Tegart, Sir Charles, 69–70 drought and rural hardship (1938), 137
Thomas, J. H. (Jimmy), 30, 80, 249 early nationalism, 116
Thomas, Sir Shenton, 203–4 gendarmerie, 102, 133–4, 328
Tilkens, Auguste, 314, 319 accusations of brutality, 120
Townshend, Charles, 67–8, 69 entrance and promotion, 119
Trade Union Congress (TUC), 252, 274 ethnic composition, 119
trade unions language competency, 118
British, 69, 252–3 policing of strikes, 131–2
in British West Africa, 274 reorganization, 116–20
in Sierra Leone, 261 workplace surveillance, 120–1
Jamaican, 221, 228, 229 heightened nationalist militancy
Trinidadian, 253 (1938), 135
Tran Tu Binh, 152 implications of protectorate status, 114
Treasury (British), 30 martial law (1938), 136
Trinidad military service exemptions, 117
Chamber of Commerce (Port of mine-works, 1
Spain), 236 Moknine riots (1934), 123–4
crisis in government, 235–6 nationalist protest, 121–6
depression conditions, 240–1, 242 policing, 105, 328
economic conditions, 237 policing of workplace subversion, 118
ex-servicemen, 237 political violence during martial law,
Forster Commission of Inquiry, 255 137
Hosein riots (1884), 74 politicization of strikes, 138–40
Indian workers, 238–9 strikes in mining sector, 130
labour protest, 235–6, 240–8, 252 trade unionism, 116, 121
Legislative Council, 236 repression of, 122
relations with government, 235–6, Tunis riots (1938), 136
240, 245 worsening political violence, 132–4
oil industry, 11, 237, 252
labour unrest, 240–8 Union Minière du Haut Katanga
racism within, 242–3 (UMHK), 316–17, 319–21, 333
‘plantocracy’, 236 labour supply, 321
police United British Oilfields, 246
during 1937 labour protests, 244–5, United British Oilfields (Trinidad), 237
330–1 United Fruit Company, 218
vigilantes, 239–40 United Planting Association of Malaya,
police killings, 243 197
prison riots (1907), 73 United States
prisons, 239 rubber purchases, 183
reactions to Italo-Ethiopian War Universal Negro Improvement
(1935–36), 244 Association, 233, 237–8, 260
sugar industry, 239, 241 urbanization, 48
trade unions, 253
Water Riots (1903), 238 van Zeeland, Paul, 323
workforce composition, 238–9 Vandervelde, Émile, 311
Trinidad Labour Party (TLP), 241–2 Varenne, Alexandre, 153, 162
Trinidad Lake Asphalt Company, 237 Verubo (rubber planters’ consortia), 193
Trinidad Leaseholds, 242–3, 246 Vichy France
Trinidad Light Horse (paramilitaries), police, 58
245 Vietnam. See Indochina: Vietnam
Trinidad Workingmen’s Association, 237, Vietnam Nationalist Party (Viêt Nam
241 Quôc Dân Dang
Truong Chinh, 144 VNQDD), 144, 150
Index 527
and Yen Bay disorders, 156 police killings during Jamaican labour
Vietnam Restoration League (Viêt-nam protests, 224–5
Quang-phuc-hôi), 141 police killings during Tunisian strike
vigilantism, 109 actions, 131–2
violence police shootings, 73
against women, 239, 285–6, 287–8, 315 political, in Indochina, 141
in prisons, 84 racial, 244
and proportionality, 71
asymmetry of in Belgian Congo, 302, Wallace-Johnson, Isaac, 273–4
307–8, 312 War Ministry
asymmetry of in Indochina, 157–8, 160 Muslim Affairs section, 140
Belgian security force killings during West African Youth League, 256,
Kwango revolt, 302 273–5
colonial levels of, 41 whipping. See prisons:punishments
colonial state and, 210 Williams, Eric, 247
gendarmes as agents and targets of, Woolley, Charles, 228, 230
101, 124 Wright, Owen, 225
in aftermath of First World War, 69
North African inter-ethnic, 114 Yen Bay mutiny (1930). See Indochina
on Dutch Sumatra rubber plantations, Young, Sir Hubert, 253
41 Youssef, Salah Ben, 134
police as agents and targets of, 244–5
police killings during Igbo women’s Zanzibar, 79–80
war, 287–9 Zitaouna mosque (Tunis), 135

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Violence and Colonial Order

This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship

m a rt i n t hom a s is Professor of Imperial History in the Department

Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary

A full list of titles published in the series can be found at:

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,

© Martin Thomas 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2012

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-0-521-76841-2 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

List of maps page ix

Introduction: Police, labour and colonial violence 1

Part I Ideas and practices 15

Part II Colonial case studies: French, British

10 Profits, privatization and police: The birth of

Notes to the text 335

4.1 French North African colonial territories page 94

4.1 Gendarmerie personnel, May 1917 page 93

Andrew Barros, Robert Bickers, Emmanuel Blanchard, Dan Branch,

local protest or, to use specialist parlance, a micro-historical approach

trio, more densely populated. They each became sites of quintessential

and Southeast Asia. It also issued Indochina’s colonial currency, the

more remote areas especially, working relationships between officialdom

requires us to consider the dilemma involved. On the one hand, imper-

in this sense, redolent of the ‘material life of knowledge’ discussed by

both a perennial feature and an increasingly prominent facet of police

coercive workplace in which opportunities to press demands were lim-

ensured privileged treatment for the industry’s major plantation owners

the copper mines of Congo’s south-eastern province of Katanga where

Ideas and practices

Approaches to colonial policing:

Palestine and elsewhere; Corsicans, often of Italian descent, in French

inability of imperial nations to justify protracted colonial repression

of European administrators, settlers and corporate interests and the

Colonial policing and labour rights

core actors in the industrialized ‘North’ and their ‘adjustable interests’

The ILO also campaigned tenaciously for free labour markets, an

Alongside such reforms, forced labour persisted in the form of the

entitlements to the original African residents of Senegal’s four urban

a transition from a coercive labour system to more widespread use of

The political economy approach

purpose, nor their avowed aim. It appears to have consumed a large

structure that shaped institutional forms of state repression, three stand

The depression and colonial labour

analysts of British colonial development, point out, the twin founda-

Asia especially. It remained axiomatic that political stability rested on

la paix (LICP), France’s fast-growing pacifist movement of the 1930s

spending as a stimulus to the British economy, not as a means to

on customs revenue, colonial governments responded, in turn, to the

Depression and the colonies

analysis of public spending in Southeast Asia’s colonies indicates that the

their produce. Extra household consumption or the hoarding of food-

pumping funds into agro-economics. Laboratories began work across

the downward slide in raw materials’ prices. Benefits accrued from

Thinking about colonial order and repression

Violent disorder or order sustained by threat of violence; do these

Even by colonial standards, the rubber-producing region of Dutch

Hence the mass arrests and other signs of disproportionate repression

ways of life.5 Not surprisingly, notionally subjugated communities

Addressing the gulf between written function and practical experience,

resurgence of popular protest, much of it economically motivated, as

Part I Ideas and practices 15