Publisher's Synopsis
Philip Ahire assesses the role of the police force within the colonial political economy in three main areas - economy, public order and "moral-environmental" hygiene. In the economic realm, the police played an important role in protecting and guaranteeing the activities of expatriate commercial and extractive firms; in, for instance, recruiting and supervising labour to construct colonial infrastructures; compelling peasants to pay colonial taxes and frustrating workers demands for higher wages.;In the realm of public order, the police helped to displace indigenous political authority and to create a centralized colonial state; it also helped to pacify recurrent waves of popular resistance against particular aspects of colonial policy such as geopolitical boundaries, obnoxious laws, and authoritarian intermediaries. The police also intervened to enforce new standards of hygiene to guard against the spread of disease, to destroy stubborn and "uncooperative" structures in the traditional enclave, and to enable the diffusion of foreign moral and religious concepts.
