The British Empire experienced a profound transformation in the later eighteenth century. From 1688 until the 1760s, Britain governed its colonies by balancing executive power with strong legislatures, restricting the military's role in everyday policing, and tolerating only a limited divergence between colonial and metropolitan law. That model of empire collapsed during the Age of Revolutions, as Britain moved “from colonial self-government to autocratic rule,” accepted martial law as a routine instrument of colonial peacekeeping, and embraced a “massive legal divergence” between Britain and its colonies—even when it came to basic liberties like freedom from arbitrary arrest (3, 5).
Lisa Ford's important book charts this metamorphosis and illuminates its origins. Britain's turn to colonial autocracy depended not only on a metropolitan reaction against domestic radicalism and overseas revolution, she argues, but also on the quotidian struggle to maintain order on the colonial periphery (228). She develops this argument through case studies focused on Massachusetts, Quebec, Jamaica, Bengal, and New South Wales.
Ford begins in the 1760s, when “ungovernable Protestant men” in Boston and Montreal “exposed the weakness of crown authority” (28, 219). Royal officials found themselves unable even to collect taxes without risking a riot. Even worse than the crown's impotence was the mob's pretension to legality: when a Boston crowd blocked customs commissioners from executing a search, it claimed not to resist the law but to defend it against lawless officials. The crown resolved to avoid such embarrassments in the future by reasserting its power over law and order. The Quebec Act of 1774 pioneered the new style. Under pretense of protecting the colony's Catholic majority from an abusive Protestant minority, Parliament imposed “gubernatorial autocracy” on everyone (221).
Quebec's inclusive authoritarianism was one dimension of the new model of empire. Another was the normalization of martial law as an instrument of civil government. After the Glorious Revolution, law and politics had tightly constrained the military's role in policing civilians; colonial governors and London magistrates alike hesitated to call on the army even to suppress a riot. Jamaica was an early exception to that norm. The West Indies had long depended on legal and extralegal brutality to sustain racial slavery. But after a major slave uprising in 1760, Jamaica's legislature empowered the governor to declare martial law at the slightest whiff of trouble. Military rule—over white planters as well as people of color—became a biennial habit on the island.
Ford shows how these new peace-keeping strategies migrated across the empire, including to East India Company-run Bengal. Her narrative culminates in New South Wales, which epitomized the Empire's transformation. Royal authority in pre-revolutionary Boston had been too fragile to collect taxes. New South Wales, in contrast, was a militarized police state in which any white inhabitant—even, it was rumored, its judges—could be detained unless they proved their non-convict status. Some of these stories are familiar to historians, but Ford revisits them with elegance and economy. The imperial scope of her book is a real achievement that bridges conventional historiographical boundaries—settler colonies versus slave societies, crown versus East India Company rule—and generates new insights about sovereignty, settler colonialism, and the fitful racialization of empire.
The King's Peace glances at developments in the British Isles, but a fuller examination of them might have produced an even stronger book. Ford convincingly contrasts Sir Robert Peel's ostentatiously civilian Metropolitan Police with its “overtly paramilitary” colonial counterparts (192). But were “[m]ounted and armed police” really “unthinkable in England at the end of the eighteenth century,” as Ford contends (193)? In 1761, Sir John Fielding requested a regiment of light cavalry to fight highway robbers near London. He had to settle for eight men, but armed patrols became an important part of metropolitan policing, including a mounted force recruited in 1805 from veterans of the Light Dragoons (see J.M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750–1840 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]). Ford characterizes police spies and “investigative policing” in nineteenth-century Bengal as “a novel thing indeed for a government composed of Britons” (151). Perhaps; but how did they differ from the thief-takers and informers who had already transformed criminal procedure at the Old Bailey?
Some of the practices that Ford describes were colonial innovations, but others echoed techniques that had been tried at home. From that perspective, The King's Peace makes an intriguing counterpoint to the famous epilogue of E.P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters (New York: Pantheon, 1975), which examined the same period. Although Thompson's tale was often bleak, it ended optimistically. As Thompson put it, Britain's rulers took “halting steps” toward autocracy, but they ultimately “surrendered to the law” (269)—an outcome he cited to justify his own (controversial) faith in the rule of law. Ford concludes, in contrast, with the “vast executive discretion and SWAT teams” that rule us today (232). It is possible that the different endings are just a matter of emphasis—reflecting, perhaps, the different political contexts of the 1970s (more immediately in the shadow of twentieth-century totalitarianisms) and the 2020s (more focused on racialized policing and the war on terror). For, despite the differences in tone, the underlying stories are similar: both authors recount an authoritarian turn that was “truncated” after 1832 in Britain and its settler colonies alike (229). (At that point, Ford suggests, a new divergence took hold: not between center and periphery, but according to the hardening racial hierarchies that structured the Victorian empire.)
These reflections amount to a wish for a longer book. But the one Ford has given us is impressive indeed. It should command the attention not only of historians of empire, but of anyone interested in how modern states exercise authority—that is to say, anyone interested in law's history.
