The Transformation of the World (135 page)

The French police model also spread outside Europe. Whereas Japan (under the influence of the Franco-Prussian War) had mainly imitated Germany in military matters, it looked to France for the building of its police force. In 1872 the country's first justice minister sent a delegation of eight young officials to Europe to study and compare its various police systems, and shortly after their return Japan set to work (initially only in the capital) on organizing a modern one of its own. The French system had rightly struck the visitors as the most clearly organized, and the ministry had already singled out France as the main model for a new justice system. Over the next twenty years it would be the French police system that the Japanese reproduced with a number of modifications. The Gendarmerie, for example, became the Kempetai.
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After Japan began its imperial expansion, it followed the French custom (unknown in the British Empire) of placing its colonies under the control of its military police, and the Kempetai took on this role in Taiwan and later Korea. Until 1945 it grew continually into that brutal instrument of terror that kept the civilian population in fear and trembling in all its conquered lands.

By 1881 Japan had completed the learning process in its police sector. What then followed were expanded adaptations of the imported system. Japan took the professionalization and training of its police more seriously than any country in Europe, covering the country with a dense network of stations. As the state's main agency for actual implementation of the many-sided Meiji reforms, the police nipped in the bud any resistance to the New Japan and ensured that social change would take place only from the top down.
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Its greatest successes were in harassing undesirable political parties and organizations of the early workers' movement. Less effective were its operations against the spontaneous protests that became more frequent around the turn of the century. At the time of the Meiji Emperor's death in 1912, the typical Japanese policeman was not an Asiatic version of the friendly London bobby but a direct agent of the central government. Japan was then perhaps the society in the world with the most pervasive police presence.

Probably no colony in the nineteenth century was without the basic elements of a modern European-style police force, above all in the cities. In maintaining law and order in the countryside, the colonial rulers nearly always cooperated in one way or another with local elites, relying partly on patron-client relations, partly on mechanisms of collective responsibility. The revolts in Asia that repeatedly caught the colonial authorities by surprise show how little was known about what was happening in those large agricultural countries.
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Whether a territory had been under European control for a long time (as had India and Indonesia), or whether it had been colonized only in the 1880s (tropical Africa or northern Vietnam), the colonial police began to tighten their grip in rural areas only in the 1920s, at a time when defiant workers were clashing with the authorities in the increasingly restless cities. Similar tendencies were apparent in noncolonial China, where halfhearted attempts at state building under the Guomindang government (1927–37) included the deployment of a rural police force such as had never existed before. Before 1920 it was only in exceptional cases, such as Cochin China, that colonial peoples experienced the kind of police control and village linkage to bureaucratic command chains familiar in continental Europe and Japan.

The worldwide evolution of police forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers good examples of all manner of transfers, not only from mother country to colonies or through export to independent countries (Siam or Japan) but also between parts of the same imperial system. Thus, after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the basic structures of the
Indian
police were introduced without any reference to local conditions. Other ways of establishing order in the colonies also impacted on Europe. The Indian penal code, for example, which Thomas Babington Macaulay, the famous historian, drafted in 1835 during his time as de facto justice minister of India, had a precision and consistency without precedent in the British Isles with its casuistic common law tradition; a comparably systematic English penal law followed in its wake
only in the 1870s.
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Just as the state in India adopted the drastic sovereign measures of a conqueror, legislator, and gendarme, many conservatives in the British mother country considered that the state's coercive power should be turned more strongly against the practice and rhetoric of democratization.
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The forces opposing such an authoritarian backlash remained strong enough to stave off threats to the representative system at home. But critics of imperialism, such as the farsighted John Atkinson Hobson, expressed major concern that nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the empire lived under the yoke of “British political despotism,” which threatened to poison the climate in the mother country.
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Colonialism constantly spawned authoritarian challenges to metropolitan liberty—and regular demands for stronger police powers.

The police in the United States had its roots in England: first in the old tradition of community night watchmen transferred to the American colonies, then in the important modernization that gave rise in 1829 to the Metropolitan Police Force and its uniformed bobbies. This basic model was adopted with a delay of two or three decades by large cities in the United States,
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and it was only in the 1850s that those in the East provided themselves with uniformed policemen on a permanent payroll. American peculiarities soon manifested themselves, however. A nationwide police force, such as existed in France and later in Britain, remained conspicuous by its absence, and it took many more decades before a further criterion of bureaucratic rationality—political independence—was fulfilled. Until then the police were often a tool of municipal party politics. Moreover, extreme decentralization contributed to wide variations in the intensity of policing, so that many areas (especially on the frontier) were virtually without a police presence and others were faced with a mosaic of overlapping jurisdictions. It was very difficult to bring to justice a criminal who managed to escape across such boundaries. This created a gap in the market that private detective agencies moved to fill, the best known being the one founded by Allan Pinkerton in 1850. Pinkerton's people initially guarded railroads and mail coaches, but in the 1890s they also became notorious for their attacks on striking workers. In no other country in the world did an incomplete state monopoly of physical force leave so much scope for private police forces; it was no easy matter to ensure that they were subject to judicial control. In the United States, the police force was regarded not as the organ of a hierarchical “state” but as a part of local government—the direct opposite of the situation in France or Japan, but also very different from England.

An English policeman in the late nineteenth century saw himself as acting under the authority of common law and the unwritten constitution, whereas his American counterpart thought of himself more as representing “justice” with the particular situation in which he operated. The “marshal” of the American West was the unmistakable embodiment of this type.
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He was also often the only local representative of a distant state power. More typical of the nineteenth-century world was a division of labor between the police and the gendarmerie or
army. The idea that the military should not be deployed to keep law and order inside a country was a new maxim of political culture in only a small number of countries. The police force was historically more recent than the army, emerged as the result of functional differentiation, and played a less prominent role in state-building processes. Its task was less to establish than to manage a state monopoly of legitimate force.

Discipline and Welfare

Although, organizationally speaking, state apparatuses had less scope for intervention in the nineteenth century, they sometimes took action in areas of daily life from which the (European) state of the early twenty-first century has long since retreated. This difference is directly linked to definitions of criminal behavior. History shows a wide variation according to whether the state attempts to impose religious conformity or, in one degree or another, considers itself the guardian of the private “morality” of its subjects and citizens. At least in Protestant Europe—and especially in Britain—there was a noticeable moralization of state functions, and hence of police activity, in the nineteenth century. In Victorian and Edwardian England, the police and courts became truly obsessed with the “prevention of vice,” targeting prostitution, homosexuality (or “sodomy”), drunkenness, and a passion for gambling in particular—not only to protect the upright majority from such transgressions but also to carry forward the moral duty of lifting the moral condition of the population. The penal system was more than before an instrument of virtue, not without a nationalist ambition to make the country morally “fit.”
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In 1859 John Stuart Mill's essay
On Liberty
had warned against such an invasion of the private sphere, and soon after the turn of the century Karl Kraus exposed the contradictions of “morality and criminality” in an Austrian context.
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That such polemics were necessary is an indication of the seriousness of the problem.

Criminalization also functioned in the colonies as a means of exclusion and control. The authorities in British India, for example, assigned people to tribes and castes that were graded on a scale of “hereditary criminality.” By the end of the colonial era, in 1947, as many as 3.5 million individuals, or 1 percent of the total population, were classified as belonging to 128 mostly migrant “criminal tribes,” which felt the full force of state persecution. Actual behavior, such as criminal practices handed down from generation to generation, interacted with official labeling to produce a stable definition of this minority, and in 1871 a Criminal Tribes Act fixed their position in relation to the colonial state. Among the methods of controlling them were police registration, compulsory residence in a certain village, and forced labor in land clearance. The analogies with Gypsies in Central Europe are evident. The “criminal tribes” were not pure inventions of a craze for taxonomy. It is now thought likely that these groups were descended from Central Asian nomadic tribes, which the collapse of the Mogul Empire in the eighteenth century condemned to a vicious circle of exclusion.
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It was not expected that the Indian “criminal tribes” would be “educated”; they stood outside the sphere in which “civilization” appeared possible and desirable. The same might happen where—almost simultaneously with the turn to greater compulsion—a policy of criminalization sought partly to reverse the consequences of emancipatory rhetoric. In Alabama, previously one of the largest slave states in the South, a mostly black convict population came into being after the Civil War and the Reconstruction period, especially from 1874 on. New crimes were introduced, and after a brief interlude of freedom prison posed a new threat to the black population. Under a new “convict lease system,” profitmotivated penitentiaries began to offer cheap labor to the new industries and mines of the South.
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Japan's main borrowing from the European arsenal of discipline was the idea of prison as a place of surveillance
and
education. This entailed far-reaching changes in penal law. In the Tokugawa period, many jailed oppositionists had written about the appalling conditions in primitive dungeons similar to those in many other parts of the world. At the time there was no publicly recognized penal code; the first such codes, still little influenced by the West, would appear only in 1870 and 1873. Early Meiji rule books continued to specify details of corporal punishment, such as the number of blows in relation to the seriousness of the offense. In the 1870s support grew for the idea that useful labor should be introduced to improve the subjective state of the prisoner, and in 1880 the first penal code modeled on the West (in fact, drafted by a French legal expert) came into force.
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The basic principle now was that any punishment must have the sanction of the law (
nulla poena sine lege
), and that it should not vary in accordance with social status. Also in the 1880s moves were begun to make education a systematic part of prison life.
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In this respect, Japan soon took the lead over European countries. Penal reform became a major policy issue worldwide, a test of whether a country was part of “modern civilization” and had the capacity to take resolute action. Around the turn of the century, Chinese intellectuals who cared about China's future, for example, generally favored the creation of “model prisons” in the European or North American style.
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To what extent was the nineteenth-century state already a welfare state? Older policies aimed at “the poor and beggars” were dismantled in Europe over time. In France the revolution's plans to fund an equality-based system run by the state went unfulfilled. The hospitals, hospices, and other communal establishments characteristic of the ancien régime remained in existence, increasingly under the patronage of private benefactors. Governments in Western and Central Europe built many new complexes, often intentionally locating hospitals in the vicinity of mental asylums or workhouses. Poor relief and social disciplining were almost inextricably intertwined. Tight limits were set to independent workers' initiative, so long as freedom of association was denied to them. After 1848, in many countries of continental Europe, this became the basis for the formation of trade unions, consumer associations, and mutual insurance. In Britain “friendly
societies” with similar aims had been in existence for an even longer time. The state sought to extend its control more than in the past, but its welfare spending had not risen appreciably by the end of the century. In some countries, such as England, it actually fell if it is measured by the share of poor relief in the national product.
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Only after 1880 did governments begin to provide for welfare in general, not just for particular groups such as miners, by means of legislative and administrative measures and the incorporation of private or church institutions.
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Poor relief was then gradually replaced with “welfare state transfers” and compulsory national insurance.
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