H-Diplo Roundtable on Martin Thomas. Violence and ... - H-Net

H-<strong>Diplo</strong> <strong>Roundtable</strong> Reviews, Vol. XV, No. 5 (2013)
evidence of this growing association. Considering how often colonial officials got their
intelligence about local affairs wrong—something that Thomas himself points out here and
elsewhere 3 —it is doubtful that colonial officials accurately calculated the degree to which
locals came together (221, 415 n. 70).
Like much of Thomas’s other work, Violence and Colonial Order attacks the problems of
colonialism primarily from the vantage point of European states and their actors, bringing
with it the limitations such an approach entails. This is not an archaeology of colonial
violence as experienced by those on the receiving end. Thus, it is probably going too far to
say that “repressive policing was critical” not only “to the configuration of colonial rule” but
also “to its eventual collapse” (5). Police repression was less a root cause of imperialism’s
demise and more a symptom of underlying economic exploitation, political oppression, and
social discrimination.
The book is not always easy going. It covers so much ground so quickly that there are
moments when its compactness detracts from its readability and others where a bit of
confusion enters the text. French North Africa’s gendarmerie, for instance, is described as,
“An overwhelmingly French force with comparatively few Maghrebi recruits . . . Frenchofficered,
[it] relied on local personnel to make policing across ethnic, linguistic, religious
and cultural divides viable” (92). Was it white-officered with native Algerian personnel
(presumably with a normal officer-to-soldier ratio), or was it overwhelmingly French? The
book is driven above all by an analytical rather than a narrative approach, making it dense.
Thomas tells the reader that the second chapter, on the lived experiences of colonial
policemen, “travels the colonial world providing snapshots of colonial police lives,
concerns, pressures and priorities between the wars” (43). But even here vignettes are
scarce, such as two about police officers in West Africa (53-57). The “detailed, local
accounts” Thomas promises early on (1) refer not to gripping and instructive tales of
policing but to the case studies underlying the book. Of course I was not expecting Hill
Street Bluesor Maigret, but additional stories might have illustrated the book’s points in
more arresting fashion. Unlike some of Thomas’s other books that I have used in the
undergraduate classroom, this book is best suited for the graduate level and beyond.
Another factor that makes the book a challenging read is that its comparative nature invites
a broad readership yet it demands a significant familiarity with the subject matter and the
many regions covered. To help understand Algeria’s gendarmerie, for example, we are told,
“in terms of function, if not status, the Algerian gendarmerie bore less comparison with
metropolitan brigades than with the political 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” (95).
Readers unfamiliar with the history of the gendarmerie and civil policing in the Hexagon
will have trouble getting the comparison.
3 Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008).
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