FROM THE COLONY TO THE METROPOLE RACE, POLICING AND THE COLONIAL BOOMERANG Tanzil Chowdhury
T
he colonies were productive spaces – not just in terms of the profits that were extracted back to the imperial centre (the metropole) through expropriated land and exploited or enslaved labour, but also the forms of governance that were enacted and operationalised in these ‘recalcitrant colonies’ and exported back to the centre. The oscillating movement, in which practices in the ‘laboratory of the colonies’ moved into the metropole, also went back ‘throughout the world as part of the neo-colonial expansion of commercial interests’.146 The violence of the imperial project is not a mere historical curiosity, nor did it only take place in a ‘distant land’; it shaped and continues to shape the technologies of British state violence today. This short piece aims to locate contemporary policing in the UK as part of this multidirectional movement – the ‘colonial boomerang’ – of policing cultures and techniques that moved between the 85
