International Relations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016). He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association and former President of the Social Science History Association.
Go applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US, and reported the following:
Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US examines the history of police “militarization” in Britain and the US: that is, those moments when police departments adopt the military materials, mindsets and forms. Existing discussions of police militarization see it as a relatively new phenomenon. But Policing Empires reveals that the history of police militarization reaches back to the very beginning of modern policing in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Policing Empires shows how militarization has been inextricably entangled with empire and racialization. Historically and through the present day, police militarization has occurred as police officials perceived threats of criminality and social disorder from groups they deemed racially foreign and inferior – whether the Irish or freed slaves in the 19th century or African Americans, Chinese, Jamaicans and Muslims in the twentieth. To manage these threats, police officials militarized their forces but they did so by drawing upon the forms, methods and weaponry that were used by colonial police and imperial armies upon racialized peoples in the peripheral zones of empire. Policing Empires thereby shows that police militarization is an effect of the imperial boomerang. Militarization is what happens when the imperial state brings home its armies and military methods from the periphery to thrash imagined barbarians who dare enter the empire’s metropolitan spaces.Learn more about Policing Empires at the Oxford University Press website.
On page 99 of Policing Empires, we encounter the following passage: “In New York, the frontier militia that had been so crucial for settler colonialism was influential, and veterans of the Mexican-American War played a role in militarizing the police. The same is true for Savannah. And with Savannah, the influence of slave patrols and coercive forms of settler colonialism was direct and palpable, evidenced in the heavily armed and mounted features of the SPD. For the formation of police in the United States, the London influence was matched if not surpassed by local varieties of the boomerang effect.” This is part of the conclusion to Chapter Two, titled “Cotton Colonialism and the New Police.” The chapter shows how the first police departments in New York, Savannah, Manchester and other cities in the transatlantic sphere were influenced by colonial forms and practices. The passage on page 99 captures something not only of this chapter but also of the larger themes of the book. The Page 99 Test is passed!
The Page 99 Test: Patterns of Empire.
--Marshal Zeringue
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