Constituting a state in South Africa: The dialectics of policing, 1900-1939

This is a contribution to the history of state formation in early twentieth-century South Africa. It uses the concept of policing to examine how a diversity of constituencies envisaged, experienced, and shaped the modern South African state's entrenchment. The study demonstrates the centrality of policing in the definition as well as the enforcement of social order. Following the war of 1899--1902, British officials in South Africa conceived their work of state construction in deliberate opposition to local specters of political disorder that their imported English law of sedition caused then to perceive. In succeeding decades, this legal perceptual framework consistently informed the institutionalization and differentiation of the colonial order's bureaucratic and coercive capabilities. A campaign to allow white women into the police brought gender to the fore in this process of defining social order---compelling South Africa's rulers to articulate their vision of policing in the evolving segregationist dispensation, and confirming a preference for punitive racial controls that paradoxically augured a less interventionist state. This ambiguous orientation toward state intervention was notably expressed in a highly contradictory official attitude toward black police, on whom the authorities inescapably relied for the surveillance and control of the African majority, but whom they viewed as a potential danger to white supremacy. Officials accordingly evolved for their African police service conditions, and recruitment and training philosophies, to minimize this purported peril. But these precautions also limited the usefulness of black intermediaries, thereby qualifying state power. Analysis of black enlistees' experiences within the police, and of how other Africans understood their role, reveals Africans' shifting perceptions of the presence of the colonial order, and demonstrates the limits of liberal bureaucratic rationality in the colonial state. A study of the police canine program confirms that the dialectics of policing in early twentieth-century South Africa produced a composite social order in which the characteristic procedural norms of modern states operated only partially. Based on archival, legal, and oral research, the dissertation affords new perspectives on the history of colonialism in South Africa, and contributes to comparative and theoretical literatures on the state.