Policing the Periphery: The Development of Scottish Policing 1795–1900 *

Abstract

This article, which is in two parts, addresses a much neglected topic — the early development of policing in Scotland. In Part I, the remarkably early growth of Scottish policing was mapped out, and the way in which some distinctive features of the term's earliest usage carried over into the nineteenth century police form was examined. Analytical emphasis in the first part of the article was upon the forces giving rise to the conditions under which the institution of police could emerge, how the penetration of capitalist relations into Scotland made policing an attractive urban and rural possibility. An attempt was also made to break through the explanatory nihilism of some recent historians who perceive so much local diversity and uneveness in the history of policing and criminal justice during the nineteenth century that they are driven effectively to abandon all overarching structural explanation. Instead of surrendering to the temptations of descriptive empiricism implicit in such elevation of diversity to analytical pre-eminence, the first part of the article attempted to analyse the interplay between macro-structural factors and local exigencies in such a way that some sense could be made of diversity itself.

The second part of the article will be devoted to the other side of the relationship between Scottish policing and the society in which it emerged, to the ways in which policing contributed to the formation of social relations appropriate to a society moving rapidly into the phase of industrial capitalism. While being careful to avoid the cruder functionalist and teleological overtones of an approach which specifies the effects of policing and then attributes causative force to those effects, it nonetheless acknowledges the significance of policing for the new order emerging in Scotland during this crucial period. In so doing it completes the “relational” circle, a conceptual framework which, as well as stressing how the institution of police was shaped by the totality of Scotland's nineteenth century order, also emphasizes how policing helped to shape that order itself.