“Coloured and White Policemen Drilling Side By Side”: Imperial Encounters in Late Victorian and Edwardian Dublin
The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), an armed and centralized police force, represented a policing ideal replicated throughout the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irish recruits formed an important component of the intermediate ranks of police forces across the empire, while the RIC’s Depot at Phoenix Park, Dublin, served as an important training center for colonial police officers. The instruction of colonial policemen in Dublin illustrates not only how Ireland’s quasi-colonial experience helped to shape the British Empire, but also a much less-studied facet of the Irish imperial experience: how Empire came home to Ireland.
My paper will explore the ways in Dublin’s role as a training center for colonial policemen helped shape Irish imperial culture. On the one hand, the Irish role in policing the Empire reinforced the ‘colonial’ nature of Irish policing, and RIC officers’ vision of themselves as belonging to an imperial police force. The pages of the Royal Irish Constabulary Magazine featured news of former RIC members in the Empire and stories about their deeds in colonial police forces. In addition, Dublin, like contemporary London, functioned as a contact zone for encounters between peoples of the Empire, as not only British recruits but men from West Africa, Malta and the Caribbean came into contact with both RIC officers and the population of Dublin. My analysis calls attention to not only the ethnic and racial diversity of Dublin in this era, and the ways in which networks of colonial policing linked Ireland to the Empire, but also to the distinctiveness of the Irish imperial experience. The paper will be based upon contemporary newspapers and journals, as well as Colonial Office records in the UK National Archives, Kew, London.