4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST suppress riots and protect life and property of the ruling classes. But it was obvious at the time that troops were too crude an instrument of class management for effective, day-to-day, urban control. They could not be used until a situation had already become explosive; their intervention often resulted in a degree of brutality which alarmed the middle classes and deepened the hostility of the workers; and the English bourgeoisie had a long-standing objection to using soldiers in internal disturbances, fearing a return to the military dictatorship experienced under Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century. A more subtle, less conspicuous, device for regulating society had to be found, and this the police was designed to provide. Robert Peel, as Home Secretary in a Tory government and as a member of an industrialist family acutely conscious of the problems of urban control,1 was primarily responsible for the creation of London's Metropolitan Police in 1829. The success of this force (in the eyes of the ruling classes) was demonstrated by its handling of the working-class Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s, and similar forces were formed for other' cities in England and later for the rural areas as well. The ^civilian' character of these forces was stressed: they did not bear arms and they were under the supervision of local government authorities.' Irish Model Designed to suit the interests of the propertied classes in an industrial society, the model of the Metropolitan Police was not intended for export to Britain's colonies, though the idea of using police rather than troops for colonial control was an attractive one for reasons both of cost and effectiveness. For the colonies a different police model was devised, originating with the colonial police in Ireland in the early nineteenth century. The Royal Irish Constabulary was intended to crush agrarian unrest and sporadic terrorism directed against British rule. Unlike the Metropolitan Police it was armed, organized on semi-military lines, housed in barracks, and kept under the direct orders of the colonial government in Dublin.8 This model was applied to other British colonies either when a new territory was annexed (to replace the conquering troops) or when a 'shift in the socio-economic character of a colony necessitated new controlling devices (for example in the West Indies where the abolition of slavery in the 1830s was quickly followed by the formation of police forces to restrain the emancipated plantation workers).4 In India the Irish police model was first introduced in Sind after its annexation in 1843 and, in modified form, it was applied elsewhere in British India in the following twenty years. In India as a whole the creation of police forces was a response to two problems of colonial control. The British had failed to evolve a satisfactory police system from the pre-colonial village watchmen; while at the same time there was a desire (heightened by the mutiny of Indian troops in 1857) to free soldiers from police duties and, by concentrating