In The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire, Lisa Ford skillfully shows that for the British Empire, one of the essential legacies the American Revolution was “the waxing prerogative” (57) and the “vast constitutional license” of colonial peacekeeping (229–30). This kind of systematic activity continued to the mid-nineteenth century and gradually dissipated after that.
From a totally different angle, Ford more or less reaffirms scholar Eric Nelson's argument in The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (2015) that many of the American founding generation tended to see themselves as rebels against the British Parliament but not against the crown (some of them even urged George III to bypass Parliament and rule directly). Ford even proves that considering the British Empire as a whole, the real winner of the American Revolution was the monarch. The king became the British Empire's “legal Despot” (94–95). The American Revolution sent shockwaves through the United Kingdom, leading to an increase in the power of the crown and a “shift to autocracy” (18–19) in other parts of the British Empire. Ford argues that as a result of the American Revolution, a “legal divergence” gradually appeared between colonial law (the “periphery of empire”) and metropolitan law (the “center of empire”), with the former starting to resemble the model of a “police state” (5–9), aimed at “coercive peacekeeping” (8). The colonial executive power had been buttressed and enhanced, while the colonial legislative bodies’ power had been weakened. Ultimately, the British Empire needed to compensate itself after the unhappy loss of the American War of Independence. It did so by initiating a more severe crackdown on the issues of colonial rights and liberty. In fact, even in the British Isles, the habeas corpus had been suspended quite a while during the American and Napoleonic Wars. Taken together, as Ford shows, the legacy of “imperial peacekeeping” is not a trivial sideshow: rather, it helped to wedge the idea and system of “empire” into “the DNA of the modern international order” (22–23).
Geographically, Ford focuses on five key areas—Massachusetts, Quebec, Jamaica, Bengal, and New South Wales—each the focus of a chapter. Within this list, Quebec, Bengal, and New South Wales are of special importance because the constitutional settlements (as brand-new experiments) in those places “marked the advent of a new kind of empire” (4–5). In chapter 1, Ford make a careful examination of prerevolutionary social disturbance and political disorder in Massachusetts. The British Empire's reaction was dramatic: “no colony established after 1770 constrained the crown's prerogative to keep the peace as it had been constrained in colonial Massachusetts” (56–57). In chapter 2, Ford interprets the 1774 Quebec Act as a crown colony model, which in essence is “an autocratic governor with an appointed council” (220–21). After 1791, both Upper and Lower Canada had its own elected assembly. Nevertheless, all legislation was still “subject first to review by an appointed upper house and then to gubernatorial veto” (98–99). In chapter 3, Ford focuses on Jamaica: “no peace was more fragile than Jamaica's” (136), and martial law was called in Jamaica every other year after 1760, even though sometimes the crises were not real but imagined. In this chapter, Ford also shows that various antislavery thinkers nonetheless thought that liberated slaves were far less fit for self-government than were their previous white owners. In chapter 4, Ford documents the Bengal situation, where a paid police force was instituted and invested by the colonial government: “torture, bribery, spying, and arbitrary imprisonment” (170–71) were acknowledged and openly tolerated, even though torture and bribery were not formally authorized. In chapter 5, Ford recounts the colonial practices in New South Wales, where military men were transferred into the mounted police, where any white person could be detained unless they could successfully prove they had not been convicted. Peculiarly, the colonial government candidly admitted that the brutal methods it adopted to keep the so-called king's peace were indeed “grossly unconstitutional” (215–16). Although Ford examine issues of race and religion, but the main focus is on legal and political history. Ford's arguments are innovative, straightforward, and clear-cut, and her methodology comprehensive methodology.
Ford could have explored further the domestic politics in the United Kingdom, particularly the parliamentary clash between the Tory and the Whig parties. Between 1783 and 1830, there was a long period of Tory dominance and Whig exclusion from power (with the brief exception of 1806–1807). This largely coincides with the period that Ford covers, from 1764 to 1836 (3). Ford mentions that after 1773, with few exceptions, “new colonies in the British Empire, slave and free, were ruled directly by autocratic governors-in-council, excising the power of the British crown” (3–4), she carefully documents “the enormous changes in the king's peace made possible by the shift to crown rule after 1773” (216). In fact, 1773 was within the years of the Tory administration led by Lord North (1770–1782). Ford's argues that “Parliament emboldened the crown” (9), but what if, when led by different political parties, Parliament might behave quite differently regarding the Parliament–Crown relationship?
Overall, The King's Peace is a very insightful and convincing book. Ford contributes quite a lot to current scholarship through her skill in collecting, processing, and organizing source material. It is highly recommended for scholars and students interested in the history of British Empire, and more broadly, the functioning of the complicated system of colonialism.
