The King’s Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire, by Lisa Ford

In the 2022 Queen’s Speech, read by the Prince of Wales to Parliament on 10 May, the British government declared that it was undertaking a ‘leading role in defending democracy and freedom across the world’. Its performance closer to home, however, suggests otherwise. Recent legislation has increased the power, and lack of accountability, of the police, Parliament and government officials, as well as restricting the right to peaceful assembly and protest, limited judicial oversight, weakened democratic institutions, and undermining the rights of the most vulnerable, not least asylum seekers. The British government’s plans to tear up the 1998 Human Rights Act and replace it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’ threatens, moreover, not only to strip away domestic rights protections and make it harder to challenge the state, but to undermine the integrity of human rights systems in Europe and beyond. While such measures would not, according to Human Rights Watch, ‘look out of place in an autocrat’s playbook’ (Y. Ahmed and E. McDonnell, ‘UK Government’s Proposed Laws Will Embolden Autocrats’, Human Rights Watch, 11 May 2022, available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/11/uk-governments-proposed-laws-will-embolden-autocrats), Lisa Ford’s book suggests that, rather than being aberrant, they are part of a long and imperial lineage of efforts to keep the ‘king’s peace’, or to maintain the authority of the sovereign to order people both within and beyond the realm. Through tracking the changing nature of colonial peacekeeping through the Age of Revolutions and beyond, and with it the growing autocracy of the imperial constitution, this wide-ranging and provocative book makes a very compelling case for the importance of the ‘king’s peace’, both in practice and as a legal idea, in defining the parameters of modern sovereignty. It does so through exploring a range of contests between the 1760s and 1830s about ‘who got to keep the peace over whom and where’, in Massachusetts, Quebec, Jamaica, Bengal and New South Wales (p. 3). While disorder in Massachusetts and Quebec was the catalyst for a shift, Ford suggests, from self-government to despotic rule in Britain’s colonies, it was in Jamaica that racialised techniques of peacekeeping were consolidated in the late eighteenth century, which were then spread throughout the British empire from India to Australia, not least a reliance on autocratic governance, the jurisprudence of emergency, and martial law. The making of this imperial constitution, for Ford, was thus a product of ‘the collision of very local problems of ordering people in place with the fundaments of imperial law’ (p. 228).

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