Martin Charles Thomas is Professor of Colonial History in the Department of History at the University of Exeter. He is a director of the University's Centre for the Study of War, State and Society, an interdisciplinary research centre that supports research into the impact of armed conflict and collective violence on societies and communities.

• Introduction: police, labour and colonial violence; Part I. Ideas and Practices: 1. Colonial policing: a discursive framework; 2. 'What did you do in the colonial police force, daddy?' Policing inter-war dissent; 3. 'Paying the butcher's bill': policing British colonial protest after 1918; Part II. Colonial Case Studies: French, British and Belgian: 4. Gendarmes: work and policing in French North Africa after 1918; 5. Policing Tunisia: mineworkers, fellahs and nationalist protest; 6. Rubber, coolies and communists: policing disorder in French Vietnam; 7. Stuck together? Rubber production, labour regulation and policing in Malaya; 8. Caning the workers? Policing and violence in Jamaica's sugar industry; 9. Oil and order: repressive violence in Trinidad's oilfields; 10. Profits, privatization and police: the birth of Sierra Leone's diamond industry; 11. Policing and politics in Nigeria: the political economy of indirect rule, 1929–39; 12. Depression and revolt: policing the Belgian Congo; Conclusion; Notes to the text.

'In a colonial system threatened by economic crisis, labour protest and rising nationalism, efforts to safeguard the colonial political economy provided the key to the policing of the empire. Martin Thomas' impressively wide-ranging and thoroughly documented study for the first time analyses the links between colonial policing, political economy and imperial policy in Africa, southeast Asia and the Caribbean.' Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney