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The settler colonial origins of modern social thought, actually: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, Princeton, 2023 »

The settler colonial police: Paul Bleakley, ‘Capital, Settler Colonialism and Police Violence in Imperial Queensland’, in Emma D. Watkins, Eleanor Bland (eds), Imperial Crime and Punishment, Emerald, 2025

26Aug25

Abstract: In the wake of its separation from New South Wales in December 1859, Queensland’s growth was predicated largely by its value as a ‘new frontier’ for European colonists seeking to expand their pastoral and agricultural wealth. The process of settler colonialism was facilitated by the Queensland colonial (later, state) government, who routinely used the Queensland Native Mounted Police (QNMP) for more than 50 years to protect the interests of white landowners, at the typically fatal expense of the region’s Indigenous peoples. The exercise of state violence by the paramilitary-oriented QNMP was reflected in punitive expeditions that resulted in massacre; however, the use of colonial or state police agencies to defend capital with violence was not limited to conflict on the frontier. Drawing on archival material, such as the transcripts of judicial inquiries and internal government correspondence, this chapter reaffirms the existence of a nexus between capitalist expansion and state violence in the imperial period and makes connections between violence committed on behalf of Queensland’s landed pastoralists in the mid- to late-1800s and similar (albeit, less fatal) interactions with labour into the early 1900s. Through this, it is possible to critically interrogate the historical role of police as agents of state in Queensland, with implications for how politically motivated law enforcement was carried out to varying extents throughout the pre-Fitzgerald era, prior to sweeping reforms of the Queensland Police Force (QPF) at the dawn of the 1990s.


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