Policing the Periphery –: Polizei, Gewalt und Staatsformierung im kolonialen South Carolina

Abstract

Policing the Periphery – Policing, Violence and State Formation in Colonial South Carolina

This article analyses the transfer of policing and legal structures from England to colonial South Carolina. Situated at the periphery of the British Empire, South Carolina was the only plantation colony in North America with a majority “black” population and its economic, social, geographic and demographic structures differed significantly from those in England. Such differences shaped the reception and adaption processes that shaped the transfer of legal and policing structure from England to the North American colonial context, thereby shaping local governance structures and supplanting them with informal modes of coercion-backed political ordering. In light of these observations, the article to critically interrogates dominant “top down” approaches on the history of state formation by arguing that colonial state formation was an overly negotiated and “bottom up” process, which was decisively shaped by the periphery.