Abstract

Over the last five years, a renewed historiography has taken up the challenge of reconstructing the development, workings, and legacy of colonial police and intelligence services in the twentieth century. Dialoguing with groundbreaking works such as those authored by Christopher Bayly, Martin Thomas, David Anderson and David Killingray, a number of studies have returned to address the problem of the surveillance and repression of anticolonialism in the European metropoles and in the colonies themselves. These studies – which cover, with one exception, the first half of the twentieth century – restitute the endeavors on the part of imperial authorities to eradicate anticolonial networks, mobilizations, and information circuits, before the final act of decolonization. Besides proposing their chronologies, that I will analytically present in two paragraphs, these recent publications deal with the opportunities and methodological challenges connected to the use of police records to write the history of anticolonialism. In the final section of this essay, I will briefly discuss their contributions to that conversation and relate them to a set of open questions.