ABSTRACT

Embedded in national justice systems, police and prisons are core institutions of the modern state. They form part of the coercive apparatus that in Weber’s idealised conception enables the state to monopolise violence within its territorial boundaries. Police and prisons acquired their contemporary forms in Europe and North America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were exported throughout the imperial world as instruments of colonial domination. Introduced in the late nineteenth century during the final wave of European expansion, their origins and subsequent development are an integral part of the larger story of colonisation, state formation and globalisation in Melanesia.