Colquhoun was the London agent for the planters of St. Vincent, Nevis, Dominica and the Virgin Islands. He worked tirelessly for the West India Merchant's Committee in London. He worked closely with the Home Secretary and the House of Commons, testifying frequently to the Finance Committee on the subject of police and drafting its legislation on that subject. Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith were visitors to his home. He collaborated closely with Jeremy Bentham on police schemes and reformations of the dockyards. If a single individual could be said to have been the planner and theorist of class struggle in the metropolis it would be he. Melville Lee called him the 'architect' of the police. The Webbs called him its 'inventor'. His influence goes far beyond the establishment of the Marine Police Office, because his books, although written for the practical purpose of establishing a police force, contain that combination of law, economics, flattery and class hatred that together have exercised a powerful influence upon subsequent conceptions of law and order.
His concept of class relations was at once cosmic and dialectical. London was the greatest manufacturing and commercial city in 'the known world'. Its riches were greater than anything 'in the Universe'. Yet, he stated axiomatically, where riches flow there is an acession of crime. The 'progressive increase of Crimes' is 'the constant and never-failing attendant on the accumulation of Wealth'. 'Commercial Riches and Criminal Offences have grown together.' Property and acts of pillage are logically and necessarily connected. He speaks, not for the West India merchants and planters, but for the 'community', 'the nation', 'humanity', 'the civilised world', 'society', 'the law'. His attitude was Newtonian in its obsession with enumerating the 'flux' of wealth and crime. He measures exports, imports, river traffic, ocean traffic, profits and losses. He seeks to do the same with the working class, whose lodging-houses, street-sellers, horse-dealers, pawnbrokers, stablekeeps, second-hand sellers, hawkers, pedlars, public houses, old-iron shops he wished to count, register and license.
'Police in this country,' he writes, 'may be considered as a new Science; in the PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES, and in those other functions which relate to INTERNAL REGULATIONS for the well ordering and comfort of Civil Society.' This was the classic conception of 'police' because it combined law and economics, the protection of property and the protection of production. It is the conception that Colquhoun learned from the Scottish élite such as Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations first appeared as 'Lectures on Police', or William Robertson, who distinguished feudal from commercial societies by the presence of 'police'. Smith's pupil, Adam Ferguson, had argued in 1792 that 'national felicity' depended on 'labour rightly directed'. That 'Wealth comes from inequality' was the first principle of his 'Moral and Political Science'.
Colquhoun sees the working class as an epidemic: the mass of labourers are 'contaminated', one group of workers 'infect' another. Hence he proposes a police to sanitize class relations. He sees the working class as a military enemy whose 'various detachments and subdivisions … [form] the general army of Delinquents'. 'Opportunities are watched and intelligence procured with a degree of vigilance similar to that which marks the conduct of a skilful General.' The London working class has spun a 'system', a 'monstrous System of Depredation', a 'General System of Pillage'. It is 'disciplined in Acts of Criminal Warfare'. It forms 'conspiricies', it comprises a 'phalanx'. The working class is also uncivilised, possessing 'unruly passions', 'rapacious desires', 'evil propensities', 'noxious qualities', 'vicious and bad habits', and its moral turpitude needs the 'humane improvement' by police.
'Poverty' was necessary to wealth (It is the lot of Man – it is the source of Wealth). 'Indigence' on the other hand is 'the evil'. It is the condition of 'idleness', the root of all problems, producing 'a disposition to moral and criminal offences'. 'Idleness' is both a moral category and an economic one: it is the refusal to accept exploitation. This refusal is measured by the 'losses' of the West India merchants (during a decade of unprecedented profit and trade). The conflation of morality and economics is also found in Colquhoun's taxonomy of depredation, which, in fact, apart from diction, is identical to the riverside division of labour, so watermen became 'night plunderers', coopers became 'light horsemen', lumpers became 'heavy horsemen', porters and gangsmen became 'scuffle hunters', etc. Colquhoun employs a rhetorical strategy that criminalizes the river proletariat. The semantic trick enables his readers both to extol the division of labour and to despise the divided labourers. The rhetorical freedom permitting this sleight of hand is necessary to the double vision of the bourgeoisie, which fears and dreads the working class while simultaneously understanding that labour is 'the foundation of all value'. Dr Johnson noted that the diction of the labouring class as casual and mutable, and he called it 'fugitive cant', thus performing a semantic criminalization. He therefore excluded the diction of labour from his dictionary as 'unworthy of preservation'. Such ignorance was a luxury that could not be afforded by those who need to understand the proletarians, such as police, army captains and engineers. Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, whose third edition was published in 1796, does not mention the terms of Colquhoun's approbrium. He was unfamiliar with river work. Colquhoun's semantic strategy was an old one, originating in the first cant dictionaries of the sixteenth century. They divide the working class into a dangerous, incomprehensible, secret underworld, and an honest, plain-spoken, orderly world of labouring dependents. By the 1790s the association between civilisation and correct English implied that speakers of vulgar English were 'savage' – the term Harriott used to describe river workers. Colquhoun added particularity to the generalization.
Colquhoun was not given to making distinctions between 'custom' and 'crime', and where he was forced to acknowledge them his goal was only to abolish the difference.
What was at first considered the wages of fortitude, at length assumes the form, and is viewed in the light of a fair perquisite of office. In this manner abuses multiply, and the ingenuity of man is ever fertile in finding some palliative. Custom and example sanction the greatest enormaties which at length become fortified by immemorial and progressive usage: it is no wonder, therfore, that the superior Officers find it an Herculean labour to cleanse the Augean stable.
The relations of appropriation give to labour a unity that is apprehended according to various capitalist interests. We can distinguish three. First, are the technologists, like Samuel Bentham or William Vaughan, who see the working class as the producers of things, because they wish to increase productivity by revolutionizing the tools of labour. Second, are the economists, like Adam Smith or David Ricardo, to whom the working class is a quantitative aspect of capital, the producers of a value according to the duration of their labour. Third, are the police, like Colquhoun and Harriott, who see the working class as the producers of idleness, drunkeness and disorder. Customary appropriations appear as inefficiency or waste to the technologists, as an inventory loss or transaction cost to the economists, and a depredation or crime to the police. They therefore wage war against the working class.
