© 2004 by Oxford University Press
A ‘Weak’ State? The English State, the Magistracy and the Reform of Policing in the 1830s
1 University of Melbourne
It has long been a historical cliché that the English state of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries was a weak one, compared to the bureaucratic states of France or Prussia. This article challenges this view by examining the political struggle over the issue of policing England outside London, in the 1830s and early-1840s. It argues that any definition of the state and its workings in this period must look beyond the small salaried bureaucracy to include the unpaid JPs in county Quarter Sessions. Though they maintained a rhetoric of gentlemanly independence of — and sometimes outright opposition to — the powers of the central state, they were a crucial ingredient of that state. An examination of their role in bringing in police forces for the counties shows that, in important respects, they complemented and strengthened the central state in maintaining law and order in a period of social, economic and political turbulence.