Given the recent demonstrations against police in the United States, Michael Silvestri's monograph on colonial police in Bengal could not be more timely. It also blends Chris Bayly's groundbreaking historiographical work on colonial knowledge production and Heather Streets's work on the “martial races” of India with Tim Harper's most recent work on transnational anticolonialism. Meticulously researched and highly readable, Policing “Bengali Terrorism” finds the origins of modern intelligence agencies in colonial police officers who were untrained in intelligence or counterterrorism but “created a new colonial ethnography of the ‘Bengali terrorist’” and, over time, “emerged as experts on imperial policing and revolutionary terrorism” (p. 6).
In part one, Silvestri artfully describes the creation and deployment of a massive intelligence apparatus in the early twentieth century and shows the heavy dependence of white officers on Bengali subordinates who were ultimately the ones committing acts of torture, coercion, and “alteration of evidence” with...
