"It is in the colonies, rather than Britain, that many elements of the modern nation-state were first put into place. The disciplinary mechanisms of the colonial state, from police services to fingerprinting, inspired like developments in England. It is in India that fingerprinting, which rapidly became accepted all over the world, was developed by members of the Bengal police, and E. R. Henry, who played a large (but perhaps not indispensable) part in this venture, went on to become commissioner of Metropolitan Police in London. The police services, as a whole, were more well-developed in India than England, not surprising when we consider the active role of the colonial state in not only putting down crime (as might be expected), but in repressing revolutionary activity and instituting a regime of surveillance. Scotland Yard was preceded by the Thuggee and Dacoity department which, when it disbanded around 100 years ago, gave way to the Central Intelligence Department. If the so-called ’rubber bullet’ was to be used by British troops in Ireland in the 1970s, it was in India in the nineteenth century that the British pioneered the use of the fatal Dum-Dum or expanding bullet, subsequently used in the Boer war. The same war saw the British imprison Boer women and children in what were in effect concentration camps, and though Britain, the island civilisation, prided itself on its unquestionable moral superiority to the militaristic Germans, it undoubtedly had a thing or two to teach to the Huns, as they were then called. It was India, Ireland, and later the African colonies that served as Britain’s laboratory, and where methods of riot control and police action were mastered before being deployed against the working class and communists in Britain." (Vinay Lal, 'Good Nazis and just scholars: much ado about the British empire', Race & Class, Vol 38, 1997)