The Empire, the police, and the introduction of fingerprint technology in Malta
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895808099181 |
| Date | 01 February 2009 |
| Published date | 01 February 2009 |
| Author | Paul Knepper,Jacqueline Azzopardi Cauchi |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
73
The Empire, the police, and the
introduction of fingerprint
technology in Malta
JACQUELINE AZZOPARDI CAUCHI AND PAUL KNEPPER
University of Malta and University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
It required more than three decades for fingerprint technology,
invented in the British colony of India, to reach the British colony of
Malta. Fingerprint technology was not institutionalized in Malta until
1932 owing to a different social context; British colonial authorities
tended to see the Maltese as Europeans and never regarded crime
prevention as a priority. Nevertheless, a review of policing in Malta
in the 19th and early 20th centuries supports the thesis that
fingerprint-based identification was invented to maintain surveil-
lance over ‘otherness’. Although the colonial situation in Malta did
not produce anything like the Criminal Tribes Act in British India, the
introduction of fingerprint technology coincided with concern over
foreign residents. Fingerprint technology became institutionalized
following enactment of the Aliens Act in 1899 and formation of a
detective and alien branch within the police organization. The
diffusion of knowledge within the British Empire did not operate in a
predictable direction. Rather, knowledge arising in one colony
spread to others, as well as to England, channelled by familiar
prejudices as much as scientific discovery.
Key Words
colonial • otherness • policing • racialization • surveillance
Criminology & Criminal Justice
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ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 9(1): 73–92
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808099181
Throughout the 20th century, fingerprint technology represented the mod-
ern, scientific approach to criminal identification. The technique of finger-
print classification has in the 21st century surrendered this prominence to
forensic DNA, but from the 1890s, when fingerprint science emerged, to
the 1990s, it was the mark of cosmopolitan police organization. The story
of how the technology developed has been told, mostly in narratives that
chart advances in technique and assign credit for contributions (Thorwald,
1965; Lambourne, 1984; Beavan, 2001). But a social history has begun to
emerge, and in this work it is possible to see links between the use of know-
ledge in society, the categorization of ‘otherness’, and political surveillance
(Cole, 2001; Ruggiero, 2001; Sengoopta, 2003; Breckenridge, 2005).
Sengoopta (2003) delivers a provocative analysis of fingerprint science in
relation to colonial rule, racialization, and policing. Although he aims at a
popular audience, Sengoopta is an accomplished historian of science con-
cerned with significant sociological issues (Cole, 2005: 253). Fingerprint
technology, he argues, was born in British India, where the ‘curious combin-
ation of despotic rule and intense insecurity’ led colonial administrators to
devise a means of identification for surveillance on a wide scale. Contrary
to the image of Scotland Yard triumphing over the efforts of London’s crim-
inal underworld to deceive them, fingerprints as a means of criminal iden-
tification did not originate at home, but abroad. The British Empire was a
‘network of people, ideas, and communication—and traffic on that net-
work could move in either direction’ (Sengoopta, 2003: 6). In this way, fin-
gerprint technology yields an example of the diffusion of knowledge or
‘policy transfer’ within the British Empire, and a meaningful starting point
for approaching contemporary internationalism in the response to crime
(Karstedt, 2002; Godfrey and Dunstill, 2005; Jones and Newburn, 2007).
To explore Sengoopta’s argument, we discuss the emergence of finger-
print technology in Malta. The Malta police did not institutionalize finger-
printing until 1932, some 35 years after the world’s first fingerprint bureau
was established in Bengal. This means that it took more than three decades
for the technology to travel ‘in’ from India to London and ‘out’ from
London to Malta. As a depot for commercial shipping from colonies to the
east (principally India), and the home of the Mediterranean Fleet, Malta was
endowed with current advances in architecture, engineering, and communi-
cations. Valletta had railway service from Mdina by 1883, electric lights in
1896, an electric tramway in 1903, and telephone service (for the police) by
1897, not to mention the Royal Opera House, which opened in 1866
(Cassar, 1988). Furthermore, forensic science was well established. Stefano
Zerafa became the first chair of forensic medicine at the University of Malta
in 1829 and Constantino Schinas, another professor of medicine, was using
a microscope to analyse blood stains as early as 1841.1The syllabus in
forensic medicine for 1856 included wounds, poisoning, abortion, and
chemistry (Cassar, 1974). What, then, explains the delay? Why did Malta
adopt fingerprint technology when it did? How were conditions in colonial
Malta different from colonial India?
Criminology & Criminal Justice 9(1)74
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