ABSTRACT
The Great War and the police 'mutinies' For many years the Whiggish view of war as an interruption to the natural development of society dominated the interpretation of British history. More recently a younger generation of historians have stressed that economic, political and social developments do not stop because of a war, and they have urged that war can both accelerate change within a society and even propel it in new directions.1 The strains of the First World War affected police development in several ways: they contributed to the unrest which resulted in the police strikes or 'mutinies' of 1918 and 1919; they fostered further encroachments by central government upon the influence of local police committees; and, together with the fears generated by the Russian Revolution, they raised political surveillance by the police to a level unknown at least since the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
