The history of the British Empire／South Africa and fingerprint identification

I have devoted myself to the field of Western historical studies from my time as a university student until the present. I decided upon this specialization because I was interested in the question of how Europeans and Americans have viewed the non-Western world. Before long, however, I came to desire more concrete knowledge, and I developed an interest in the history of the British Empire, which possessed numerous colonies outside Europe. During my studies, I gradually narrowed my focus in particular to British South Africa.

Furthermore, in 2017, my interests shifted toward the issue of identification through fingerprints after translating Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present, a book written by the South African historian Keith Breckenridge. Fingerprint identification originated in British India in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This emerged from various necessities of colonial governance. Of special significance was the fact that, in criminal investigations conducted by the police, British officials were unable to distinguish among local individuals by facial appearance. Edward Henry, the Commissioner who first made full-scale use of fingerprints in criminal investigations in Bengal, has already been the subject of extensive research. Building upon these studies, Biometric State clarified how fingerprint identification was introduced into South Africa when Henry was invited to the country, and how it came to be used in such contexts as tracking African laborers who fled from gold mines.

From fingerprint identification to the global history of policing

While working on the translation of Biometric State, I started to feel the desire to address issues concerning the theme of fingerprint identification in South African history that Breckenridge himself had not examined. Acting upon this interest, I began to examine historical sources in the late 2010s. A primary source was residence permits issued in the British Cape Colony in the early twentieth century to immigrants of Indian and Chinese descent. These correspond to what would today in Japan be called residence cards for foreign nationals. These permits are available for viewing at the Western Cape Archives and Records Service, and the fingerprints of the immigrants themselves are impressed on the permits.

However, in July 2019, I developed a new interest upon reading an article in the American magazine Foreign Policy. Written against the backdrop of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong at the time, the article traced the origins of the Hong Kong police's suppression of demonstrations to 1967 during the period of British rule. In that year, the Hong Kong police adopted a new strategy for suppressing demonstrations in which units were divided into three coordinated groups responsible respectively for the deployment of tear gas, the driving of crowds into particular streets, and arrests. Particularly noteworthy about this new strategy is that it was exported to Britain in the mid-1980s and used in suppressing the strikes by miners. Moreover, after being further refined in Britain, the strategy was subsequently reimported into Hong Kong.

Reading the article in Foreign Policy spurred my interest in the global history of policing. The article discussed the international transfer of policing technologies. The spread of fingerprint identification through Edward Henry may likewise be regarded as one example of such technological transfer. He later moved from South Africa to Britain, where he became the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London and introduced fingerprint identification there on a full scale as well. Although somewhat unlike technological transfer, the establishment of a centralized police force in the American Philippines in the early twentieth century, which later influenced the creation of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) in the United States, might perhaps be described as a case of institutional transfer across countries.

Encounter with crime history

Unfortunately, my study of such matters was interrupted when the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020. It became difficult to conduct research at overseas archives. However, I was able to spend much more time reading scholarly literature. My thinking was further advanced by one particular book which I encountered during this period.

That work was the monumental study by the South African historian Charles van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal. The subject of the book was the life of Joseph Lis (Joseph Silver), a Polish-born Jew who operated across the trans-Atlantic world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a brothel owner, procurer of prostitutes, robber, police informant, and other shadowy roles. Lis moved constantly among Poland, Britain, the United States, South Africa, Namibia, Germany, France, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. According to van Onselen, there is also a high probability that Lis was the perpetrator of the Jack the Ripper murders in London in the late 1880s, in which prostitutes became victims of a series of killings that ultimately remained unsolved.

The Fox and the Flies, which traces the internationally wide-ranging activities of a single criminal, is first and foremost an outstanding achievement in global crime history. Yet the work may also be described as a study of global police history, albeit one differing from the international transfer of technologies and institutions discussed above. This is because it vividly depicts the development of police systems in various regions, as well as scientific investigative techniques such as fingerprinting, as factors that cornered Lis and forced him to move from place to place. Through van Onselen's monumental study, I came to keenly realize the true state of a world, which had appeared only in abstract terms when viewed solely through the lens of police history, within the context of crime history.

My current research theme

How, then, could I write a global history of my own that, like The Fox and the Flies, examines both those pursued by the police and the police themselves? A clue was provided by my book Nelson Mandela in 2021. Mandela was a leading figure in the South African Communist Party. In the twentieth century, many communist activists transcended borders to reach the wider world. If one were to investigate how the police traced the movement of such activists, would this contribute simultaneously to both the global history of political movements and police history? With such questions in mind, I am currently engaged in the investigation of primary historical materials from a variety of regions not limited to South Africa and Britain.

---

Reference Literature

• Horiuchi, T. "Empire and Colony: Focusing on the History of Fingerprint Identification in British India and South Africa", Explorations in Western History edited by Horiuchi, T. et al. (Minerva Shobo, 2026)
• Horiuchi, T. "Governing "Suspicious Persons": From Immigration Control and Police Records in Twentieth-Century South Africa", Perspectives and Approaches in Historical Studies edited by Takahashi, H. and Miyama, J. (Benseisha, 2026)
• Horiuchi, T. "A Global History of Police and Models of the State", Fenestra, No. 5 (2021)
• Horiuchi, T. "From "History from Below" to Global History: On Charles van Onselen's Studies of South African Crime History", Journal of the Faculty of Letters, Chuo University, No. 69 (2024)

Takayuki Horiuchi／Professor, Faculty of Letters, Chuo University
Areas of Specialization: Western History, History of the British Empire, and South African History

Takayuki Horiuchi was born in Kyoto Prefecture in 1976. He graduated from the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University, in 1999. He completed the Master’s Program in the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, in 2001. He completed the Doctoral Program without obtaining a degree in the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, in 2007. He holds Ph.D. in History (Kyoto University). After serving as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education at Niigata University, and subsequently as Associate Professor and then Professor in the Faculty of History, Language and Culture at Kanazawa University, he assumed his current position in 2023.
As noted above, his current research focuses on the global history of policing and political movements centered on twentieth-century South Africa and the British Empire.
His main written works include British Identity in South Africa (Maruzen Publishing, 2018), Nelson Mandela (Iwanami Shinsho, 2021), Explorations in Western History (co-edited volume, Minerva Shobo, 2026), the Japanese translation of Keith Breckenridge’s Biometric State (Iwanami Shoten, 2017), and more.

• Share articles
• 
• 
•