FOLLOWING the relative stability of the 1890s, the Edwardian decade saw the emergence of new types of political radicalism. Although the peak of anarchist propaganda by the deed seemed to reach a new, truly global dimension after the assassination of both the Italian King Umberto I and the American President William McKinley within the span of just over a year, the anarchist colony in Britain continued to rapidly decline. Instead, the new challenge for British authorities came increasingly from home-grown movements like the militant suffragettes (who after 1906 began advocating violent methods in their struggle for female enfranchisement) and the labour movement, sections of which were increasingly responsive to the advanced socialist doctrines circulating on the continent.

Simultaneously, the problems posed by colonial unrest and the mounting wave of immigration from Eastern Europe were only further highlighted by spectacular and violent episodes involving foreigners active in revolutionary and nationalist politics. At first glance, the British government's response to these new challenges appears to have changed very little when compared to the previous decade. Scotland Yard and the Home Office continued to display the same circumspect conservatism in regard to strategies of containing politically motivated violence, all the while insisting that political crime was not even a category recognized by British law. Change was nonetheless forthcoming and as the following pages will show, the decade preceding the First World War had a profoundly transformative effect on the expansion and development of political policing in Britain.

On 3 December 1901, in his first annual message to Congress, the twenty-sixth President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, decried the assassination of his predecessor William McKinley by a ‘criminal whose perverted instincts [led] him to prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order’, adding that anarchism was ‘a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist. His crime should be made an offense against the law of nations, like piracy and… the slave trade… [and it] should be so declared by treaties among all civilized powers.’