Smoke Poetics: The Wapping Coal Riot, the Marine Police, and Romantic Forms of Urbanity

This paper reads coal as a metonym for London’s social fabric in the writings of police theorist Patrick Colquhoun, the archival reports on the Wapping Coal Riot, and the anti-carceral poetry of William Blake. In 1798, at the behest of the West India Committee, Colquhoun had developed the first modern police force, the Thames River Police, which predated Robert Peel’s metropolitan police by over 20 years. Colquhoun’s “Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames” (1800) centers on coal in his case for policing. In his argument, coal’s energy economies link domestic affairs with the entire metropolis, making policing a city-wide problem, one that merits public support (and public funding). In reading Colquhoun’s treatise as an example of the entanglement of policing and fossil fuel power, I discuss the relevant literature from the energy humanities that connects fossil energy to the larger extractive ideologies of empire. I also demonstrate how Colquhoun’s figuring of coal builds on but alters portrayals of coal in Jonathan Swift and Anna Barbauld. The final section of this discussion demonstrates how Blake’s Jerusalem (1820) indexes dispersed, atmospheric systems of carceral power and summons dynamic, unpoliceable crowds. Blake’s smoke poetics sketch a limit of generalization, one that recoups figures of pollution and waste to riot against the systems that produce them.