Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2025: The growth of the British private security industry in the age of decolonization, 1960-74.

Before the Second World War, private security companies provided guards for a small number of wealthy householders and local business owners in Britain. By the mid-1970s, however, the industry had expanded rapidly to offer a broader range of guarding and watch services to corporations, public authorities, educational establishments, and other organizations across the country. Leading British security firms also extended their operations overseas as they established subsidiaries across the former empire. Focusing on the largest company, Securicor, this article explores how private security companies cultivated and sustained a demand for guarding services that had previously been marginal. It argues that individuals with colonial policing and military experience played an important role in marketing privatized policing as a solution to societal unrest and political instability between the early 1960s and mid-1970s. As security professionals, they positioned private security as a means of countering Britain's postimperial decline at home and safeguarding property against the encroachments of postcolonial governments abroad. The appointment of former colonial officials as executives, managers, and guards further lent legitimacy to private firms in the eyes of public police forces. In effect, decolonization helped bolster demand for new types of privatized services, cultivated and delivered by those for whom the empire no longer offered a viable career path. Many of the private companies founded in this era continue to dominate the British and African security sectors today.