Patrick Colquhoun

Ten years later, with the outbreak of the American Revolution, Colquhoun sided against the rebels and, along with 13 other local businessmen, funded a Glasgow regiment to contribute to the government's war effort.

His findings formed the basis of numerous pamphlets and treatises that he wrote promoting legal reform and business generally.

[6][2] By the end of the eighteenth century, merchants from the British Empire's colonies were losing an estimated £500,000 worth of stolen cargo annually from the Pool of London on the River Thames.

[7] In 1796 Colquhoun's published A treatise on the police of metropolis[8] and two years later, in collaboration with Justice of the Peace and master mariner John Harriott and utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, he wrote a letter to the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants proposing "the Establishment of a marine Police Office for the prevention of River Plunder".

[7] With an initial investment of £4,200, the new force began with about 50 men charged with policing 33,000 workers in the river trades, of whom Colquhoun claimed 11,000 were known criminals and "on the game".

It found receptive audiences far outside London, and inspired similar forces in places in other countries, notably, New York City, Dublin, and Sydney.

Colquhoun's utilitarian approach to the problem – using a cost-benefit argument to obtain support from businesses standing to benefit – allowed him to achieve what Henry and John Fielding failed for their Bow Street detectives.

Unlike the stipendiary system at Bow Street, the river police were full-time, salaried officers prohibited from taking private fees.

Patrick Colquhoun was appointed as Resident Minister and Consul general to Britain by the Hanseatic cities Hamburg in 1804, and Bremen and Lübeck shortly after in the following as the successor of Henry Heymann, who was also master of the Steelyard (In German: Stalhofmeister).

Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh posits another persona of Colquhoun, i.e., the agent of often violent oppression wholly in the service of an industrialist and property-holding class in the earliest incarnation of socio-economic warfare in the Atlantic economy.

Observations on a late Publication: intituled, A treatise on the police of the metropolis, for instance, published in 1800, criticised Colquhoun for fearmongering about the extent of crime in London, suggesting that doing so was "dangerous" because it tended "to produce innovations that were not merely useless, but that which may prove prenicious to the public body, and be paritularly grevious to individuals"; and that some of Colquhoun's "remedies ... are of a suspicious character, and ought to be treated with rigid scrutiny, lest in the adoption of them, real evils may be experienced while attempting to get rid of imaginary or trivial ones.