Gary Sturgess
East India Company Building
Three hundred and fifty years of British involvement in India have been summed up in six words: “We traded; we conquered; we governed.” [1]
And until 1858, this trading, conquering and governing was done by a private corporation, the East India Company, which from 1772 exercised virtual sovereignty over a substantial and consistently expanding part of the subcontinent.
The East India Company was a government in all but name. It maintained its own army and navy. It collected taxes and preserved customs barriers. It minted coins and printed stamps. It codified the criminal law, and tried and punished offenders. And in its final years, it started to lay down the public infrastructure — roads, railways and irrigation systems — necessary to support a modern economy.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 4 – January-Febrary, 2011
Historical perceptions
Suspicion of the profit motive is a thread that runs through the long history of public service contracting, and it recurs with such frequency that it should not be lightly dismissed by those who advocate competition and contracting in public services. There are no doubt earlier examples, but let us start with the New Testament, where Jesus uses the universal dislike of tax farmers to underpin his Parable of the Modest Contractor.
Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a public contractor. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even as this contractor. I fast twice in the week. I give tithes of all that I possess.”
And the contractor, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes until heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other, for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
Certainly a public good, but not always a public service.
British insurance companies are planning to create a fleet of armed patrol boats to escort vessels through the Gulf of Aden. This “private navy” would be funded by insurers and shipping companies, but would work under the control of the multinational naval force already operating in the region.
According to London’s Independent newspaper, the Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group, which insures 14 percent of the world’s commercial shipping, is leading the initiative. Several major shipping companies have lent their support, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has agreed that the concept deserves consideration.
Insurance companies delivering services that most of us would regard as “inherently governmental” is by no means a new phenomenon. Over the past two or three centuries, the insurance industry has played a vital role in the development of key public services, among them fire-fighting, criminal investigation and social insurance. Indeed, it is difficult to think of an industry that has contributed more to innovation in public services.
In the United States, trade associations have long played an important role in law enforcement. Throughout the nineteenth century, bankers’ and jewellers’ associations contracted with Pinkerton’s and later William J. Burns’ detective agencies to advise members on security, disseminate criminal intelligence and pursue offenders. Railroad and streetcar companies were systematically tracking fraudsters from the late 19th century – the slip-and-fallers, banana-peelers and broken-window men – forming their own Alliance Against Accident Fraud in 1905 to share intelligence about fraud gangs.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 2 – September/October, 2010
Venue to advances in accountability.
October 1786. A county gaoler from Norwich named John Simpson arrives at the London office of the Secretary of State with a remarkable request. He has just travelled 200 miles from Plymouth, where he delivered three female prisoners to be shipped on board the First Fleet of convicts to be sent to Australia. One of the women, Susannah Holmes, brought along her five month old son, but since the legal papers said nothing about a child, the captain of the prison hulk refused to accept him on board. Simpson has left the distraught mother at Plymouth, threatening suicide, and caught the first coach to London, nursing the babe on his lap.
The clerks are not prepared to trouble Lord Sydney and the Norwich gaoler is turned away. But as he leaves the office, Simpson sees the Home Secretary coming down the stairs, and he presses forward to make his petition. The Home Secretary listens to him and signs the order. Not content to let the matter rest, the gaoler asks one more favor. The father of the child, a 20 year old felon named Henry Kable, who had been imprisoned in Norwich Castle with Susannah Holmes, is not on the list of convicts to be sent to Botany Bay. He has offered to marry Susannah and accompany her on the long and uncertain voyage to this unknown country, but his applications have been refused. Lord Sydney at once agrees, and after a further journey to Norwich to collect Kable, Simpson reunites the young family on board the Plymouth hulk.
This heart-warming story was given significant attention in the press, and money and gifts were donated to assist the Kables in making a fresh start. These were taken aboard one of the convict transports and stored in the hold until the family arrived at their destination.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 1 – July/August 2010
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door. . .
- W.H. Auden
Away to a six-horse town.
IN 1935, the General Post Office commissioned England’s poet laureate to write a poem celebrating the rail service that carried the overnight mail from London to Glasgow. Set to music by the renowned composer Benjamin Britten and produced as a short film by the great socialist filmmaker John Grierson, Auden’s “Night Mail” quickly became a national icon.
With a clickety-clack rhythm and, as Auden read it, a bland, thoroughly reliable voice, “Night Mail” captured the role that the postal service has played (in most countries around the world) by reinforcing our sense of national community.
Not even classical liberals questioned the government’s monopoly of the mail. Adam Smith thought that the post office was perhaps the only mercantile project that had been successfully run by government. For John Stuart Mill, the postal service ranked alongside coinage and weights and measures as activities that increased the public’s sense of nationhood.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 5, Number 5, March-April, 2010
One of the early writers on military contracting.
“HE is the very antithesis of civic responsibility. He is unimpressed with the claims of good government. Falstaff has no interest in public values.”
At first glance, it is difficult to grasp what young Harry sees in Sir John Falstaff – an “old, fat, cowardly, drunken, amorous, vain and lying” man according to John Dryden.
And yet, over four centuries, theater audiences have warmed to William Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, partly because he seems fundamentally good-hearted, and partly because he exposes the pomposity and self-interest of those who chase after honor and office – “Can honor set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No.”
At the same time, audiences laugh at his venality, and for two and a half centuries, Shakespeare’s audiences laughed at a familiar literary figure – the corrupt military contractor. Though, since the middle of the 19th century, when the state finally assumed responsibility for recruiting and equipping soldiers, some of the playwright’s humor has been lost.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 5, Number 4, January – February 2010
Flying colours
THOMAS the Tank Engine is a private train. The bright red, blue and green locomotives that help to make this bedtime story so fascinating to children are the colors of a private rail system that flourished in England between 1825 and 1946. Colors were used by the pre-1946 rail companies to distinguish themselves from their competitors, and much of the romance associated with steam railroads comes from their distinctive livery. As one historian explains:
“Though the Great Northern and its northerly partner, the North Eastern, both used a sort of grass green, the North Eastern in later years painted footplate edges, tender framing and other lower parts black with red lines, while the Great Northern used a deep reddish brown with vermilion lines for the equivalent parts of its locomotives. There were red engines: fire-engine colored on the Brecon and Merthyr, brownish crimson on the Midland, and Indian red on the Furness. Yellow was once the London, Brighton and South Coast color, while blue in various shades enriched the Great Eastern, the Caledonian, and the Somerset and Dorset.”
Vermillion. Grass green. Fire-engine red. These are the colors of a public service market. Where there is variegation, we find diversity and choice. Where trains have names — the Rocket, the Baillie MacWheeble, the Orange Blossom Special — railroads have personalities.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 5, Number 2 – September-October, 2009
Sadly, no shortage of people to remember.
ON September 11th, 2001, 343 firemen and 21 police officers died at the World Trade Center. In the weeks and months that followed, New York City and the world at large celebrated the heroism of these men.
Three New York firefighters were pictured raising an American flag at Ground Zero in an image that referenced the 1945 flag-raising on Iwo Jima. Crowds loitered outside city firehouses, applauding the firemen as they returned exhausted from laboring at the site. A firefighter figurine named Billy Blazes briefly became the nation’s hottest-selling toy.
This is a powerful narrative, one that we all recognize. However, it leaves out the paramedics who also died at the World Trade Center that day. There were eight of them: three were volunteers who just happened to be nearby, three were employees of non-profit hospitals and two worked for commercial ambulance companies.
It is these last two who challenge the simple equation that only direct public employment can deliver a public service ethos. Mark Schwartz was a 50-year-old supervisor and assistant vice president of Hunter Ambulance. He had been an emergency worker for 19 years and was survived by his wife and two children, one of whom was studying to be a paramedic. Yamel Merino was a 24-year-old single mother who worked for Metrocare Ambulance in the Bronx. She left behind an eight-year-old son.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 4, Number 2 – September-October, 2008
The Founding of Australia by the First Fleet in 1788.
OVER a period of 80 years, somewhere around 160,000 British and Irish convicts were transported to the Australian colonies, where they played a central role in founding a new nation. All but a handful of them were shipped by private contractors.
The following case study suggests that, 200 years ago, public officials were grappling with much the same challenges of competition and contracting for complex public services as governments around the world face today. However, they learned the lessons and over time, developed a sustainable system of performance contracting.
The contract for Australia’s first convict fleet, which sailed in 1787, was won by a naval contractor, William Richards, following a public tender in which he seems to have been the only serious contender. Richards supplied six ships and he was required to feed and provision some 800 convicts and their guard of marines for a period of eight months. It was largely a cost-plus arrangement, with Richards paid a flat rate per month for each ton of shipping, and a separate rate per convict day for the food and provisions.
This was similar to the contracts that the Navy board had developed for the shipment of troops, and given that the ships were sailing to a corner of the world that only three European ships had visited, it is understandable why such a cost-plus contract might have been used. The voyage was an outstanding success, with a death rate of around 3 percent, comparable to the mortality rates on the last convict shipments to North America a decade earlier (which kept the convicts at sea for a much shorter time).
