The Frontier and The Plantation is a police economy of post-slavery Jamaica. Its goal is to grasp colonial dramas of dispossession within ongoing processes of capital accumulation and to reconstruct the global economy of policing in a particular location. The work theorizes what is conventionally called “state violence” as an effect of a broader organization of material—economic and violent—social relations, which characterize the global institutions of frontier and plantation. The dissertation is grounded in 18 months of fieldwork within the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), in communities subject to intense policing, and among the international milieu I call “the reform police.” The first section uses the police to chart state-making and unmaking from the era of imperial reforms that culminated in the abolition of slavery (1834) to contemporary police reform campaigns. Situating the institutions of organized of violence within the global political economic context in which they emerge, I show that the JCF is located between the local and the external state, and between the state and the nation. I examine an attempt to overcome this contradiction in the 1970s, when police officers developed a version of anti-colonial policing in an idiom of black power and democratic socialism. Finally, I show how in the neoliberal era, the return of the reform police depends on theories of race and cultural difference to legitimate the government of creditors. In the second section, I discuss the dialectic of frontier and plantation as a central institutional grammar, wherein forms of individual liberty compelled by the frontier are violently restrained by plantation-like institutions that recover hierarchies of race, class, and gender. I argue that police extra-judicial executions are not sovereign spectacles, but a form of managerial violence used to administer communities and to control the illicit economy. I also show that police executions expose the state a class project. Yet popular understanding of the state as an “extortion racket” or of the police as “just another gang” does not give rise to emancipatory mobilization because frontier capitalism naturalizes hyper-individualism and depoliticizes social relations. The third and final section analyzes “the community” as a basic unit of the police economy while also showing how, within the community framework, the dispossessed develop critiques of race/class domination and sustain emancipatory consciousness. The dissertation concludes by arguing that, in Jamaica, violence has become doubly alienated: First, politically, as control of state institutions is wrested from the nation and placed beyond democratic contestation, and second, socially, through the quasi-autonomous movement of frontier relations. It therefore returns to Fanon’s understanding of decolonization as a violent event from the vantage of the present and suggests rethinking decolonization as a process of democratic reappropriation and reorganization of violence across scales.