What is ‘thuggery’?

The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than he perhaps knew. ‘I won’t shy away from calling it what it is – far-right thuggery.’ Thuggery throve in India, was suppressed by imperial authorities and has been revived in a different form in the gangsta culture of black America. A thug was, the OED tells us, ‘a member of a society or cult of robbers and murderers in India known for strangling their victims’. The word was first noted in English usage in 1810.

Between 1826 and 1840 more than 14,000 thugs were hanged, transported, or imprisoned for life (certainly ‘the full force of the law’ in Sir Keir’s terms), largely through the efforts of William Sleeman, a district officer in central India, who was sometimes accompanied by his wife Amélie on his travels in pursuit of thugs.