This chapter tests the theory of institutional continuity by moving away from the law-and-order function of the police and dealing with a different aspect of colonial control, that is, economic control through legal penetration and social reordering. Here too we see, strangely, a preponderant role of the police. What is particularly remarkable is the fact that the role of the police in the regulation of alcohol, the particular economic activity chosen for this study, stretches linearly from colonial times and into contemporary times. As with the role of the police in maintaining law and order, these intrusions of the police were successfully challenged in the Supreme Court with the dawn of constitutional rule, but not before exposing the dysfunctional role of the police in fiscal and cultural control and in the economic strangulation of local entrepreneurs. This chapter ends with a ray of hope, by recounting instances where subalterns successfully frustrated the enforcement powers of the police through counter-hegemonic practices.