What is the global nature of police power? What are its features and how can they be studied? This landmark multidisciplinary volume looks beyond policing as experienced at the local level, and instead explores the “police idea,” practices, and institutions that have been historically developed through the interaction of capitalist growth, nation-state formation, and imperial encounters.

Drawing on a set of uniquely global case studies including that of the UK, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, and the US, this volume shows how police power has been formed by, and has likewise formed, capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism by acting as midwife, guardian, or guarantor
of the norms and forms of life produced by these vast global processes.

Amit Prakash is Visiting Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Middlebury College where he teaches courses on anticolonialism, policing, and border control. He is the author of Empire on Seine: The Policing of North Africans in Paris, 1925-1975 (2022).

Max Ward is Professor of History at Middlebury College, author of Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (2019) and co-editor of Transwar Asia: Ideology, Institutions, Practices, 1920-1960 (2022) and Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (2017).