Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police

How vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distribution In this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the ...