THE NEW IMPROVED MONIED POLICE: Reform, Crime Control, and the Commodification of Policing in London

Abstract

This paper examines the reform agenda surrounding the ‘new improved monied police’ in London in the later eighteenth century. It starts by describing the system of monied policing and then moves on to show how the reform programmes and strategies of Henry Fielding, Sounders Welch, and Sir John Fielding sought to combine monied policing with a new kind of public spirit. Two related questions are addressed: Did policing reforms contribute to the commodification of policing services in and around the city? How successful were the ‘new improved monied police’ in creating a new criminal investigation and surveillance apparatus for London? The paper concludes by assessing the aftermath of reform on entrepreneurial policing.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.