Vagrant Figures

In this innovative book examining eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo reveals the narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices that shaped the purview and scope of policing long before the establishment of the modern police force. Arguing that the legitimacy of the police was built upon the much older legal category of vagrancy, Nicolazzo traces vagrancy through an expansive, transatlantic archive that reveals the everyday theorization of local security and welfare to be crucial to an expanding racial capitalism.