The publication of these two volumes on policing, each authored by scholars with fine urban history credentials, signals the vitality and diversity of police history as a field. Of the two, Peter Andersson's Streetlife in Late Victorian London speaks more directly to urban historians. As the title suggests, the book is not a study of the Metropolitan Police, but a history of London viewed primarily through the lens of police constables and their encounters with the public. Frustrated by the apparent dominance of literary sources in studies of the metropolitan experience, particularly the tired tropes of urban alienation and of the flâneur, Andersson directs himself to the ‘more everyday level of practice, and to the “non-cognitive” cultural life of urban dwellers’ (p. 7). Although inspired by the ‘performative turn’ (especially of early modern history), his conceptual apparatus are supplied by Erving Goffman's sociology of social interactions, their situational contexts and attendant norms. Applying this to urban history, Andersson takes from Goffman not just a theory of social interactions, but also ‘theories on how interaction “rubs off” on the place where it is played out’ (p. 8).

Having laid the book's conceptual foundations and briefly surveyed the development of Victorian London, Andersson embarks first upon a rich and extensive study of the ‘public’ and ‘parochial’ realms of the modern city – respectively the bustling thoroughfares and quieter residential backstreets (the contrast between them runs throughout the book). Here, as in later chapters, he explores social interaction by tracing the police constable, and others, through various spatial contexts, making creative use of the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) proceedings, police force records (particularly constables’ notebooks), oral history transcripts and other sources. Drawing on those histories of policing which have emphasized discretionary restraint in law enforcement, Andersson stresses the closeness between policemen and the policed, and the scope for good relations between the police and the working-class public. Continuing to trace urban social interaction from this perspective, Andersson proceeds through chapters on the Victorian ‘traffic code’ (p. 86), on dress and appearance and on manners and street disorder. The overall thrust of his (largely convincing) argument is that the orderliness of late Victorian street life is too often exaggerated, and that a certain boisterous familiarity persisted; he thus argues that claims that anonymity and atomization characterized modern metropolitan existence are misplaced.

Streetlife is a fascinating study in the quotidian features of urban life. Andersson sheds light on a tremendous variety of topics: gossip and pub talk; street crowds, pushing and shoving; rituals of hat-knocking and bonnet-pulling. This is necessarily a rather eclectic set of topics, prescribed in large part by the sources at Andersson's disposal. There is little on aspects one might consider important to situations of social interaction, for example, weather and seasonality, and many of those covered have been touched upon before. Moreover, this practice-oriented metropolitan history somewhat resembles those classic social histories of urban communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Andersson perhaps owes more to this tradition even than he acknowledges, not least given that his more original yet problematic ambition to explore ‘the “non-cognitive” cultural life of urban dwellers’ never quite materializes. Nonetheless, something is still gained from taking such variegated material together; despite some patchiness to its content, Streetlife amounts to more than the sum of its parts, and it provides an intriguing and provocative history of everyday life in the modern city.

Following Streetlife, Chris Williams’ Police Control Systems presents an abrupt change of perspective. Here we leave the minutiae of street-level interactions, and explore instead the principles and techniques of police organization and administration. Williams sets out to chart not policing in practice, but the aspirations of police governors and chief officers: he emphasizes ‘the question of how police organizations were supposed to work. . .over that of how they actually did work’ (p. 3). Yet this is not a study in (explicit) police theory, as inscribed in learned tomes; it is instead a study in (implicit) police principles, as manifested in and articulated by particular techniques and technologies – books, forms, telegraphs, telephones, mobile radios, surveillance cameras and computers.

First, Williams charts the governance of Georgian parish constables who, as rational, reasoning and independent men, were directed more by financial incentive and reward than by threat of sanction. Next, he reviews the transition to the new police, reinterpreting this process not as the professionalization but the proletarianization of policing. The three following chapters, which survey in turn the governance of police labour, bureaucracy and communications, constitute the core of the book, and communicate a portrait of the new police as a highly disciplinary, insular and meticulously ordered machine. While the sections on bureaucracy and communication creep onward into the twentieth century, the final two chapters, on the control room and the police national computer, depart decisively to the inter-war and the post-war era respectively. Here, Williams advances an interpretation of ‘techno-police’ which tacks between the enthusiasm of contemporaries and the despair of radical critics. He demonstrates convincingly that the adoption of technology was driven more by the ‘pull’ of autonomous police priorities than by the ‘push’ of private industry, and that extensions to police surveillance derived from its application were generally incremental rather than transformative.

Williams valuably demonstrates that police forces were more than the sum of their men, and that various techniques and technologies of co-ordination and control (discipline, bureaucracy, communication) provided a measure of stability and durability to forces which, in the nineteenth century, were wracked by high rates of personnel turnover. The book is structured around the various discrete layers of administration cumulatively bolted onto the police machine, and it profits from this fairly loose approach to chronology. Yet some readers will miss a proper evaluation of how each subsequent layer of administration impacted on the founding techniques of organization, for example, how the rigours of early Victorian drill and discipline were modified from the late nineteenth century onwards. Amongst the book's many fruitful contributions is the tantalizing glimpse it offers into the changing worldview of police governors and so building particularly upon Carolyn Steedman's earlier study of mid-Victorian county forces. In the finish, much of this is left implicit, understandably enough given that space precludes any sustained analysis of the governors’ changing social origins and experiences; nevertheless, Police Control Systems in this respect provides a valuable contribution toward understanding a certain governing mentality which made itself felt far beyond police administration.

So much separates these books, in terms of their topic, perspective and chronological reference. Yet, in their very different ways, they prompt reflection upon the uses of social theory in history. Streetlife provides a fine example of how a particular conceptual perspective can organize what might have been and, to some extent, remains an unwieldy topic. While at times the detail is very fine indeed, Andersson's discussion is never antiquarian; the theoretical frame provided by Goffman emboldens him to delve into the most minute of details, while at the same time ensuring that his reader is not lost in the process. By contrast, Police Control Systems draws more liberally on a range of perspectives from the sociology of information, surveillance studies, science and technology studies and governmentality. Williams consciously exploits ‘the historian's luxury of borrowing an idea here, or a concept there, from a general theory without feeling a need to take it (or leave it) intact’ (p. 14). Such borrowing is essential to his purpose of identifying and analysing in a nuanced manner the salient changes to police organization over a 200-year period. Reading both together, one is reminded of the rich and diverse engagement with social theory which marks out such innovative contemporary work in social and urban history.