ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the Britain, and in particular London, occupies a central place. It describes on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, states have been known to employ or to recruit private agents for various policing tasks. The book focuses on outside Britain and the British Empire have been planned to show parallel developments in different kinds of state, as with the essays on France, the comparisons and contrasts with detective policing under a particularly authoritarian regime. It explores the onset of organised detection in eighteenth-century London - a metropolis which, according to the traditional Whig historians, had very little in the way of police institutions. The book also focuses on the generally positive image of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and even in the post-war Federal Republic.
