ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how control over police and criminal justice occupied a central place in the debates over the best form of government for the town of Sheffield in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It explains why the topic of urban police reform ought to occupy a central place in any study of the nineteenth-century city and advances some explanations as to why this has hitherto not been the case. The chapter offers an interpretation of the ways in which the idea of governance will be treated. It explains the course of events in the 1830s whereby Sheffield got its new policy and its charter, stressing the extent to which these outcomes were under-determined by social and political trends. It offers some general conclusions demonstrated by this process and their bearing on the contexts and structures within which it occurred. Incorporation meant that the body controlling the police was now the major organ of local government.
