ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks, through a historical perspective, to examine how the policing of flows has developed from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century. It introduces three dimensions – prevention, controlling and producing – of the policing of flows as a first step of outlining a framework for analysis. The pre-eminent concern for (local) authority officials during the sixteenth century was poverty, labouring people and its consequences. As a result, both administrative and criminal law were deployed as strategies in order to regulate the movements of the labouring poor. The main reason for establishing such regulations was related to the belief of that time that ‘poverty, vagrancy, the spread of the plague, idleness, immorality, irreligion, and crime were linked together’. Vagrancy continued to be viewed as a problem during the eighteenth century, therefore the policing and regulation were still present. However, the understanding of the labouring classes started to change.
