This unique collection brings together leading international scholars to explore how ideologies about masculinities have shaped police culture, policy and institutional organization from the eighteenth century to the present day.

It addresses an under-researched area of historical inquiry, providing the first in-depth study of how gender ideologies have shaped law enforcement and civic governance under ‘old’ and ‘new’ police models, tracing links, continuities, and changes between them. The book opens up scholarly understanding of the ways in which policing reflected, sustained, embodied and enforced ideas of masculinities in historic and modern contexts, as well as how conceptions of masculinities were, and continue to be, interpreted through representations of the police in various forms of print and popular culture.

The research covers the UK, Europe, Australia and America and explores police typologies in different international and institutional contexts, using varied approaches, sources and interpretive frameworks drawn from historical and criminological traditions.

This book will be essential reading for academics, students and those in interested in gender, culture, police and criminal justice history as well as police practitioners.