In the UK and beyond, policing has been a key function of the state for centuries. It is worth examining the socio-technical history of policing in order to investigate the broader outlines of the advent of the modern strong state. This can be done with reference to the theoretical insights of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Christopher Dandeker, Bruno Latour and James C Scott.

Three main strands are visible in the long-term development of police technologies. The first was the adoption of techniques of intense labour discipline which characterised the new police: a discipline which was physical, institutional, and temporal. The second was the use of various forms of bureaucratic record for monitoring the institutions and their interaction with the wider world. The third was an increasing but uneven development of real-time communication and control. All these innovations shared some characteristics: relationships with leading sectors elsewhere in the public or private sectors (particularly the military); sometimes close relationships with responses to threats to the state; and a reflexive nature - innovations in control and surveillance were present within the police institutions as well as forming part of their relations with the wider world.

The pattern revealed can seem like an ever-increasing level of surveillance; but the ever-present danger of information overload meant that filtering information was as important as collecting it.

BIO: Chris Williams is Senior Lecturer in History at the Open University. He has worked on various aspects of police history in Britain and the British Empire, and his publications include work on the creation, presentation and analysis of crime statistics, the mechanics of policing, the archives and heritage of the British criminal justice system, and the history of closed circuit television surveillance. His new book 'Police control systems in Britain, 1775-1975: From parish constable to national computer' (Manchester University Press, 2014) looks at the long-term evolution of policing practice, and includes the first ever study of the development of the Police National Computer. Among his broadcast work has been the role of academic consultant on BBC's 'Wartime Farm' and as the originator of the Radio 4 series 'The Things We Forgot to Remember'.