This article examines the tactics and concepts formulated and exercised in the name of police in Britain and their gradual evolution between 1750 and 1840. It concen trates on the writings of Fielding, Coloquhoun and Chadwick and locates their contri butions as part of a new grammar of policing power concerned to map and administer English society and to comprehend it panoptically. My argument is that their theories, proposals and plans added enormously to the development of an institutional, formal, and practical conception of police, while simultaneously buttressing moral govern ment and developing the administrative underside of English law.
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