Police and the Empire City

“A remarkable historical narrative that details the racial and ethnic projects at the center of the development of the institution of modern policing.” - Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing

“Exhaustive, meticulous, and brilliant, Police and the Empire City is an indispensable addition to our understanding of race, empire, law enforcement, and the places where these elements intersect. Matthew Guariglia’s work has provided us a genealogy of the problems that continue to beset modern policing and the thinking that produced them in the first place. A striking scholarly achievement.” - Jelani Cobb, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Columbia University

"Guariglia excels at teasing out the numerous ways the NYPD helped enforce racial boundaries, including by shutting down interracial 'Black-and-Tan' nightclubs (which served Black and white patrons) and offering Irish and Italian officers opportunities to 'consolidate their "whiteness"' by meting out violence against Black New Yorkers. He also draws parallels with more recent eras of NYC policing. . . . The result is a damning investigation of the NYPD’s past." - Publishers Weekly

"By drawing out the material and ideological connections between the police and the policed, Guariglia crafts a persuasive and innovative accounting of modern policing as an instrument of racial and ethnic formation. . . . This book would be an excellent resource for scholars and students in several fields and disciplines, including the burgeoning interdisciplinary work on state violence and racial capitalism; historical analyses of whiteness and immigration; as well as scholarship on imperial and global regimes of policing and militarization. The book is thoughtfully organized and accessibly written, and, both explicitly and implicitly, stakes out clear connections to the strategies of contemporary urban police violence and racism." - Emily Holloway, The Gotham Center for New York City History

"Matthew Guariglia’s ambitious first book substantially advances the project of integrating the history of the police into U.S. cultural history, particularly the history of ethnicity, race, and empire. . . . Guariglia’s approach to policing history is refreshingly contemporary—his bibliography is excellent—and this book is a model of where I hope the history of policing is heading." - Elaine Frantz, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

"Recommended. General readers, graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - F. J. Augustyn Jr, Choice

"Through the extensive use of primary sources consulted at numerous archives and libraries, author Matthew Guariglia addresses the decades-long racialization theme of the New York Police Department (NYPD) from its origins to the late Progressive Era." - Francesco Landolfi, Society for US Intellectual History

"Police and the Empire City is a valuable resource for scholars in fields such as history, critical race studies, criminology, surveillance studies, science and technology studies, and post-colonial literature. It also serves as an engaging read for anyone interested in US history, the US Police Department, or the NYPD specifically." - Joseph Aloysius Rajasekar, Surveillance and Society

"Empire City ultimately presents as a rich social history of policing in New York City bolstered by various sociological frames. More than a book about racist policing, it argues the urban police department was a unique 'racemaking' mechanism."
  - Trevor Gardner, American Historical Review

"Guariglia’s book is an important contribution to the history of policing, setting a standard about how to highlight the crucial role of race and ethnicity for future research. We do not only learn how the police changed and what the modernization of techniques, personnel, organization encompassed—a story that has often been told—but we learn how that was intertwined with the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, from the experiences of and discourses about Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Chinese, and Black New Yorkers."