This has obscured the importance of poverty, indigence, and political economy to Colquhoun's understanding of police. The author suggests that Colquhoun's work should be of interest as much to the discipline of social policy as to police studies, and he uses this argument as a springboard into a wider argument concerning historical, political, and conceptual links between police and social policy as mechanisms for fashioning the market. The major suggestion is that the concept of a "social police" may be a useful way to understand these links. The primary aim of a social police is to understand the ways in which policing extends well beyond a uniformed force for the prevention and detection of crime. 59 references and 5 footnotes