Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives Across Borders by Katherine Unterman (review)

Uncle Sam’s Policemen traces the rising commitment that the United States made to international policing between the 1840s and 1930s through a careful analysis of newspaper accounts, diplomatic correspondence, and case files. Policing international crime took two forms: extradition and irregular renditions. From this core dichotomy, Unterman builds a fascinating narrative that links domestic concerns about crime to the ways the United States situated itself in the broader world.

Uncle Sam’s Policemen is at its best when it delves into the complicated administrative and legal environments presented to individual officers who fought to bring wanted criminals back into their jurisdictions. While the United States signed dozens of extradition treaties with countries around the globe, it did not wed itself exclusively to this approach. Unterman demonstrates that the United States simultaneously supported secondary forms of acquisition conducted by both government officials and private detectives. These kinds of rendition shifted over time and according to place but ranged from calculated deportations, trickery, and seduction to outright kidnapping.

Unterman relies on a semi-thematic approach to highlight how the multiple actors in extradition and rendition cases (criminals, private detectives, judges, diplomats, and police officers) interacted to create a dynamic system of control. Criminals took advantage of inconsistencies across extradition agreements to find appropriate havens based on their specific circumstances, while police officers developed creative workarounds to limit the safety that exiles felt. Federal courts and domestic police officers in turn relied on private detectives to increase their international reach. Unterman’s approach succeeds in demonstrating the instability in extradition and rendition cases and emphasizes the often social consequences that shifts in international policy could have around the world. In this context, embezzlers became significant not only for their violation of American laws, but also through their investments in the economies where they found safe havens. This semi-thematic approach makes the book feel at moments like a fascinating series of essays rather than a cohesive narrative, but on the whole works on both an analytic and stylistic level.

While Uncle Sam’s Policemen successfully links foreign policy and domestic law enforcement, it misses an opportunity to provide its readers with a quantitative sense of how many people the United States extradited from each country, for what crimes, and at what rates of success. Providing this kind of information would have helped drive home many of Unterman’s broader claims and helped to establish a more concrete sense of geographic variation and change over time. Similarly, providing a detailed inventory of criminals retrieved by extradition vs irregular rendition would have highlighted more clearly the impact that foreign policy decisions, treaties, and the creation of federal agencies like the fbi had on the ways the United States exerted its power abroad.

Despite these limitations, Unterman’s work is admirable and makes three significant contributions to borderlands literature. First, she demonstrates the importance that non-state actors (often private detectives) had in the projection of federal power and the historical contingency of this process. During the nineteenth century, the Pinkerton detectives succeeded where even the largest centralized police departments failed because their mandate as a private business allowed them to station personnel around the globe without creating the same kinds of diplomatic problems that military personnel or state-sponsored officers would have. Private detectives, operating in the grey areas of the law, served as valuable intermediaries between governments. They created diplomatic deniability as well as encouraging results.

Second, Unterman succeeds in demonstrating a complex and fascinating link between technology, extradition, new kinds of crime (notably embezzlement), and imperialism. Technical innovations in transportation, for example, shifted the reach of both criminals and their pursuers and encouraged national governments to develop new forms of foreign policy to increase their own reach abroad. Bringing transnational criminals to justice without the need to reciprocate surrenders to other countries became a means through which the United States demonstrated its national greatness. Finally, Unterman contributes to...