Recent scholarship has radically revised our understanding of nineteenthcentury American political authority, pointing to ways in which traditional Weberian concepts of the state as a unitary locus of coercion in a territory simply fail to apply in the case of the United States.1 Rather than being housed in autonomous centralized bureaucracies, as they were in much of Europe, state capacity often operated (and continues to operate) through the fragmented nature of American governing institutions. This includes the long-standing collaborative link, for instance, between public authority and private associations aiding in the enforcement and articulation of policy, the multiple and overlapping federal and local institutional domains providing pathways through which those policies could be implemented, and the process of territorial segmentation via Western expansion affording opportunities for state expansion that were precluded in the East.2 Indeed, even the key domain of federal criminal law enforcement in the late nineteenth-century United States—putatively under the control of the relatively small U.S. Marshal’s force—depended to a considerable degree on informal collaboration between public and private actors, including detective agencies and citizens’ groups, who were frequently involved in pursuing and prosecuting federal criminals.3

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支离破碎的力量：1870-1900 年美国联邦执法的演变

最近的学术从根本上改变了我们对 19 世纪美国政治权威的理解，指出传统韦伯式的国家作为一个领土上的单一强制场所的概念根本无法适用于美国的情况。 1 而不是被安置在自治的中央集权官僚机构中，就像在欧洲大部分地区一样，国家能力通常通过美国治理机构的分散性质来运作（并继续运作）。这包括长期的协作联系，例如，协助执行和阐明政策的公共当局和私人协会之间的长期协作联系，多重和重叠的联邦和地方机构领域提供了实施这些政策的途径，