David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
New Books in Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
Historian David Petruccelli discusses how the collapse of European empires, crime panics and the League of Nations shaped the origins of Interpol and modern international policing. The conversation tracks early focuses on property crime and counterfeiting, expanding into trafficking, narcotics and terrorism, while highlighting the human impact of cross-border police cooperation.
1:03:07•31 May 2026
From Empire’s Collapse to Interpol: How International Policing Was Born
Episode Overview
- The International Criminal Police Commission emerged in 1923 Vienna as a response to the breakup of multi-ethnic empires and fears of a post-war crime wave.
- Early international police cooperation focused on property crime, burglary and counterfeiting as states tried to restore economic and social order.
- Collaboration with the League of Nations over counterfeiting, trafficking in women and children, and narcotics helped expand the Icpc’s influence and shape new international conventions.
- Different powers pushed rival models of drug control: British regulatory approaches, Icpc-style multilateral policing, and highly centralised American narcotics enforcement.
- Individual cases, such as passport forger Moritz Kohn, reveal how expanding police networks could build far-reaching criminal records and exert pressure without formal court proceedings.
“"The international criminal police commission was in some sense an effort... to forge new forms of cooperation in order to deal with the problems that they saw were coming out of imperial collapse."”
In this eye-opening episode, you'll learn about how international policing took shape long before modern debates about crime, borders, and drugs. Historian Dr David Petruccelli sits down with host Dr Miranda Melcher to talk through his book *A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe*, showing how a story that sounds bureaucratic is actually full of upheaval, anxiety and some fairly wild criminal cases.
Rather than starting with today’s Interpol, the conversation goes back to 1923 Vienna and the collapse of the Habsburg, German, Russian and Ottoman empires. Petruccelli explains that the International Criminal Police Commission (the precursor to Interpol) grew out of fear that "the collapse of empire had created social, political tumult" and a cross-border crime wave. Early priorities weren’t glamorous: burglary rings, counterfeiting, cheque fraud and restoring basic economic order.
Things escalate as the episode traces how the League of Nations drew the Commission into bigger projects: a 1929 convention on counterfeiting, campaigns against the "traffic in women and children", and later the control of narcotics. You’ll hear how different models of drug control clashed, with British officials treating it as an economic regulation issue and both the Icpc and US federal agents pushing more police-centred approaches.
Petruccelli also highlights the limits of international policing, especially around terrorism, where the Icpc pulled back to avoid political crime. A gripping story about master forger Moritz Kohn shows how these new systems of files, radio messages and cross-border cooperation could turn one man into a "major international criminal" without a courtroom ever being involved.
This is a thoughtful listen for anyone curious about how today’s systems of cross-border policing, drug control and "international crime" came out of messy post-war experiments and shifting ideas about law, sovereignty and security. It might leave you wondering: who gets to decide what counts as crime, and whose stories end up in the files?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.
Related Episodes
Similar episodes from other shows in the catalogue.