David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

About this episode

Dr. David Petruccelli discusses the origins of Interpol and its role in combating international crime in the context of post-World War I Europe.

As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity." Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol…

People in this episode

Guest: David Petruccelli

Topics covered

• history of Interpol
• international crime
• Central and Eastern Europe
• policing
• legal history
• empire

Keywords

• Interpol
• international cooperation
• crime
• Habsburg
• German Empire
• Ottoman Empire
• law
• policing
• interwar period

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Interpol, Oxford University Press

Places: Central and Eastern Europe, Habsburg, German, Ottoman

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