| Resumo: | Hisotiography has insisted, fairly and with solid arguments, on the fact that the word policía (police) used to have a different meaning. Our paper examines this assertion in order to establish the history of the semantic variations of the word between 1750 and 1850, resorting to the tools of conceptual history. After concentrating diverse branches of the city government and belonging to different components of the ayuntamiento or city hall, the police became specialized in matters of public security, until it finally established itself as a body in charge of maintaining order within society. In spite of this apparent linearity, the old meanings of the word survived into the modern vocabulary.
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