The Revolution In Crime

Caleb Crain looks at the evolution of crime (via the Dish):

So why invent police? What are they for? In “The Institutional Revolution,” the economic historian Douglas W. Allen theorizes that their purpose was to preserve manufactured goods from theft. Before the nineteenth century, Allen writes, theft was easy to detect. If your transport was a horse, you could recognize it. (For that matter, it could recognize you.) Not only was your coat hand sewn, but a tailor looking at its fabric could probably tell who had woven it. If any of these items were stolen, they were easy to reclaim if they could be found. With the advent of the industrial revolution, handmade goods gave way to standardized commodities, which all look alike, and it ceased to be possible to know an object’s provenance just by looking at it. The phrase “possession is nine-tenths of the law” came into vogue, and it was made illegal to hold stolen goods. After all, once goods became untraceable, they were all too easy to fence.

Not only that, but the transportation revolution made it easier to get somewhere that people wouldn't recognize the hot items.  One reason why farm machinery doesn't often get stolen is that it is hard to transport them far enough away that they can be fenced, and dealers really only deal with people they know or know of.  You've got to have a pretty sophisticated network to move a machine a couple of states over, and you still have to get it sold.  The ability to move goods by rail had to make it somewhat easier to steal back in the day, although stealing off of trains probably became an issue too.