Part 1: The policeman-state INTRODUCTION For centuries in Britain, stealing from and hurting other people have been pursuits as common and traditional as drinking and fornicating. All social classes have participated in them. Poorer and younger people have stolen to procure food or clothing, to demonstrate daring, or to relieve tedium. Affluent, older or upwardly mobile people have embezzled, evaded taxes, excise and currency regulations, defrauded each other and their clients under the guise of commercial or professional practice, and lifted from shops. They have done these things far more frequently than the courts have ever recognised, as self-report studies nowadays show. And in times past, for good measure, the rich no less than the poor used violence to assert prowess, relieve tension and settle disputes. ‘Crime’ in these many senses has been as much a part of our national heritage as has a taste for beer, politics and sex. This makes the history of crime an unimaginably large subject. Commentators usually therefore take a short cut. They address themselves not to the ubiquity of law-breaking at all social levels, but to those actions, merely, which come to be labelled as crimes by the reactions of the law-enforcement and judicial systems. This in turn, however, puts them at the mercy of the prejudices and constraints which determine how the law selects some targets and ignores others. That is why no discussion of ‘crime’ can sensibly proceed which does not first discuss how, by whom and why attitudes and policies towards crime are formed, and what often covert purposes those policies serve.

Crime, authority and the policeman-state

This collection examines the profound transformations that have characterised cities of the advanced capitalist societies in the final decades of the 20th century. It analyses ways in which relationships of contest, conflict and cooperation are realised in and through the social and spatial forms of contemporary urban life. In particular, the essays focus on the impact of economic restructuring and changing forms of urban governance on patterns of urban deprivation and social exclusion. These processes, they contend, are creating new patterns of social division and new forms of regulation and control.

Transforming Cities : Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions

Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870.

of British Historical Statistics (1962), A. H. Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica: Studies in British Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century (1958), and B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (1988), to which I. Stone, The Global Export of Capital from Great Britain, 1865–1914 (1999) is a valuable addition. Particular issues are dealt with in F. Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (1990), P. Mathias and J. Davis, eds, International Trade and British Economic Growth (1996), and D. McCloskey, Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (1981). The link between trade and industrialization is explored by R. Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (1979), while S. B. Saul’s Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914 (1960) and The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873–1896 (1985) remain valuable for changes in the late nineteenth century. The relationship with empire is central to P. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (2001) and there are relevant essays in A. Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (1999). For the political economy of British trade policy, see A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (1997) and D. Winch and P. K. O’Brien, eds, The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (2002). britain and the world economy 33

A companion to nineteenth-century Britain

Here we analyze the forms of community and institutional responses to the problem of wife beating. The regulation of domestic affairs in European communities is traced from the fifteenth century to the present. The historical analysis begins with direct and personal responses of members of the community, such as misrules and charivaris, and traces the development of the more abstract and impersonal responses of the state institutions that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both community and institutional forms of response were directed at upholding patriarchal authority and the husband's right to control his wife through various means, including the use of physical force. The intent was not to stop the violence but to set limits on the amount of violence a husband might use in pursuing his rights. With the transformation from ritualized forms of community response to abstract forms of institutional regulation, battered women were forced to seek help from institutions, such as the police, that were not established to deal with problems of domestic order and that remained relatively unconcerned with the problem of wife beating.

The refuge movement within the Women's Aid movement in Britain is trying in an egalitarian way to return the problem to women and the community and also to get social agencies to respond positively. It rejects male violence unequivocally and challenges the patriarchical domination underlying-the acceptance and continuation of wife beating.

Community Response to Violence Against Wives: Charivari, Abstract Justice and Patriarchy

The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–1880

Ted Robert Gurr, Rogues, Rebels, and Reformers. A Political History of Urban Crime and Conflict (1977), xii+192 (Sage, Beverly Hills and London, £7.50)

Robert D. Storch

Papers

The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–1880

The study of urban crime