1st Edition

Crime in England 1688-1815

By David J. Cox Copyright 2014
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    Crime in England 1688-1815 covers the ‘long’ eighteenth century, a period which saw huge and far-reaching changes in criminal justice history. These changes included the introduction of transportation overseas as an alternative to the death penalty, the growth of the magistracy, the birth of professional policing, increasingly harsh sentencing of those who offended against property-owners and the rapid expansion of the popular press, which fuelled debate and interest in all matters criminal. Utilising both primary and secondary source material, this book discusses a number of topics such as punishment, detection of offenders, gender and the criminal justice system and crime in contemporaneous popular culture and literature.

    This book is designed for both the criminal justice history/criminology undergraduate and the general reader, with a lively and immediately approachable style. The use of carefully selected case studies is designed to show how the study of criminal justice history can be used to illuminate modern-day criminological debate and discourse. It includes a brief review of past and current literature on the topic of crime in eighteenth-century England and Wales, and also emphasises why knowledge of the history of crime and criminal justice is important to present-day criminologists. Together with its companion volumes, it will provide an invaluable aid to both students of criminal justice history and criminology.

    1. Introduction  2. The impact of historical developments on the criminal justice system  3. Crime, 'traditional' and 'new'  4. Capturing the criminal  5. Punishment  6. Gender and the criminal justice system  7. Crime in contemporary literature and culture  8. Review and conclusion: beyond the eighteenth century  Appendix: Timeline of events 1649-1815.

    Biography

    David J. Cox is currently a Senior Lecturer at Wolverhampton University, specialising in Criminal Justice History and Policing History. Previously, David has worked at Keele and Plymouth Universities as a Research Associate/Fellow as well as being the former Editor of The Blackcountryman, the quarterly journal of the Black Country Society. He gained a PhD in Modern History from Lancaster University in 2006.

    'For readers interested in the historical context of English criminal history, Cox is the source to go to...an engaging exploration into the contextualization of criminal sources'M. A. Riebe, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Choice Reviews