Full Description
This book examines London's transformation from the mid-Victorian "miracle" of low crime to a high-crime society, treating six different types of misdeed as representative of phases in the evolution of crime to argue that lawbreaking must be explained by connecting all types of offenses to their social and economic contexts.
Contents
Crime There Will Ever Be Burglary in the Era of the 'English Miracle,' 1850-1900 'Adapting the Machine to Meet Them': Traveling Thieves and the Transformation of Police Power, 1900-39 Women, Work, and Shoplifting in London, c. 1890-1940 Aristocrats of Crime: Confidence Men in the Interwar Years Robbery and the Making of the English Criminal Class, 1945-75 The Empire Connection: Smugglers and the Modernization of the British Drugs Market The Ubiquity of Crime
