Robert Shoemaker is Professor of Eighteenth-Century British History at the University of Sheffield. Holder of a PhD from Stanford University, he is an expert on London history, gender, and crime and criminal justice in the 'long' eighteenth century. In addition to his collaborations with Tim Hitchcock, he is the author of Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660 1725 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Gender in English Society, 1650 1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (1998), and The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century