In this book which was first published in 1970, author Galen Broeker traces the events of a crucial period in the struggle of the British government to bring law and order to rural Ireland. He demonstrates that throughout the forty years following the union a major challenge to government in Ireland was the sporadic violence that seemed endemic to the rural south and west. Organizations of Irish peasants terrorized the countryside in protest against a political and economic system that seemed to threaten their very existence. The formation in 1814 of the Peace Preservation Force is...

This study, first published in 1982, is concerned with the nature of crime in nineteenth-century Britain, and explores the response of the community and the police authorities. Each chapter is linked by common themes and questions, and the topics described in detail range from popular forms of rural crime and protest, through crime in industrial and urban communities, to a study of the vagrant. The author pays special attention to the relationship between illegal activities and protest, and emphasizes the context and complexity of official crime rates and of many forms of criminal...

In the years between 1750 and 1868, English criminal justice underwent significant changes. The two most crucial developments were the gradual establishment of an organised, regular police, and the emergence of new secondary punishments, following the restriction in the scope of the death penalty. In place of an ill-paid parish constabulary, functioning largely through a system of rewards and common informers, professional police institutions were given the task of executing a speedy and systematic enforcement of the criminal law. In lieu of the severe and capriciously-administered capital...

This volume, first published in 1977, brings together eleven studies of crime and the administration of the criminal law in England during the early modern period. They represent a variety of approaches - legal, historical and sociological - to the study of historical crime. The initial essay in this study, which is written from a legal standpoint, is the first coordinated account of the structure of criminal law administration in this formative period. It is followed by investigations into the nature and incidence of crime, court appearance and punishment, separate studies of witchcraft,...

This title, first published in 1981, draws from an extensive range of national and local material, and examines how innovations in policy and administration, while solving problems or setting new objectives, frequently created or disclosed fresh difficulties, and brought different types of people into the administration and management of prisons, whose interests, values and expectations in turn often had significant effects upon penal ideas and their practical applications. Special attention has been paid to the study of recruitment, the work and influence of gaolers, keepers, governors,...

This title, first published in 1984, is a case study of crime and criminal justice in rural, southwestern France in the last century of the Old Regime. Based on extensive research in criminal court records, often the only documentary evidence of the poor and illiterate, the study is a valuable addition both to our knowledge of Old Regime society and to our understanding of its judicial institutions.

Rural, Old Regime France seethed with violence. Assault, homicide, and a violence of speech occurred frequently at all levels of society. The author's finding that royal fiscal and...

The year 1856 saw the first compulsory Police Act in England (and Wales). Over the next thirty years a class society came to be policed by a largely working-class police. This book, first published in 1984, traces the process by which men made themselves into policemen, translating ideas about work and servitude, about local government and local community, servitude and the ideologies of law and central government, into sets of personal beliefs.

By tracing the evolution of a policed society through the agency of local police forces, the book illustrates the ways in which a society,...

This book, first published in 1988, is a study of clientelism in the south of Italy, its relationship with the mafia and its importance in the context of national politics. The book explains the existence of clientelism in modern societies and its relation to the distribution of public resources. It examines the growth of political consensus in the region and whether and where clientelism can be explained in the terms of the mafia. The title examines the relationship between local and national politics and the ideological aspects of clientelism in operation. It makes a detailed comparison...

Before contraception was generally available, and when abortion was fraught with danger, infanticide was a common solution to the problem of unwanted children. Massacre of the Innocents, first published in 1986, shows the causes and consequences of the high tide of infanticide in Victorian Britain.

Lionel Rose describes the ways in which unwanted and 'surplus' infants were disposed of, and the economic and social pressures on women to rid themselves of their burdens by covert criminal and sub-criminal means. He discusses the activities of infanticidal and abortionist...