Property Crime in London, 1850-present

This book examines London's transformation from the mid-Victorian "miracle" of low and diminishing crime to its status as a high-crime society at the outset of the twenty-first century. It treats six different types of misdeedburglary, shopbreaking, shoplifting, confidence schemes, robbery, and drug smugglingas representative of distinct phases in the evolution of criminal activity and the criminal-justice system in modern Britain. This is the first book to offer an expansive analysis of twentieth-century thieves and to challenge the notion that they operated in a self-contained underworld. It argues that to understand the growth of lawbreaking we must connect sensational and mundane offenses alike to their social and economic contexts, with a particular focus on how these contexts, including experience within the penal system, shaped criminal decision-making and expanded opportunities for transgression.

William M. Meier is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Christian University.

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