Book Review

This study of eighteenth-century criminality and law enforcement is solidly researched, clearly written, and beautifully presented. Archival material is skillfully woven together with secondary literature, and the chapters on executions, transportations, and prisons are particularly original. (But did transportation to Australia really begin from Newcastle in 1786 [159], two years before the First Fleet sailed to Sydney?) The book succeeds in its goal of revisiting the past of crime and punishment to give points of historical comparison as modern British society again debates its responses to deviance and penality.	1
The study is a perhaps under-theorized and finally leaves the reader with an impression of solid local history written with an eye on wider sociological and criminological issues that are rarely deeply explored. The authors begin with a survey of the distinct social and economic structure of the northeastern counties of England. They then go on to offer solid statistical and descriptive work detailing the incidence of different types of crimes ranging from petty theft to rape, murder, and riot, and contrast the local figures with national data in pursuit of the question of whether the north-east shows its own patterns. The answer, perhaps predictably, is: yes, but only to an extent. The book closes with the lines: "in some ways, the North-East, whether knowingly or not, as much pioneered as followed the national trends in law enforcement and punishment" (218). Perhaps the same could be said of any region of England, and there must be some puzzlement as to why the authors have not produced a more delineated historical thesis. The answer lies, perhaps, in the theoretical underpinnings of the book. A vast range of recent historical sociology and criminology is broached in the text and references, and, moreover, a degree of the empirical data is derived from well-known secondary works produced in the last twenty years. The many ideas debated in this field are judiciously summarized and incorporated in the argument, but the reader is given little guidance as to which theories are best suited to understand northeastern England's criminal history. For example, we are told that Foucault exaggerates the English love of flogging in pursuit of "a heavily Freudian and sexualized interpretation" of history, yet "it is nevertheless easy to understand why Foucault regarded England . . . as one of the more reactionary societies. Flogging was a peculiarity of the English" (133). A rich historical theory is thus flagged, but then put aside as not readily fitting the local historical data. Examples of such quotation and minimization of theory by the authors could be multiplied dozens of times. No striking reassessment of late twentieth-century visions of English eighteenth-century crime is offered.	2
A more serious problem is that the book does not focus sufficiently on its own theme, the nature of the rule of law in the context of eighteenth-century crime. Jurisprudential analyses of the concepts of crime and punishment are almost wholly absent. Formal legal relationships between central and peripheral authority are only touched upon. The Marxist Hay/Thompson school of gentry hegemony is given some credence, as are notions of criminality as a type of counter-authoritarian carnival. Feminist sensibilities are present with a particularly interesting chapter in the differential treatment of female criminality. But this method of sampling theory in order to loosely organize a body of local data does not ultimately yield an argument concerning the nature of the rule of law in the period. Indeed, nowhere is there much discussion of what the problem of the rule of law might be; and the historical data presented does not really disturb existing debates on this issue. If this book is read as proficient local history, with an overlay of secondary historiography and theory helping to point the material, then it achieves its aims extremely well. But a bold new explanatory thesis is nowhere provided. Perhaps we must now all miss the collapse of intellectual Marxism, as its friends and enemies at least had a strong framework for historical debate. In an age of postmodern eclecticism we must make do with lighter theoretical fare, at least on the evidence of this book.	3
Joshua Getzler University of Oxford and St Hugh's College, Oxford

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