ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the problems entailed in naming corporate harm as crime, before turning to one way in which the corporation has been problematised in criminological and socio-legal scholarship; that is, as an object of state regulation and enforcement of law. It argues that the process of regulating social harms is in many ways key to understanding the present relationships between states and corporations. One debate that has persisted within criminology is over the ways in which, and the extent to which, corporate crime is crime. The combination of the legal movement along with a relative lack of accountability in the banking sector provided the formative conditions for widespread corporate fraud in nineteenth-century Britain. In the United States in the nineteenth century, also a key period in the rapid rise to power of the corporation, corporate fraud and criminal activities were similarly widespread.
