ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on how the sailing warships developed in Atlantic Europe gave the West a critical advantage overseas. A university education was rare in Britain until the Robbins Report on Higher Education in 1963 unleashed a rapid expansion of higher education. The St Andrews team presented its work on Scottish crime for the first time, and listened to the far more impressive presentations of others, notably Victor Gatrell, author of pioneering work on criminal statistics and their interpretation; Christina Larner, who had just completed a survey of Scottish witchcraft cases; and Alfred Soman, working on the almost indecipherable early modern records of the criminal courts in Paris. The 'Scottish-Swedish workshops on the history of crime' in summer 1978 and summer 1979 proved remarkably productive, despite the fact that they were as 'wet' as the Social History Society meeting had been 'dry', for the Swedes follow elaborate drinking protocols.