ABSTRACT
Historians too have shown considerable interest in criminal behaviour, its causes and its forms, its extent and its consequences. And historians of course are no more immune than anybody else from the interests, concerns and preoccupations of their contemporaries. During the 1970s and 1980s, historians of all stripes tended to assume that crime were overwhelmingly – it sometimes seemed exclusively – working-class. Even the most scrupulous of scholars found it easy to equate crime with the working class, and working-class crime with economic and social delinquency. Even left-wing scholars who one might expect to have challenged such assumptions accepted the correlation between class and crime. But they sought very often to reinterpret working-class crime as social protest and/or as class resistance. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
