ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a step back and looks at histories of crime. It outlines key changes in the ways that historians have researched crime and criminals. Many people believe that crime has got ‘worse’ in modern societies. The chapter suggests how and why patterns of recorded crime changed in the case of Britain. National criminal statistics were collected from 1805, which turned crime into a national and more easily measured phenomenon. Social changes may have meant that fewer crimes were actually committed, rather than fewer prosecutions brought. Historians’ views on crime have altered a lot since the 1970s, especially with the challenges of, first, ‘history from below’ or social history and, later, gender history and cultural history. The chapter shows, social historians’ initial and ground-breaking concern with white male, working-class criminals has given way to a broader range of studies involving women, juveniles, individuals of different race and social class, and studies on colonialism.
