ABSTRACT
This is a study of financial crime in society, and has at its heart the objective of demonstrating that fraud is a problem old and new. The work is constructed around the assertion that fraud is an activity problem which troubles society greatly today, but no more so than it did our Victorian ancestors. This assertion is itself couched within the proposition that while British society's encounters with fraud can be seen to have predated the nineteenth century, the Victorian experience of fraud is crucial to this discussion. 2 This represented fraud as a long-term and continuing threat to social and economic stability, as one leading financial commentator put it during the 1850s: 'From time immemorial clerks have been discovered embezzling the property of their employers' .3 This chapter takes as its starting point the insistence that notwithstanding fraud's antecedence, the 'inauguration, development and rapid progress' of 'high art' crime which occurred from the middle years of the nineteenth century marked the birth of financial crime in its true modern sense. 4
The classification of certain crimes as 'financial crimes' flows from the much broader conception of white collar crime. White collar crimes are believed by modem scholars to raise a number of fascinating issues in relation to law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice, with their often complex interactions with society and key institutions. The chapter aspires to reach beyond a consideration of fraud's numerous crimino-legal difficulties to link white collar crime literature and research for the nineteenth century with another burgeoning corpus of literature; that which is growing up around the onset and progression of twentieth century economic globalisation. The objective is ultimately to position fraud's complex relationship with society in the context of a rapidly changing world, past and present. Predictably, this has involved a consideration of current events for both periods, as the promises inherent in ever-greater technologicisation of society and economy are inherent to both periods, with their allusions to an age of insecurity.5 Both time points are characterised by great excitement and promise, as well as anxiety, as the implications of a world without economic boundaries are explored, and an inability to predict the future becomes apparent. In seeking to link these broad themes together, this chapter is really a snapshot of Britain's encounters with fraud in two periods with powerful similarities.
