ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters we have ranged freely over a number of areas, and have demonstrated, if nothing else, the variety of approaches that can be employed in studying the history of crime, and the multiplicity of issues involved in the subject. The point has now come for pulling these various threads together, and attempting to understand the general developments and problems relevant to the study of crime in our period. These developments and problems are fairly numerous, and the avenues towards understanding them correspondingly diverse. There is, nevertheless, one essential central theme: that of the possible connections between patterns of crime, patterns of punishment, the attitudes of ruling groups to such matters, and broader socio-economic change. After all, a general consensus suggests that such connections exist: thus a student of crime in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, for example, could claim that‘it has become one of the more widely accepted axioms of our age that an increasing crime rate is the invariable price of material progress’. 1 Commentators on earlier periods have, in general, been equally convinced of the presence of such links. Hence the author of a general work on crime in early modern Europe informs us that ‘although crime is usually seen as an index of social distress, it can also be appreciated as an index of social development’, claims that the pattern of European theft, if drawn up, would correlate in time and geography with economic development, and suggests that within the timespan he covers Europe witnessed ‘the emergence of new forms of criminality that reflected the ongoing transition to industrial life’. 2
