Panels
Banditry: Representations and Social Context
Contested Identities – Networked Technologies
Crime and Media
Crime, Violence and Legality: Colonial & Postcolonial Perspectives
Culture and Violence
Empire and Criminal Justice
Intimacy and the Law
Law, Institutions and Governance
Policing: Systems and Process
State Formation and Criminal Justice
Variations on Capital Punishment

Plenary Speakers
Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College (top)
Sexed Violence
Violence is at the core of intimacy. Sexed bodies are both vulnerable and vindictive, but although frailty is humanity’s shared plight, a significant number of individuals set out to exploit other people’s capacity for suffering. The infliction of cruelty is a choice. Looked at from a historical perspective, who are these people who opt to deliberately inflict pain in sexual encounters? They may not be easily recognizable, but their actions are disconcertingly familiar. Their highly ritualised practices suggest that rape is a social performance that infuses every subtle nuance of the society from which it emerges. Sexual violence is fundamentally situated in historical time and geographical place. There is nothing timeless or random about it. Indeed, meaning has not been stripped bare from deeds of brutality, but has been generously bestowed.
This paper examines the changing nature of the rhetoric of violence applied to rapists in Britain and America from the 1860s to the present. It interrogates the meaning behind historically-contingent definitions of rape, including an examination of the legal transformations from crimes of “seduction” to date and marital rape. It investigates the reasons for a shift in emphasis from rape being seen as an “act” to an “actor” (the rapist). Interventions by the psychiatric profession were crucial in understanding this shift from the deed to the doer, creating the rapist as a discrete identity. The invention of the sexual psychopath is important in understanding this change in the way the violator’s body has been sexed discursively. By demystifying that category of the rapist, we reveal the specificities of the past – thus enabling us to imagine a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the threshold of the human.

Clive Emsley, The Open University (top)
The ‘Brutalized Veteran’ and Violence in Europe after the Great War.
On 3 January 1917 William Chandler appeared before Bedfordshire Quarter Sessions charged with indecent assault. It was alleged that, on the night of the previous 22 December, Chandler, a 30-year old soldier, had entered three houses in Kempston, a town on the fringe of Bedford and where there was a large barracks. In the third house, armed with a pair of tongs, he had gone into the bedroom where Mrs Gertrude Ann Warton, the wife of another soldier, was in bed with her baby. Chandler had made some suggestions to Warton, unspecified in the local press, and then he had struck her with the tongs. Warton had managed to get out of the house and had found help. When she had returned with the police Chandler had been found asleep in the kitchen. The police had woken him up and he had offered to fight them. Chandler entered a plea of guilty in court. He apologised and admitted to being drunk, but he said that he could remember nothing of the assault. He had been at the front and had been wounded. Now he was on the way back to his unit and he had been in Kempston for two days before the assault. The army gave Chandler a good character. The magistrates were divided over their verdict but, taking into consideration that he had fought for his country and had been wounded, they agreed to bind him over in the sum of £20 for two years good behaviour.
The Chandler case occurred after at least a century of courts taking an increasingly hostile view of male violence, and particularly male violence towards women. Often judges and magistrates appear to have been ahead of the general population in this, dragging sometimes reluctant jurors to their way of thinking and criticising those that were inclined to leniency in such cases. The Chandler case contained some elements of traditional assault and subsequent court narratives. Specifically, there was his claim that he was too drunk to recall any events, followed by the magistrates, having received a good character of him from a reputable source (the British Army), eventually deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt and handing down a minimum punishment. Implicitly the case also contained two other significant elements: the traditional trope of the brutalised soldier, and the new narrative of the soldier wounded and, in consequence, psychologically damaged by war.
Violence is central to the soldier’s trade. And there is a long history of the fear that when the soldier’s political masters have no immediate call on his violence, then he will turn it against civilians. In some instances there was justification for such a fear. In France, for example, the precursor of the Gendarmerie nationale had been created specifically to police the king’s armies at home and to protect the king’s subjects from his soldiers. Former soldiers can be found among the brigands of continental Europe and the highwaymen of Stuart and Hanoverian Britain. It also appears probable that in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain at least, the fear of criminal soldiers demobilised at the end of wars contributed to a greater sensibility towards crime and hence to a greater determination to report and prosecute crime. A statistical study by Wilhelm Starke, a senior figure in the Prussian Interior Ministry, showed an increase in inter-personal violence in both France and Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Starke concluded that the brutalising impact of war may have had some impact here, though he was also concerned about the increasing consumption of alcohol.
In the early modern world it was possible to differentiate clearly between soldier and civilian; wars were fought by professionals, often mercenaries, fighting for a prince or a republic. The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon marked a significant shift in this; wars increasingly began to be seen as fought by citizens in arms fighting for their nation state or empire. Many of Napoleon’s princely opponents had been wary of this development, recognising the threat to the existing political and social order inherent in the notion of armies being recruited to fight for a nation or an empire in which they, as citizens, had some kind of stake. But the use of conscription across most of Europe during the nineteenth century, together with the heady concept of nationalism, meant that in 1914 armies of citizen soldiers were encouraged to see themselves as fighting for ‘their’ country or empire against alien nations and nationalities. Many appear wholeheartedly to have embraced this understanding. The British, while being latecomers to the use of conscription, manifested such sentiments in the millions that volunteered for Kitchener’s army. They accepted that ‘their’ country needed ‘them’.
There is an important paradox here. By the beginning of the First World War armies were composed of citizen soldiers; but those citizens, who were now required to use lethal violence as soldiers, had grown up in a world where violence was increasingly stigmatized. From the eighteenth century at least masculinity was beginning to depend less and less on physical prowess and a man’s ability to overcome his rivals by physical strength. Violent behaviour was associated more and more with the rougher elements of society, with children who lacked education and discipline or with primitive peoples to whom the European advocates of empire considered they were bringing the advantages of civilization. The nineteenth-century, it has been urged, witnessed the significant criminalization of violent men. Jon Lawrence has forcefully argued that the post war fears of brutalization in England prompted a reworking of national myths and a delegitimization of violence in the state and nation specifically to forge the idea of a peaceable kingdom. He considers that the fears of brutalization were exaggerated, but does not set out either to interrogate or to reconstruct them in detail. Others have seen the violence and brutality of the war in the trenches contributing significantly to the paramilitary groups that formed the vanguard of right-wing political movements during the inter-war period.
The aim of this paper is to interrogate broad assertions of the impact of the war on violence in Europe. It takes as its principal source material a cross section of newspaper reports of violent offending in the aftermath of the First World War. It begins with a focus on the British experience and moves from there to a rather more cursory look at France and Germany. In particular the paper questions the extent to which men may have returned so brutalised by their experiences in the conflict that they continued to use the extreme violence that they had employed as soldiers in their private and in their public lives.

Panels
Banditry: Representations and Social Context
Karine Lambert, IUFM de Nice (top)
Women and banditry in Provence after the French Revolution. (In French below)
To embark on a study of the relationship between women and banditry is to tell the story of how historians have attempted to break the silence created by both the modesty of the witness and the shame of the victim. Although very much present in the actual perpetration of criminal activity, women are all but absent from the stories that are told when recounting these exploits. In this paper I revisit an already well-worked field of historical inquiry, examining it from the perspective of women and their connections with bandit groups. In so doing, it is possible to obtain a unique insight into the manner in which gender identities are constructed in these all male associations. Such confederations have a great deal to tell us about the Mediterranean conception of masculinity with its traces of an archaic mentality grounded in a rural society. Based upon the concept of female modesty and the vigorous defense of manly honor, this sense of manhood is fundamental to notions of family and community identity as well as social standing.

Femmes et brigandage en Provence au lendemain de la Révolution. Pistes de recherches (in English above)
Proposer une étude des rapports entre femmes et brigandage revient à faire le récit d’une traque. Celle que mène l’historien pour briser la chape de la pudeur du témoin ou de la honte de la victime. Certes les femmes sont omniprésentes dans les faits criminels mais paradoxalement le silence s’établit et elles s’absentent lorsque la mise en mot prend le relais de la mise en geste de l’acte délinquant. Nous avons fait le choix de revisiter un champ historiographique déjà bien balisé en nous plaçant du point de vue des femmes et de leurs rapports avec les bandes criminelles. Cette approche constitue une voie d’accès privilégiée pour observer les modalités de la construction des identités de sexe dans ces sociétés d’hommes. Ces dernières, révélatrices de l’andria méditerranéenne, portent les marques d’une mentalité archaïque, celle d’un monde rural qui se prête à l’analyse de la gender story, propre à faire la part du concept de pudeur féminine et du respect viril de l’honneur qui constituent les fondements de l’identité familiale et communautaire ainsi que les conditions de la reconnaissance sociale. La dichotomie classique femmes-victimes / femmes criminelles s’enrichit de ces parcours de vie où les mêmes figurent tour à tour du côté de l’outrage subi, puis de l’agression perpétrée sur un tiers. Ce brouillage des rapports entre le féminin et le masculin permet dès lors une relecture des identités de sexe.

José Martinetti, IUFM, Nice(top)
Deux formes contrastées de violence sociale et politique en Corse entre le début et la fin du XXe siècle. (In English below)
Notre réflexion porte sur les liens qui existent en Corse entre les revendications nationalitaires et les diverses manifestations de la violence sociale au cours du XXe siècle ainsi que les rapports qu’ils entretiennent avec l’État Français. Le XXe siècle présente dans le cas de la Corse deux périodes de recrudescence de violence sociale : la première de la fin du XIXe siècle jusqu’aux années 1930 et la seconde à partir des années 1970 à nos jours. Aussi la comparaison entre ces deux temps présente-t-elle de nombreux intérêts.
Dans la période la plus ancienne, la violence reste essentiellement un banditisme rural ayant progressivement évolué d’un banditisme d’honneur vers un banditisme de droit commun, et motivé par une violence vendettaire. Le banditisme est à ce moment-là fortement lié à l’identité même de la société corse, le bandit étant directement attaché au fonctionnement clanique de la société communautaire corse. Les régionalistes prennent leur distance avec le phénomène et ne le magnifient pas même si le banditisme corse subit de la part des élites parisiennes un processus de “ folklorisation ” qui a tendance à l’enjoliver. Les autorités centrales entreprennent toutefois d’éradiquer fermement le phénomène dans une société rurale en voie de désertification en lançant dans le maquis corse une intervention armée massive et décisive (1934). Avec la seconde période, le banditisme traditionnel est en quelque sorte réactivé par la renaissance des mouvements régionalistes et nationalistes à partir des années 1960. La légitimation d’une violence politique qualifiée abusivement de “ libératrice et anticolonialiste ” n’hésite pas à sacraliser le bandit comme représentation de “ l’âme corse ”. Les pratiques archaïques sont magnifiées et revendiquées comme identitaires. Le débat qui a animé la communauté insulaire au cours de l’été 2003 sur la justification de l’hospitalité à propos de l’affaire Yvan Colonna, assassin présumé du préfet Érignac, permet de sous-entendre une nouvelle fois que la République et la Démocratie parce qu’elles sont françaises, donc extérieures, ne sont pas légitimes. Le folklore du bandit d’honneur a désormais laissé la place au mythe du “ ribellu ” cagoulé, et armé de kalachnikov dans une confusion de genres où se mêlent inculture et consumérisme.
Les discours protestataires deviennent un ressort essentiel d’un néo-clanisme et plagient de façon incantatoire une phraséologie révolutionnaire anachronique, vaguement “ écologisante ”. Cette couverture idéologique facilite la reconquête du terrain insulaire par un banditisme classique de type mafieux. Les mécanismes de prédation du bien public sont à l’œuvre et rappellent dans leur fonctionnement les “ fraternités d’hommes ” qui structurent les sociétés secrètes d’Italie du Sud.

Analysis of two types of social and political violence in Corsica between the beginning and the end of twentieth century. (In French above)
This communication invites to compare and unite regionalistic and nationalistic positions and social violence kept in this french island, during two individualized periods.
During the twentieth century, we can effectively observe a first time of emergence of nationalistic speeches . What kid of bonds had they with the endemic manifestations of rural banditism ? How did the first intellectuals of the “corsican cause” fear and gather the phenomenon of honour banditism evoluting during these first years of twentieth century in a more and more venal job of strong shadow personnalities structuring and strengthening the political clanic system called in a more adapted way in mediterranean countries “ spirito di partito ”. Do they glorify these customs as “ local and identitaire or on the contrary do they responsabilize “ foreigner occupant ” , in fact the French State after Genoese for these archaïc practices ? The come back of regionalistic revendications in Corsica from the seventies (1970) carries a new perception of violence. Integrating the different idealizations of anti-colonialism fighting liberations, it produces a new ideology politically correct which glorifies heroes of resistance and makes of the corsican bandit the archetype of “ corsican soul ”.
Thirty years after, we may speak of social drift of corsican society related more and more with south italians men brother hoods.

Vangelis Tzoukas and Thodoris Spyros, Panteion University(top)
Social Banditry in a post-modern society. From Rentzaioi to Palaiokostaioi.
In our paper we will deal with the complex mechanisms that led to the transformation of a well-known criminal (the infamous Vasilis Palaiokostas) into a popular hero, the last “mountain king” of Greek countryside. Concretely, we study the construction of an identity close to the archetype of “social bandit” that refers to a kind of rural protest against the state in traditional societies. The media coverage of his opposition to the repressive mechanisms, and his ability to escape, is analyzed in terms of a social context that allows the survival of traditional practices in a modern society, although the similarity between old banditry and modern outlawry is nevertheless complicated. More than 50 years since the last bandits of Greece were arrested, and many of them decapitated, a new myth was created, reflecting the emergence of a certain nostalgia for men who could resist the state, help poor people, and restore old values.

Contested Identities – Networked Technologies
Ilsen About, European University Institut(top)
A Bureaucratic Turn : Police and Identification in France and Italy, 1907-1914 (In French below)
The long run study of the identification police (1880-1940) allows us to distinguish the main inflections of a very important police activity in the history of the police institution, of the relations between society and criminal matters, of surveillance and repression practices during the twentieth century. During a first foundation period, the creation of a specialized identification police coincides with the mutations of the signaletic methods, aiming at a systematic study of the criminal body, and with the introduction of classification and organisation methods of the police card index systems. The fast inflation of the tasks soon assigned to the services - criminal, administrative and politic polices - characterises this period. Between 1890 and 1905, the repression of recidivists, the anarchist threat, the incrimination of vagrancy and the surveillance of mobile populations, nomads and foreigners, leads to the extension of a centralized and national system of identification, taking differente shapes according to the country’s polices.
In this context, the major reforms implemented in 1907 in France and in 1910 in Italy, are the benchmark of a deepchange which we will later define. The reorganization of the identification services is also part of general transformations of police institution, in way of professionalization and specialization. It also participates in the incrementation of a bureaucracy which reaches alls public administrations. The services acquire new administrative spaces, focused on the card-index, organized with a new and singular rationality. But this new bureaucratic order deals also with a territorial organization of the identification services, distributed into central and local structures. The rationalization of the signaletic description, the creation of new supports and channels for transmission allow for the installation of remote identification conceived to improve the police control network
Before the WWI and the first international congress of judicial police (Monaco, april 1914), the identification police displays a new image. Whether this police representation, which emerged from the institutionnal sources, corrisponds to reality remains to be seen. We could also debate whether the new capacity in the field of identification really improved the power of the State over new criminal categories.

Un tournant bureaucratique: police et identification en France et en Italie, 1907-1914 ( In English above)
L’étude de la police d’identification sur la longue durée (1880-1940) a permis de distinguer les inflexions majeures d’une activité policière déterminante dans l’histoire de l’institution policière, des rapports entre la société et la question criminelle, des pratiques de surveillance et de répression au XXe siècle. Durant une période de fondation, la création d’une police d’identification spécialisée coïncide avec la mutation des méthodes de signalement tournées vers une étude systématique du corps criminel et l’introduction de méthodes de classement et d’organisation des fichiers de police. Rapidement, les champs d’application - police criminelle, administrative et politique – se multiplent. Entre 1890 et 1905, la répression des récidivistes, la menace anarchiste, l’incrimination du vagabondage et la surveillance des populations mobiles, nomades et étrangers, entraîne, selon des modalités différentes dans un pays comme dans l’autre, l’extension à l’échelle nationale, d’un système centralisé d’identification.
Dans ce contexte, les réformes profondes, entamées à partir de 1907 en France et de 1910 en Italie, marquent un tournant qu’il s’agira de définir. La réorganisation des services d’identification s’inscrit dans une transformation générale de l’institution policière, à la fois plus professionnelle et plus spécialisée. Elle peut également être placée sous le signe d’une bureaucratisation accrue qui touche alors l’ensemble des administrations publiques. Les services se dotent de nouveaux espaces administratifs, centrés sur les fichiers, répartis selon un principe original de rationalité. Mais l’ordre bureaucratique investit également l’organisation territoriale des services d’identification, répartis entre un service central et des relais locaux. La rationalisation des signalements, la création de nouveaux supports et de canaux de transmission permettent la mise en place d’une identification à distance destiné à améliorer l’efficacité du maillage policier.
A la veille de l’entrée en guerre et du premier congrès international de police judiciaire (Monaco, avril 1914), la police d’identification offre donc un nouveau visage. Mais la représentation policière, véhiculée par les sources institutionnelles, correspond-elle à la réalité ? Les nouvelles capacités de l’identification permettent-elles réellement d’accroître le pouvoir de l’État sur les nouvelles catégories criminelles ?

Peter Becker, Johannes-Kepler-Universität Linz(top)
Network Technologies: the implementation of new identification technologies at the turn of the centuries
At the end of the 19th century the arsenal of criminalistic techniques was significantly enhanced. Police detectives, magistrates, and public prosecutors started to use a wide range of technological innovations to identify repeat offenders who acted under a pseudonym and to reconstruct the mysteries of crime through a systematic analysis of the crime scene. Inspired by theoretical and conceptual advances within cultural studies, I will add a new perspective to current debates about technological change within the police. The focus of my argument will be on the ‘local’ conditions, in which the implementation of new technologies was negotiated. From this perspective, we are confronted with a more diverse set of actors than expected. It is no surprise that officials from the Home Office, from the ministry of Justice and police experts played an important role. More surprising is the authority conceded to scholars in the fields of medicine and anthropology as expert witnesses. Most surprising, however, is the active engagement of delegates from municipal councils and of members of provincial and regional administrative bodies. The participants in the ad-hoc networks, which formed around the discussion of new technologies, exchanged their views about the meaning and relevance of new identification schemes, discussed strategies for their implementation, made changes to police and legal procedures, and decided on financial provisions.
Latour’s focus on the processes of innovation and its implementation offers heuristic benefits as it draws attention to the far reaching impact of new police techniques within the complex network of legal norms, procedural standards, and institutional practices. Implementing new identification technologies incurred significant institutional costs as I will argue. The entire system of registration, communication, and training was affected. New positions had to be inserted into the organizational chart, files of suspects and criminals had to be indexed anew and existing registers had to be adapted. Officers needed additional knowledge and practical competences to perform anthropometric measures and even the communication routines between police departments on a regional and national scale were subject to modification.
These changes could not be implemented by decree; they had to be negotiated with local actors. These actors had to agree on the need for innovation and the usefulness of the particular scheme in question. The negotiation had to solve questions of authority and competence; it had to settle competing claims and to assign the authority to certain institutional actors. Anthropologists, police experts, and administrators discussed the theoretical even the material side of the innovation at conferences and in specialized publications. The Home Office was the most important institutional hub. It orchestrated the negotiations between different actors and organized the implementation of its results.

Jane Caplan, St Antony’s College, Oxford(top)
Reading Writing: Criminalistics and the Interpretation of Handwriting
The analysis of handwriting as evidence in police work and in criminal and civil cases is not a modern problem. In France, handwriting experts were already organized in an academy in the 17th century, and in the 18th century there were more handwriting experts in France than there were a century later. However, like other criminalistic techniques, handwriting expertise underwent a new evolution in the second half of the 19th century, not least because of the expansion and elaboration of written documents and means of communication. Testimony by handwriting experts became admissible in English civil courts in 1854 and in criminal courts in 1865; in the US by the middle of the 19th century; and in India not until 1900. Its continuing significance can perhaps be gauged by the fact that the police manuals of both Gross (1924 English edn) and Locard (1939 edn) devoted more pages to handwriting than to fingerprints. This process was marked in particular by the attempt to differentiate ‘handwriting expertise’ from ‘graphology’. In principle, this turned on the distinction between, on the one hand, the identification of a genuine or a forged hand by means of the analysis of the writer’s writing techniques and through the comparison of samples; and, on the other hand, the interpretation of the writer’s character or personality through his or her handwriting. As with other types of evidence, it was in practice hard to establish and police this boundary between identity and character, not least because, as Tamara Thornton has pointed out (in Handwriting in America. A Cultural History), both handwriting experts and graphologists worked with physiological, cultural and psychological attributes, claimed scientific expertise, and ‘made the concept of individual uniqueness a cornerstone of their theory’.
This paper will present and analyse the debates on the use of handwriting as evidence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, drawing on contemporary police manuals, treatises by graphologists and handwriting experts, and other materials from Britain, France, Germany, the US and India. It will pay particular attention to the problems posed by the signature.

Crime and Media
Louise Jackson, University of Edinburgh(top)
Good Time Girl: a movie, a murder and a ‘moral panic’.
In May 1947 the illustrated magazine Picture Post published a series of photographs, taken on the set of a new film – Good Time Girl – which depicted a fight in a girls’ approved school. These pre-released pictures as well as the launch of the film attracted considerable controversy. The film was loosely based on the heavily sensationalised ‘Cleft Chin Murder’, which had led to the conviction at the Old Bailey in January 1945 of a London-based ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ - American GI Karl Hulten and 18-year-old Elizabeth Maud (‘Marina’) Jones - for the murder of taxi driver George Heath. It was the apparently ordinary and almost accidental nature of the case that guaranteed its appeal. Attention focused on Elizabeth Jones: when war broke out she had been a 12-year-old schoolgirl; when it ended she was serving a life sentence for murder in Holloway prison. For the writer George Orwell, the ‘Cleft Chin Murder’ was ‘pitiful’, ‘sordid’ and meaningless’ rather than tragic and emotional, signifying the ‘decline of the English murder’. Yet the interest surrounding both the film and the original murder case was illustrative of the way in which the ‘girl delinquent’ had become a central figure of moral panic against the backdrop of the Second World War.
This paper will examine the reception of the film (detailed in papers recently released by the National Archives) as well as the original ‘Cleft Chin’ murder case to examine the relationship between the portrayal of one fictional girl ‘delinquent’ and the experiences of the actual subject upon whom she was allegedly based. The themes of Americanisation, gender, and sexuality will all be considered in relation to ‘criminological’ discourses and state penal-welfare policy.

Penelope Papailias, University of Thessaly (top)
Cameras and Crime: The Framing of a Television “Bandit”
This paper centers on the 1999 hijacking of a Greek public bus by an Albanian migrant worker. This hijacking, which came to a bloody conclusion with the death of the hijacker and one of the Greek hostages, turned out to be a traumatic and emblematic moment in the first decade of Albanian mass migration to Greece in the 1990s. The hijacking fiasco also constituted a key “media event” of the period: the filming and reporting of the hijacking, enabled by numerous new mobile technologies, such as cell phones and satellite links, produced a “live” televised chase, unprecedented by Greek standards. This controversial event also would later be “reenacted” in other media formats, including Albanian cassette-recorded song and Greek feature film (Hostage, dir. Constantinos Giannaris, 2005).
In this paper, which draws on my larger research project on this subject, I will focus on the connection between violence, crime and media, but perhaps not in the way that is typical in academic work on migration or in the discourse of anti-racist activists. Namely, I am not simply interested in critiquing and debunking the dominant media stereotype of the “migrant as criminal,” which is clearly evident in this case. Rather, I want to scrutinize the rhetorics of criminality invoked in the Greek press, as well as, I would argue, implicitly underlying the filmic representation of this event. In the press, the hijacker constantly was referred to as a bus pirate (never, even in post-9/11 references, as a “terrorist.” Scripted as a premodern throwback, wed to a masculinist (and homophobic) code of “honor and shame,” the hijacker was implicitly consigned to the Greek past. To this representation of the crime and the criminal, I will counterpose my reading of the hijacking as the quintessentially postmodern gesture of a subject living very much in “our” moment: namely, in the age of “teledemocracy.” As suggested by the image of him holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and a microphone in the other, the hijacker appears to have hijacked the bus in order to speak on television and publicize his grievances. The television cameras, in other words, were hardly secondary or exterior to the performance of this crime. A second dimension of the paper, thus, will consider the violence of the cameras themselves. I ask to what extent the chase scene and the optical framing of the hijacker, in objectifying and silencing the migrant subject in the act of supposedly neutrally reporting the crime, ironically, repeated and revealed a tactics of objectification and surveillance that characterized everyday interpersonal and institutional violence against the bodies of migrants during this period.

J. Carter Wood, Open University (top)
Violence and Victimisation in Interwar Britain: The “Martyrdom” of Mrs. Pace.
With some exceptions, the interwar period has until recently been curiously ignored by British historians of crime and violence. However, it is becoming apparent that the ‘20s and ‘30s present an opportunity for the examination of these issues, in particular for exploring the topic of victimisation, which, although of increasing interest to criminologists, has received relatively little historical analysis.
In the ‘20s and ‘30s, the expansion of the media, growing interest in (and understanding of) psychology and shifting expectations with regard to the acceptability of violence had an impact on perceptions of violent crime and victimisation. Investigating the influences of these trends requires considering both individual experiences of fear as well as the ways that anxious narratives regarding threats to the person were developed collectively. How were victims depicted by the media? What factors tended toward (or against) a sympathetic view of victims? How did narratives of victimisation reflect attitudes toward those agencies – such as the police and courts – which had to prevent victimisation and deal with victims?
This paper will explore these issues through a case-study, a late 1920s trial in which a woman was acquitted of fatally poisoning her husband. As the extensive pre-trial hearings had revealed, the dead man had treated his wife cruelly throughout their eighteen-year marriage, abusing her psychologically as well as physically. These hearings and the trial were given extensive national press coverage, and legal issues raised in the case (particularly those connected to the accused’s treatment by the police and coroner’s jury) led to questions being raised in Parliament and contributed to changes in the law. Subsequently having sold her story to a tabloid, the details of her ‘martyrdom’ riveted readers across Britain. Some of the letters of support she received during and after her trial have survived, and some of these were from women who had also suffered abusive marriages. Thus, this trial and what followed it provide a unique opportunity to deal with the topic of victimisation from three different perspectives: that of the state (through the official trial documents), that of the media (through newspaper reporting) and that of the public (through readers’ letters).

Crime, Violence, and Legality: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives (top)
The transition from sovereign to democratic forms of rule which occurred in the west was subsequent to the consolidation of territorial nation-states in those countries. As a result, the historical compromise represented in the nation form of these, largely western, countries generally came to define the limits of political contestation once universal franchise was granted. Thus for example, the largely mono-ethnic, mono-lingual nation-states of Western Europe established a rule of law based on individual rights, where the state retained a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of violence.
By contrast, postcolonial nation-states have usually experienced democratization alongside their own attempts to consolidate their authority. The historical compromises resulting in a given constitutional arrangement have thus themselves been subject to political contestation. The boundaries of what a given regime claims as legitimate are hence experienced as fluid and liable to be changed by violence or by political action.
The reliance on colonial forms and infrastructure, combined with the tendency to make use of authoritarian populist measures, including the use of violence and other extra-legal measures to generate consent for postcolonial governance has produced a peculiar form of postcolonial politics today. From the resurgence of efforts to indigenize law and to institute shari’a in Nigeria, to the emergence of Hindu majoritarian politics in India that targets Muslims as “foreigners,” we are witness to a politics of cultural indigeneity and authenticity that is the enduring legacy of colonial governmentality.
This panel addresses the relationship between violence and politics, and between law and violence from a comparative perspective, and does so by examining the significant continuities and discontinuities across colonial and postcolonial frames of legality and governance. Conjoined by their experience of British colonization, India and Nigeria offer important points of entry for addressing how colonial efforts to manage difference, and to adjudicate the relationship between law, culture, and crime has produced a set of enduring relationships between law and violence well into the postcolonial period. Focusing in particular on the way in which culture, community, caste, and religion continue to inform legal definitions of culpability and vulnerability in postcolonial contexts, this panel will address changing forms of legality and state intervention in the definition and categorization of crime, as well as the relationship between law and society. Whether it is the contradictory efforts to indigenize law in Nigeria through the institution of shar’ia and to modernize it to resemble European legal procedure, or the Indian state’s efforts to address the phenomenon of collective violence against vulnerable communities such as Dalits and Muslims, the papers in this panel address the social and political contexts, as well as extant taxonomies of body and identity through which violence becomes legible as crime. These papers will examine how assumptions of culture and identity inflect the perception of crime, even as they examine the force of law to categorize and distinguish between licit and illicit acts, thereby enabling certain forms of state intervention. Thus panel will examine cases of individual and of collectively committed crimes; the criteria that in each case appear available for restitutive responses, and the conditions and constraints illuminating the perceptual space in which these criteria take shape.

Steven Pierce, University of Manchester(top)
Crime, Culpability, and Identity: The Politics of Homicide in Late-Colonial Northern Nigeria
On December 26, 1955, Ayuba d’an Rufa’i Fogoje killed a man named Sale, whose daughter he believed was bewitching his own daughter. The following June he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by Emir Sanusi of Kano, Nigeria. Subsequently, the Privy Council commuted the sentence to fifteen years’ hard labor. The proposed paper examines this case as a window onto greater issues of crime, culpability, and the politics of personal identity in late-colonial northern Nigeria. The emir’s court applied Islamic law under the doctrine of indirect rule, though by this period doing so was complicated by colonial efforts to “modernize” the court system (though more complex appellate procedures and attempts to make Islamic jurisprudence more closely resemble European forms) and by nationalist agitation against deviation from Islamic law.
The ways in which Ayuba’s guilt was proven in court—and then by which his sentence was mitigated by colonial decision makers—neatly outline the political relationships that were being negotiated in preparation for national independence in 1960.
Criminal culpability was in part determined by one’s area of origin and cultural background. These determined not only the codes of law to which one was subject but also the extent to which one was ultimately considered to be a responsible juridical subject—a belief in witchcraft and Ayuba’s “notoriously fiery” Fulani temperament made him less culpable than a more “modern” man’s would have been. Such practices have led to a continuing politics of indigeneity in Nigeria with profound consequences, that is visible in the resurgence of Islamic practices of punishment.

Arvind Rajagopal, New York University(top)
Routine Violence as Communicative Event
My paper addresses the phenomenon of collectively committed crimes and their apparent routinization within South Asian electoral democracy. Often taken for granted in the shock and horror that such crimes justifiably provoke is the communicative context in which such crimes are perceived as crimes. In a multilingual postcolonial society, however, a structured set of miscommunications tends to occur across English and Indian language media, and the predictability of such miscommunication itself becomes a factor available for political use. In this paper, I examine the stark disparities between English and Gujarati language news media in their reportage on the gruesome anti-Muslim violence of 2002, when more than 2000 Muslims were raped, butchered and killed with state abetment, and I examine possible explanations accounting for the perceptual differences between these media.
By examinining the overlap as well as the the productive dissonances between different circuits of media production, circulation, and consumption, I seek to examine: 1) how the rhetoric of violence was mobilized during the Gujarat riots, and 2) to explore the relationship between the spectacle of violence, and its banalization by apparatuses of state. Drawing on cassettes; public speeches; television coverage; citizens’ fact-finding reports, as well as a handful of (law) cases that have gained high publicity, I examine the production of new narratives of anti-Muslim sentiment and regional chauvinism which were critical in producing a state of political emergency in Gujarat.

Anupama Rao, Barnard College(top)
Urbanity, Masculinity and a New Politics of Protest: The Dalit Panthers
This paper will examine the new cultural and political forms that emerged in the urban neighborhoods and slums of Bombay during the early 1970s amongst Dalit, or ex-untouchable youth, and the centrality of violence to this emergent politics.
Formed in 1972, the Dalit Panthers were a group of young men whose experiences of deprivation and poverty in the working-class neighborhoods and urban ghettoes of Bombay produced a new language and style of critique that transformed Dalit politics. Inspired by the actions of the Black Panthers of the United States, the Dalit Panthers were a motley crowd of writers, cultural producers and unemployed youth who criticized the corruption and factionalism of older Dalit political leaders, even as they engaged in a spectacular and often violent confrontation with the social and cultural mores of a mainstream society dominated by upper-castes.
During a series of riots in 1974 in the Naigaum - B.D.D. Chawls [tenements] in Bombay, the Panthers came into open conflict with the Shiv Sena–another political formation composed of unemployed youth from the non-Dalit castes who embraced a policy of ethnic and regional chauvinism—in what was referred to at the time as “urban warfare.” The Panthers emerged as a counter-force in localities such as the Naigaum-BDD Chawls by engaging in acts of violence. Indeed the 1974 riots clarified the struggles over control over city space and neighborhoods as an important aspect of Dalit politics. The Panthers defined themselves through their virulent critique of caste; the embrace of city spaces such as slums as the site of both exploitation and radicalization, and through the turn to so-called “lumpen” or criminalized lifestyles. Such practices of spatial re-signification produced a violent counter-response, unleashed upper-caste retribution, and provoked narratives about the breakdown of law and order.
By examining the 1974 Naigaon-BDD Chawls riots as a critical event in the emergence of a militant Dalit youth culture, this paper examines how violence especially violence between castes is represented, and subsequently contained by state functionaries, especially the police. Drawing on reports of a Commission of Inquiry that was set up after the 1974 riots; various fact-finding reports, as well as pamphlets and other Panther propaganda, this paper will examine the relationship between new constructions of violent masculinity; the urban geographies of violence, as well as the ways in which the state fetishizes violence by severing it from the social and political contexts in which it is situated.

Culture and Violence(top)
Efi Avdela, University of Crete
Making sense of “hideous crimes”: Homicide and cultural identity in post-civil-war Greece
The paper will examine shifts in the ways violent homicides were interpreted in the decades following the Greek Civil War. During a period of political oppression and recriminations against the defeated Left and all those who were identified by the victors as national enemies, the link between homicide and Greek identity was often debated publicly, in the press as well as in court. Different kinds of “hideous crimes” were considered more or less compatible with “Greekness” according to their inscription in divergent social and cultural projects and their cultural meaning in various social milieus. Whereas in some cases, for example “honour crimes”, perpetrators could defend their acts in the name of local custom, in other cases, mostly in rural contexts, they were denounced as “aliens”, bearers of backwardness and lacking in civilisation. In both cases they represented the opposite pole to publicly aspired “Greekness”, thus exemplifying alterity. As the frequency of “hideous crimes” that were considered senseless increased by the 1960s -a period of relative political liberalism-, new approaches emerged, approaches which regarded these homicides as the product either of “distorted human nature” or of “mental disturbance”. Putting forward individualistic traits as an explanation for homicide, these approaches -lay, legal, or medical- created a new kind of “alien”, the “ogre” or the “mad murderer”, which was more compatible with modern urban life.
Based on research in court records and the press, the paper will examine the reactions to cases of homicides in respect to wider concerns about rising levels of violent crime in Greek society. The paper argues that the association of violence with cultural identity during this period shows the anxiety over wider issues related to the rapid transformation of Greek society (for example, urbanisation, the implementation of the new penal law and the reordering of the gender system) at a time of acute political conflict, which drew legitimacy by reference to the Nation.

Thomas W. Gallant, York University(top)
When ‘Men of Honour’ met ‘Men of Law’: Ritualized Violence, the Unwritten Law and Modern Criminal Justice.
This paper explores the dynamic encounter between unwritten law and ‘modern’ criminal justice. The cultural setting selected for analysis is the Ionian Islands during the period of the British Protectorate (1817-1864). The islands were ostensibly an independent country, the United States of the Ionian Islands, under the protection of Great Britain. British protection, however, soon morphed into imperial rule, and one area of administration that the Colonial Office ensured that it had firm control over creating was the criminal justice system. British jurists wrote the criminal code and designed the legal system; Colonial Office administrators, frequently military men, created the institutions that enforced those laws and punished the convicted. Many of those men were deeply involved in the development, the modernization, as some would argue, of criminal justice in the Metropole. William Blair, for example, was one of the drafters of the Ionian criminal code and he was also a key participant in the debate in Britain over the codification of Common Law. Sir Charles James Napier helped shape the design of both the Ionian Police force and the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the model he helped craft was subsequently deployed widely in the British Empire. While the institutions of the criminal justice system may have been molded by Britons, Greeks employed by the Ionian state operated them and, of course, Greek society used and was ruled by them. The Ionian case, then, affords an excellent opportunity to analyze the transnational and intercultural encounter between a modern criminal justice system, as delineated by an imperial state, and an indigenous local society.
The precise subject I explore in order to better understand this imperial, legal encounter is the contestation between Greek society and its traditional unwritten law and the Anglo-Ionian state and its modern statutory criminal code over the ‘legitimacy’ of certain forms of ritualized violence: specifically, duels, vendetta homicides, and feuds. Through an examination of police and court records, correspondence between criminal justice officials, and popular writings, such as newspapers and pamphlets, I explore the tense and complicated encounter between “men of honour” and “men of law”, both of whom claimed that, when it came to certain forms of violence, they had “justice” on their side. The results of this examination enable us to see more clearly the complexity and importance of the encounter between unwritten social codes of behaviour and statutory criminal law, and the institutions responsible for enforcing it, and the importance of this encounter in the development of modern criminal justice.

Tomás A. Mantecón, University of Cantabria(top)
Long Term Trends of Interpersonal Violence in Early Modern Spain: Urban and Rural Patterns
Two main perspectives are developed in this paper to explain the long term trends of interpersonal violence in early modern Spain. On one hand, are evaluated the statistical information from at least the starting sixteenth century up to the end of the eighteenth. By collecting all the studied statistical information on the evolution of different forms of interpersonal violence in rural and urban areas of early modern Spain, it is possible to consider how the process of civilization of violence took part in the Spanish society of those ages, pointing the pattern differences of rural and urban environments not only in the forms but also in the trends of interpersonal violence. On the other hand, and to explain the social and cultural production and solution of violence affairs, what it is done is an qualitative analysis of gender and juvenile sociability and cultures, particularly focused on those values that were behind many brawls and popular duels. From this viewpoint, masculinity, hierarchy, loyalty, friendship and social competition to control some districts, the sexual favors of some girls, just to keep a position of within a juvenile informal group or even between groups outburst from the backstage, giving sense and meaning to many expressions of violence. With all this empirical material and from this viewpoint this paper settle some ideas to be taking into account within the long debate on the historical decline of interpersonal violence in Western societies that starting with Gurr-Stone articles in the eighties of the XX has been actualized with Monkkonen, Eisner and Spierenburg articles on the topic.

Aris Tsantiropoulos, University of Crete(top)
Collective memory and blood feud. The case of mountainous Crete.
In anthropological approaches of feuding societies, two tendencies can be identified. The first is that in native conceptions, in cases of retaliatory crime, there are no individual responsibilities but the involvement, as avenger or victim, of a wider range of kinsmen (clans, lineages etc.), interwoven with the ideology of the "one blood". As a consequence of this is the formation of feuding or alliance relations between groups. The second tendency refers to a wide range of strategies and actions ordered by custom (such as inflicted emigrations, intermarriages, interventions by mediators, the Albanian Kanun etc.), that are used by the natives to forestall the expansion of uncontrolled violence in the wider community. Consequently, the relations between groups are placed, in reference to the catalytic fact of the murder, in a process that frequently expands the depth of time of one generation.
Based on ethnographic data from mountainous villages of Crete, a feuding society until the present moment, I will focus on collective memory that is located in the kinship group and is sustained by the fact of a retaliatory crime that took place in the near or distant past. The frameworks of this kind of collective memory is a feuding society where an ambivalence dominates in the natives conception about vengeance: From one point of view, the retaliatory crime is justified by the community as a response to a insult against the avenger or as a previous murder of one of his close siblings. At the same time, this type of crime is perceived within a framework of a “civil war” between neighbors, cooperators or even relatives. These ambivalent conceptions articulate native discourses which are not heroic (neither anti-heroic), nor apologetic, but ambivalent and ambiguous.
Within this framework of conceptions, I will approach retaliatory crime as a “trace” in the collective memory of the sibling group, based on two categories of ethnographic data. One relates to the motives of locals stories told by members of the sibling group. The other category of data refers to cases of retaliatory crimes where the avenger was unborn or an infant when his sibling was killed. The purpose is to indicate the concept of crime as contributive factor in the formation of a group identity and in the creation of a native discourse of reasoning about contemporary situations, stances, choices, in addition to corporate social or political action.

Empire and Criminal Justice(top)
The existence of European empires led to a wide variety of new situations for the criminal justice institutions of imperial states. As the leading imperial state, and as the one with the most sophisticated history of legal development, Britain's experiences offer many examples of relevance for contemporary issues of race, ethnicity and criminal justice. When non-English persons came within the purview of the Empire's criminal law, what happened to the rights that were on the one hand guaranteed to all British "subjects" but on the other seen to be the peculiar birthright of "freeborn Englishmen"? Indeed, was this extensive bundle of rights consistent with maintaining the authority of the imperial or post-imperial state? This session examines three cases, widely separated in time and space, where "British justice" had to deal with conflicts between English and other ethnicities and "races."

Jordanna Bailkin, University of Washington(top)
Leaving Home: Crime and Deportation in Twentieth-Century Britain
Scholars of race, law, and immigration in modern Britain have been preoccupied overwhelmingly with questions of access and entry: that is, with which individuals and groups were allowed (or forbidden) to enter Britain, and what rights they held (or lost) once entry was obtained. But the British government engaged in a much broader process of population movement beyond the spatial and temporal confines of entry. I revaluate the existing scholarship by focusing on moments of departure: specifically, the 1950s and 1960s deportations of Commonwealth immigrants convicted of violent crimes.
In 1958, when a deportation bill for Commonwealth citizens was first proposed, the focus was on persons convicted of sexual crimes. Furthermore, many officials understood the bill as an alternative to entry controls. By 1962, with the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, deportation and entry controls were firmly linked and sexual crimes had been supplanted by crimes pertaining to the immigration process: that is, by the criminalization of immigration itself. How and why did these changes occur? I analyze the revamping of deportation policies and techniques in the 1950s and 1960s. The Home Secretary's vetting of deportation orders highlighted conflicts between the executive and the judiciary about what constituted a deportable crime. Policies on Irish deportees were shaped by the legacy of the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act 1939; these cases explicitly raised questions about the link between deportations, terrorism and counter-terrorism that remain highly topical. Drawing on PRO sources that have only recently been made public, this paper treats criminal law as a largely unexplored vector of thought and practice about immigration.

Elizabeth Kolsky, Villanova University(top)
Citizens, Subjects, and Subjection to Law: The Scandal of White Violence in Colonial India
Poor and working whites in colonial India represented a dominated faction of the dominant ruling class. Their very presence brought to the fore many of the “tensions of empire” that defined British imperial society. However, when the merely “ungentlemanly” behaviour of British tea planters, sailors and soldiers in India entered the realm of the criminally violent, it often produced broad public debate and a sense of scandal. This paper will trace several sensational cases at the turn of the 20th century that involved Britons in India accused of violent crimes. I will explore the ambiguous efforts of colonial administrators to bring the punishing power of the law to bear on their own countrymen as well as the challenges raised by “freeborn Englishmen” to being subjected to laws framed for a subject population. I will also examine Indian critiques of what was known as safed insaaf (“white justice”) and the widespread perception, voiced by the editors of the Indian newspaper Bengalee, that “no justice is to be had in our courts where Europeans are charged with acts of violence done to the natives of India.” The paper seeks to demonstrate that while white violence was both legitimized by and critical to the maintenance of empire, the promise of justice posed limits to the gross exercise of colonial power and provided Indians with the means to simultaneously expose the injustices concealed by law and a space to struggle within forms of law.

Martin Wiener, Rice University(top)
Can Uncivilized People be Kidnapped? The Australian Trials of 1869 and 1871
As the reach of British law expanded with the growth of empire, new questions arose as to whom and to what degree its rights extended. The law had long of course recognized the authority of other sovereign (i.e. “civilized”) states over their subjects, but what about those regions British subjects were venturing into in the course of the nineteenth century where no recognized sovereign authority (i.e. no “civilized” state as understood by Europeans) existed? What law applied there? One facet of this question was settled early in the century by the abolition of the slave trade, and the subsequent British resistance to recognizing its legality anywhere. But when a new practice arose in the wake of abolition, that of “independent labor recruitment”, as described by its apologists, or “kidnapping”, as labelled by its critics, what was its legal status?
As this practice roiled the Western Pacific and Australasian world in the 1860s and 70s, the Colonial Office and colonial courts were forced to define the boundaries of British justice and the nature of “human rights.” Two trials in New South Wales and Queensland, little noticed beyond these colonies, became landmarks in the history of human rights, and deserve to be better remembered today.

Intimacy and the Law(top)
Shani D’Cruze, Barry Godfrey and David Cox, Keele University
'The most troublesome woman in Crewe’: investigating gender, sentencing and the English lower courts, c. 1880 - c. 1920.
The English lower courts dealt with 95% of all prosecutions in the 19th and 20th centuries and practically all cases of violence. Together with local police forces, they were the main point of contact between working people and the institutions of criminal justice. Two key explanatory concepts offered to inform historical and criminological investigation of this period are those of a nineteenth-century ‘civilising offensive’ to discipline the violence of working men in particular and that of an early twentieth century growth of ‘penal-welfarism’ - both trends arguably involving gendered shifts in the management of deviance. As the initial clearing house for most offending behaviour, the lower courts are a key site to investigate how (and indeed whether) such broader processes worked.
Our research specifically investigates gender and sentencing. A preliminary quantitative study on common assault, 1880-1900, (Godfrey, Farrall and Karstedt, BJC, 2005) demonstrated that while men outnumbered women in the courts, when matching similar cases women were less likely to be convicted and that those that were, received lesser sentences than male offenders. Even though the women in this data set were mainly convicted for violent brawls involving members of their wider family and neighbours, and in some cases they were also drunk, the differing contexts of women’s offending apparently rendered their violence less socially threatening. If such offending women were ‘doubly deviant’ in transgressing norms of femininity as well as the criminal law, the quantitative evidence indicates that the magistrates did not administer particularly stringent punishment. Our current research extends this study to address shifts into the early twentieth-century as well as the fuller range of women’s offending that these courts tried.
This paper uses qualitative analysis of press reports of Crewe police court and borough quarter sessions to further explore the reasons for the lenient sentencing of women for assault and petty theft through the finer textures of specific cases, the interactions of the parties within the court and the ways that these cases were inflected by the local press. Mixed journalistic agendas, to underpin authority but also to entertain through certain kinds of subversion, meant press reports had multiple strands of authorship which gave voice to the parties to a case as well as to the court and the journalist. If the lower courts and police despaired of civilising working women through punishment, they did so because of the practical, if highly gendered, ideologically-inflected and often pejorative knowledges of women’s lives that they worked with. Therefore, what did it take to become the ‘most troublesome woman in Crewe’ and what did that trouble amount to, not only for the police and the courts, but also for a woman’s kin, neighbours, and for herself? What changes in the interactions between working women and the lower courts can be discerned with the legal and institutional changes of the early twentieth century such as probation (1907) or the Children’s Act (1908)?

Dimitrios Stamatopoulos, University of Macedonia(top)
The management of the intrafamilial violence on behalf the Orthodox clergy: some aspects of the reconstruction of the private sphere in the South Eastern Europe (19th – 20th c.)
As it is widely well-known the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople has achieved, during the period of the Ottoman occupation, to retain its competencies in the form of “privileges” regarding the affairs of the family law. The Patriarchate defended against the Sublime Porte a legal system that had been supported to a great extent in the application of the text of the Exabiblos of Constantine Harmenopoulos (1335), a private Byzantine legislative collection, the last one important, before the final fall of Byzantium. Consequently, the preferential management by the Church of marriages, divorces and wills, a management that strikes so much "natural" in the regions of the South Eastern Europe, it means very simply that the constitution of the private space took place under its direct or indirect control. What therefore should occupy us is not the accurate application of the Exabiblos’s provisions but precisely if its application gave the right to the Orthodox clergy to re-product inside the frame of the Ottoman Empire (till the beginning of the 20th century) or in the successor national states, its sovereign position in the judicature process, especially in the affairs of Family Law. Analysing some cases of intra-familial violence drawing from metropolitan codices, (i.e. codices of some sees in the Balkan Peninsula like Veliko Târnovo, Thessaloniki, Bitola, Edirne etc), but also certain aspects of the discussion that was carried out between the members of the legal personnel of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, we will focus on the consequences resulting by the particularly important role that held Orthodox clergy’s leading elite on the issue of its legal jurisdictions in relation to the reconstruction of the private sphere in the age of the modernity.

Romina N. Tsakiri, University of Athens(top).
Deviance and morals: a study on Crete under Venetian rule (16th century)
Offences are regarded as the result of changing social, political, cultural and moral values. In our study we are going to examine moral offences which became indictable in the state of Venice in the 16th century. Our object of examination will be the island of Crete in the 16th century. This is a century with an intense attempt at moralising, where behavioural discipline also included moral discipline. Consequently, immoral behaviour was regarded as an offence against society at large and was tried in courts as such. Which is why heresy, blasphemy, prostitution and moral depravity were conspicuous among indictable offences.
This study will be based on public documents of the Venetian administration of the island. Our first aim is to examine the penalties imposed in Crete for these offences and furthermore, to the extent that drawing conclusions is possible, the treatment of different social groups, of the two sexes, of children and of special groups, such as the Hebrews. We will try to understand how the authorities dealt with these offences, as the nature of the offences orientated the law.
We will particularly examine the wording of the documents, tracing the trends towards moralisation and reconstructing the relationship between the authorities and the church in dealing with offences which, as it is characteristically stated, oppose the divine and human laws (contra le leggi Divine et humane). The contents and lay-out of these documents, despite their formality, contribute to the creation of a narrative framework which is indicative of mentalities and beliefs. They reflect the image of Man, his understanding of the world in which he lives, and at the same time they shape mentalities, as truths and conventions mix harmoniously through phrases, motives and images with the aim of arousing common moral values. Finally, to the extent that it can be deduced, we will try to trace the stance of the population on these offences but also on the moral injuctions that their treatment by the state imposed.

Law, Institutions and Governance(top)
Rania Astrinaki, Panteion University
Powerful subjects in the margins of the state
The mountain communities of Western Crete are famous for their «tradition» of violence and insubordination to state laws and policies. This «tradition» continues and proliferates to this day, through renewed and «modernized» practices, despite state repression and dramatic local social transformations. Official discourses, political and scientific alike, construe the perpetuation of this «tradition» as the long-living effect of the geographic remoteness and inaccessibility of these communities translated into continuing social, political, economic and cultural isolation and marginality. More particularly, it is considered as the effect of three interrelated factors: first, of the preservation of a distinct, pre-modern, local identity, due precisely to this multiple marginality; second, of a lack of effective state control, due to weaknesses of the Greek state and to the inaccessibility of the communities in question; and, finally, of the resistance of the local population to the removal of their autonomy by the external forces of the state.
Drawing on a longterm archival and field research on these communities, as well as on recent anthropological insights on state processes, I will attempt to challenge this received wisdom by questioning both the «will» of the Greek state (taken as a block or a «bounded entity) to eliminate this «tradition of insubordination» and the supposed political marginality of these communities. As I will attempt to show, the repression strategy of the Greek state was mitigated and ultimately proved inefficient, first by the action of counter-forces in the state framework itself, which were the product of the intetwining of local power structures in the national state power; second, by the counter-action of internal processes fuelled by the specific ways that this repression policy was conceived and implemented.

Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas European University Institute, Florence and Stelios Karagiannopoulos, Birkbeck College, London(top)
Criminalization and the development of a criminal justice system in the Ionian State under British rule.
This paper will examine the creation of a ‘modern’ criminal justice and penal system by the British-Ionian authorities in the protectorate of the Ionian Islands (1815-1864). The implementation of new laws in the colonies which was based on a British-instigated mentality regarding the application of the law in hand was proved to be an indispensable condition for British colonial officials during the nineteenth century. In the Ionian Islands the British found an already established criminal justice and penal system, which originated from the set of principles that safeguarded “law and order” in the Republic of Venice and was not based only in local custom. By castigating the administration of justice by the Venetian officials as corrupted and inefficient, their British counterparts paved the way for the introduction of a ‘modern’ criminal justice system. This new system was supposed to have a twofold function: on the one hand to safeguard the internal and external security of the state and on the other to facilitate the administration of the protectorate.
Through the examination of the Criminal Code of the islands and the institutional tools used for its implementation, namely the police forces, prisons and poorhouses we seek to explore what constituted crime for nineteenth-century British colonial officials, what were the measures adopted against criminality and illegality and the ways in which they tried to enforce these measures. Specific examples of criminalization will include forms of political activity that challenged British authority in the Islands, contraband trade, vagrancy, and the further criminalization of indebtedness. This process of criminalization, it will be argued, was historically contingent and catered for the British exigencies in the islands, namely rule with the least possible cost.
British officials were not, however, the sole factor of law enforcement in the Ionian Islands. Nineteenth-century Ionian society was divided along social, economic, linguistic and religious lines. Different groups of people had various - and at times conflicting - perceptions on what constituted crime and what the role of the state and authorities should be on taming criminal activity. In this respect, another issue that the paper will touch upon is the extent to which British and Ionian attitudes to crime and the legal system co-existed, clashed or reached an accommodation.

Ricardo D. Salvatore, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella(top)
Socio-Political Violence and the Judicial System: Argentina, 1890-1920
This study examines four notorious moments of socio-political violence in Argentina during the period 1890-1920. Using judicial, criminological, and journalistic sources I reconstruct the judicial and constitutional implications of these moments of social tension, focusing in particular on the role of the criminal justice system. These four episodes include: the “revolution” of 1890; the general strike of 1902 that led to the passing of the “Law of Residence,” the bomb placed at the Colón Theatre in 1909; and the events of the so-called “Tragic Week” (January 1919). The question under consideration is whether the justice system stood aside in the resolution of these cases (letting the police and the executive power restore the social order) or if it intervened in order to safeguards basic constitutional guarantees and, thus, establish some notion of balance and fairness in the relations between government and the governed. Though the evidence suggest that the intervention of the justice system was minimal during this period, looked in perspective we can see a transition between a time in which the judicial system self-excluded itself from any intervention in the resolution of these cases and a time (after the anarchist events of 1909 and 1910) in which it intervened to guarantee certain basic constitutional rights of the accused.

James Sharpe, University of York, UK (top)
The state and criminal violence in the eighteenth century: the evidence of Cheshire coroners’ inquests
There is now a reasonably large literature on criminal, and especially homicidal, violence in England in the period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Although the nature of the conclusions to be drawn from the analysis of this literature remains contentious, it is nevertheless clear that the trajectory of the prosecution of homicidal violence constitutes an important avenue for approaching both the modernisation of criminality and the modernisation of the state’s treatment of it. But what, over this period, did the term ‘the state’ mean in relation the categorization and treatment of English homicide cases? In practice, it meant the coroner, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an unpaid, untrained, amateur and locally – appointed official whose duties included the investigation of suspicious deaths.
During the eighteenth century the coroner became more professionalized and his role more controlled, thus representing an important change in how these particular state officials were meant to go about there business, or more accurately, how unpaid amateur local officials so typical of the early modern state structure became more integrated into an increasingly nationally conceived governmental system. This paper will examine how these processes operated ‘on the ground’ by analysing homicide and infanticide cases coming before the coroners in the English county of Cheshire during the eighteenth century. The relevant archival sources for Cheshire are unusually rich for the eighteenth century, and analysis of them provides a counterpoint to the research which has been conducted on crime in south – eastern England in this period, thus opening up an important regional perspective. The paper will demonstrate how the coroners regarded the cases they investigated, and also, via the deliberations of the coroners’ juries (composed of local small property owners) and the witness statements of those giving evidence about the killings in question, how popular and local opinion also had to be accommodated.

Policing: Systems and Process(top)
Katerina Mousadakou, University of Athens
Policing in the Age of Greek Revolution (1821-1828)
The Struggle for Independence (1821-1828) dissolved the certainties in the social structure. Crime and violence became a part of everyday life and the Temporary Government of Greece had to deal with them in order to secure public safety in the new state. This was the main task of the Ministry of Police.
The study of the Archive of the Ministry of Police - preserved in the General State Archives of Greece in the city of Athens, with documents that cover the period of Greek Revolution (1821-1828)- allows us to hear the voices, not only of those in the military and political leadership of that era, but also of simple, ordinary people. These citizens are the main characters of the theme that I shall discuss.
Many sources document charges for thefts, murders, assaults and economic disputes. People demanded the fair administration of justice. They asked for compensation, not only ethical but mainly material. Various aspects of their everyday life are documented in the Police Archive: work, family life, household affairs, diet, clothing, the status of women and children, behaviour, poverty, social organization, cultural life, customs, fears and personal distress, memories and expectations.
Generally, we see that during the Greek Revolution, people found themselves between the old and the new. Some understood the appearance of new roles and new forms of power and claimed their share. All approached the State expressing not just their anxiety and pain, but also their hopes and dreams. Individual cases, however, often engage with the wider political and social structures, describing vividly the beginning of a new era, the state's organization effort, the problems in its operation and in the process of administering justice.
In conclusion, it seems that the experience of studying the Police Archive resembles a detective game of traces and silences, shifting between the past and the present. The documents give rise to many questions – the thread of historical narration has only just begun to unroll.

Haia Shpayer-Makov, University of Haifa(top)
The Changing Image of Police Detectives in Britain from the mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
Few occupations in the Victorian and Edwardian periods were as influenced by public image as was police work, for few were similarly exposed to such public scrutiny. Much has been written about the evolution of the police image in Britain. However, only scant research has been devoted to the perception of the official detective (outside the world of literary criticism), although his reputation and prestige were crucial to the functioning of the police. The paper traces the changing image of police detectives in the formative period of their vocation. With most of the public having no direct contact with detectives, the press was the major source of information about them. Initially, the establishment of detective departments in existing police forces was held back due to widespread opposition to the idea of plain clothes policing as a form of spying. The first detective department (formed in London 1842) was exposed to heavy press criticism. Relations between journalists and detectives were ambivalent throughout this period – tense and fragile albeit symbiotic. By the eve of the First World War, however, police detectives, especially at Scotland Yard, enjoyed an almost heroic reputation as the best sleuths in the world. What role did the press play in this metamorphosis? The answer to this question sheds light both on the power of the press at the time and on the extent to which it served the interests of the contemporary social order in Britain.

State Formation and Criminal Justice (top)
Emmanuel Berger. Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)
Interactions between Citizens, Government and Justice: The Using of Abusive Criminal Legislations during the Late French Revolution (1795-1799)
During the first years of the French Revolution (1790-1791), the delegates to the Constituent Assembly operated on a profound judicial revolution. In the space of several months, the delegates replaced the justice of the Ancien Regime with a new judicial model. This model was known as liberal, insofar as it was based on various principles that were destined to protect the individual liberty of the citizens. Among the new principles we found the independence of justice, the participation of citizens in the practice of justice, the free access and proximity of justice, the accusatory procedures, the public, oral and contradictory debate in front of the courts, etc. Parallel to the defense of liberties, the new judicial model must assure the maintenance of public order. This model was meant, therefore, to make the synthesis between the necessity to protect the individual liberties and the responsibility to guarantee society’s security as a whole. However, the liberal principles were promptly criticized. Since 1790, there are objections about the capacity of justice to maintain the public order and, more precisely, to protect the citizens from the attacks of bandits and criminals. In order to resolve the insecurity issue, the governments of the Directoire (1795-1799), then the Consulate (1800-1804), propose to sacrifice certain number of liberal guarantees. Within the framework of the symposium, we propose to study the court and the people reactions to the liberticide criminal policies of the Directoire. We will evaluate the success or the failure of this policy and, determine the place took by the revolutionary judicial model within the long history of the continental justice. This communication would integrate the subject “Policing societies and communities”.

Fabien Gaveau, CESDIP, UMR CNRS 8183 (top)
Law and order in the country: The question of the rural police force in the thought of the French revolutionaries of the 1790’s
In the 1790’s, the private property, one of the Human Rights, constitutes the basis of the new French Nation. To defend it and to protect its Masters, landowners and farmers, Revolutionaries imagine a rural police force, rooted in each administrative district. Defined to establish the personal freedom and to educate citizens on their obligations, this police runs up against the usual forms of common life and against the usual means of regulating conflicts. Tensions and violences, between individuals, between groups, between communities, multiply then in the countryside. The rural policemen, called the gardes champêtres, quickly symbolize the failure of a policy of transformation and pacification of the society.
Despite the frailty of this police, Revolutionaries perceive the presence of a rural policeman in each part of the territory like the means of diffusing the same legal standard to create the same national culture. However, the financial difficulties and the climate of war prevent the successive governments from limiting the change of this police force in another one subjected to the balances of power which structure the localities. Its functioning binds indeed more and more clearly to a social accommodation ceaselessly redefined within the communities of inhabitants. Thus, the rural police is daily characterized by negotiations. Sometimes, periods of serious crisis happen. They incite authorities to act in order to prevent the situation from making worse.
So, the aim of this paper is to discuss the difficulty of defining forms and structures of a local police force within a national project through the example of the action of the French Revolutionists.

Evi Karouzou, Academy of Athens (top)
Crime and State Constitution in Greece (19th century)
The state’s role in defining crime is well-known, either when the state is regarded as an institution that expresses the interests of particular social classes or a self-governing one which retains a relative autonomy from society. This paper examines what exactly happens when the state is born in parallel with the institutions of specification and control of the crime. The case of the foundation of the Greek state in the 19th century will be investigated.
The Greek state was founded in 1830. As a new political entity, which resulted from the Revolution of the year 1821, the government needed to form its institutions, namely the rules upon which it would survive. The elements that decisively contributed to the formation of these institutions were the following:

This paper examines to what degree the definition of the crime and the constitution of its control mechanisms derive from social or political rivalries. What is investigated is whether there are class motives (e.g., property), broader social ones (e.g., behavior ethics) or political motives behind the acts that were penalized or the “enemies” who were persecuted. The assumption that the political parameter is especially powerful during the period of the constitution of the government is enforced by the relatively intense politicization of the Greek society. This politicization is reflected here in the participation of all social layers (via the activity of the parties, the secret companies and influential individuals from the countryside) not only in the management of political power but mainly in its structuring.

Variations on Capital Punishment (top)
Panel Chair: Pascal Bastien, Université du Québec à Montréal

Simon Devereaux, Department of History, University of Victoria (top)
The Execution Rate in London (1547-1837): some Data and some Questions
The story of the decline and fall of capital punishment in England is well-established, and three decades of revisionist perspectives have not altered its broad outlines. The execution rate was very high under the Tudors, declined from the early seventeenth century onwards, and began a decisive downturn during the eighteenth century, each decade of which saw a wider and wider gulf in the proportion between those sentenced to death and those actually hanged. So great had this divide become that, by the early nineteenth century, England’s wide-ranging “bloody code” at last collapsed under the weight of its own illogic. This is a point on which both Whig historians of the capital code (like Leon Radzinowicz) and revisionists (like V.A.C. Gatrell) are largely agreed. The “Bloody Code” finally collapsed because the statistical likelihood of any given capital convict actually being hanged became so remote as to make a mockery of its pretense of achieving certainty and proportion in punishing criminals.
This paper revisits the ways in which historians have quantified, defined, and explained the “decline” of the capital code in London. It suggests that, when the figures (such as may be found) are properly related to one another across the long term, the Tudor and Stuart eras do not seem quite so relatively bloody-minded by comparison with the eighteenth century as once we thought, nor does the late eighteenth century seem quite so restrained and humane. The aim is to pose questions about the precise reliability and/or relevance of some of our broad cultural explanations for change – the growth of humanitarian impulses, the rise of “civilization”, and so forth – in light of how extensive and how frequent executions were at different times from the Tudor era through to the onset of the Victorian Age. Certain forms of aggravated execution – the burning of women for treason (not abolished until 1790) and the gibbeting of corpses – may in fact to have been more characteristic of the eighteenth rather than the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will also be suggested that the geography of execution may help to explain perceptions of and attitudes towards the capital code and its imposition over the long term.

Jérôme Bourgon, Université Lumière Lyon 2 (top)
Chinese Executions from Myth to History, through Iconographical Analysis
Chinese executions have gained a great fame at the turn of the 20th century as the utmost refinement of cruelty, the achievement of a perverted civilization. The representation that was eventually turned into the French clichéd expression “supplice chinois” has been studied under its historical, cultural, iconographic expression by an international team of researchers whose main discoveries can be consulted on the website http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr. For all their notoriety, Chinese executions appear as a bundle of paradoxes, depending on the resources the historian rely on. For most Western eyewitnesses and commentators, they are but barbaric outbursts of unbound cruelty, wherein a crude absence of sensitivity, a general callousness in the scene and particular apathy of the protagonists betray Chinese backwardness compared to modern Europe —“ China is still in the Middle-Ages” is the most commonplace comment.
Studying Chinese judgments and procedural rules, however, does not confirm these testimonies: the historian is confronted to strikingly modern features, well ahead of major countries of the 18th century Europe— some of them being heralded by Western legal reformers still in the first decades of the 19th century. Moreover, a cross-examination of written and iconographic resources on Chinese executions shows that they differed from their European counterparts, by their general spirit as well as their concrete proceeding. Intensely focused on punishments as they were by their religious, iconographic, and legal environment, European observers tended to view these differences as display of cruelty. A lucid comparison must therefore include these culturally and religiously biased representations in the approach of Chinese executions.

Paul Friedland, Department of History, Bowdoin College (top)
‘Barbarous And Ineffective’: The Humanist Assault on the Cruelty of Executions in Eighteenth-Century France
Public, spectacular executions were a regular feature of life in eighteenth-century France, existing in a relatively unchanged, ritualistic form since at least the fifteenth century. Suddenly, in the early 1760s, a chorus of critics emerged to decry the “horror” of public executions, branding these judicial spectacles as barbarous. Why, all of a sudden, did humanist reformers take aim at an institution that had seemingly bothered no one for generations? The reformers themselves were quick to assert the self-evident, rational, and compassionate basis for their attack on contemporary penal practice: how could any human being stand by and witness these spectacles which were, quite simply, too horrible to watch?
By the 1760s, there appears to have developed two very different ways of attending and understanding executions, neither of which seems to have meshed with enlightenment notions about what people ought to have been feeling when they witnessed an execution. Most spectators who attended executions were still watching in the traditional, quasi-religious manner in which spectacles of punishment functioned as a kind of societal Passion Play whereby the entire community achieved healing and expiation through the sufferings of the condemned. Beginning in the 1760s, however, accounts of executions refer to a new kind of detached voyeurism, particularly among more well-to-do spectators who seemed titillated by the thought of mixing with their social inferiors as they watched the spectacle on the scaffold.
As far as the enlightenment reformers were concerned, however, neither of these modes of watching seemed appropriate. Schooled in the principles of Roman law, enlightened reformers took it as a given that the sole purpose of punishment was deterrence. Spectators, according to this logic, were supposed to be terrified by the spectacle of punishment and thus deterred from a life of crime. And yet neither of these classes of spectators – the ones who wept and the ones who watched without emotion --seemed properly horrified. In the eyes of the reformers, therefore, horrible cruelties were being perpetrated for no rational or appropriate reason. The problem was less cruelty itself, than it was pointless cruelty. As the great humanist reformer Cesare Beccaria put it, the issue was not simply barbarous punishments, but rather “barbarous and ineffective punishments.” And so, despite their claims to a monopoly on empathy, a careful reading of their criticisms reveals that what most disturbed humanist reformers was not the suffering of the criminal, but rather the reactions of the crowd who witnessed that suffering and who failed to show that the spectacle was having a deterrent effect. What was truly “horrible” about executions, in other words, was the fact that the overwhelming majority of spectators were not themselves horrified.

Paper by correspondence
Radhika Singha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (top)
`Desperate and dangerous': policing bad-characters in colonial India, 1872- 98
Criminal Procedure Code, 1898, s 110 (f) : `a person whose character is so desperate and dangerous as to render his being at large without security hazardous to the community’
This paper will explore the `preventive provisions’ of the Indian criminal procedure code used against vagrancy, bad-livelihood, and hazily defined `dangerous characters’. The 1857 rebellion in colonial India had spurred legal codification and police `reform’. However this drive also generated a deep anxiety in the colonial executive about the dangers of over-legislation and over-specialisation. Law-makers like J.F.Stephen deployed the provisions they had formulated for `preventive’ policing, to reassure officials that legal rationalisation had extended and not curtailed executive authority. Stephen also agreed whole-heartedly that oriental subjects needed to feel that the district magistrate was still the `little king’ of his locality.
The badmaashi or bad-character and bad-livelihood sections of the criminal procedure code allowed the police officer and the district magistrate to convert their suspicions about a certain person into a legally tenable demand to produce `securities for good behaviour’. Failure to do so brought prison terms ranging from six months to three years. The higher courts were expected to give the district magistrate ample leeway in the exercise of these powers. The bad-maashi trials conducted by the district magistrate during his winter tours were also public rituals meant to sustain the mystique of his office, and to renew the regime’s ties with local notables.
By the 1880s and 1890s it was the figure of the `native lawyer’ which was held to pose the new danger to the prestige of the district magistrate. `Desperate and dangerous’ characters it was said drew upon legal touts and professional bail-bondsmen to evade prosecution. Legal-mindedness was also said to be undermining the executive from within, in the figure of the weak `native’ magistrate who failed to use corporal punishment and the preventive sections with sufficient vigour.
By the end of the century colonial officials grew apprehensive about the way modern mass transport and communication, economic diversification and population mobility seemed to allow bad–characters to efface their antecedents. The dissemination of seditious images and writings also threatened to take on a dangerous velocity. The modernisation of institutional and economic infrastructures had been crucial to the revamping of colonial rule. However legal rationalisation seemed to undermine executive discretion and foster a burgeoning market in legal services. Migration seemed to weaken the control of rural notables, and to create scope for `criminal’ entrepreneurship. Officials began to argue that the preventive sections of the criminal procedure code would have to be supplemented by a special Habitual Offender Act.