Social transformation impacts directly and indirectly upon crime and the reactions to it. Discuss with reference to 18th century England.

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IC201                                                                 Zoe Emma Liddiard

Social transformation impacts directly and indirectly upon crime and the reactions to it. Discuss with reference to 18th century England.

In the first section of this essay is laid out what was seen by some social historians (Shoemaker, 1998; Sharpe, 1996; Emsley, 1996) as the major social transformations of the eighteenth century and there impacts on rural society, urban society, society in peacetime and the changing number of statutes of law, often called the ‘bloody code’. The second section will look at three competing historical views, orthodox, revisionist and  post-revisionist, of this period and their reactions to this era.

The eighteenth century underwent many huge transformations which impacted on crime and the reactions to it (Sharpe, 1996). Some examples include the ‘[C]onsiderable population growth’ and ‘the emergence of a class society, with an increasingly prominent middle class;’ (Shoemaker, 1998:5) and the decline in monarchical power in favour of democracy (Lea, 2002) which all occurred during this period. ‘The pace of economic change in the late eighteenth… was so rapid and its impacts so great that contemporaries borrowed the previously political idea of revolution to describe it: the industrial revolution.’(Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Schmidt & Virk, 2002:7; Emsley, 1996) This transformation occurred first in agriculture. Increasing productivity, by division of labour and technological development, meant non-agricultural populations, in towns, could be supported by increasingly small numbers of farmers (Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Schmidt & Virk, 2002:7). This aided the decline in rural villages and their traditional values and a rise in towns and cities, and increased anonymity (Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, Schmidt & Virk, 2002:7). This migrational process of members of the rural communities to towns and cities is known as urbanisation.

The impact on rural society needs to be examined, as crime and its history cannot be seen outside its broader, demographic, economic, religious or political contexts (Briggs, Harrision, McInnes & Vincent, 1996:18). Increasing dominance of large scale capitalist agriculture impacted on the relationships between different sections of society, creating a division in the moral values of the better off and the labouring classes (Rawlings, 1999:9). Hay has argued that over the eighteenth century that crime control, which was originally based on religious values, was replaced by one based on defence of property. (Hay, 1975) By this Hay is referring to the decline in moral economy and the way traditions and customs were criminalised by the ruling classes (1975). With the increase use of the enclosure, the transfer of open fields or wastes and commons to individual private plots of land, individuals lost their right to use these areas for pasture, fuel and building materials (1). Subsequently statutes were passed making many traditional or customary activities, such as collecting firewood or peat for fires, grazing animals on common land or poaching, a crime. This created a category of crime that some social historians refer to as ‘social crime’ (Emsley, 1996:2). These are ‘those offences which had a degree of community acceptance or which can be linked with social protest’ (Emsley, 1996:2) and crimes as proto-political resistance (Hobsbawm 1972:5). It is however important to note that the concept of what is and is not a social crime has been highly debated (Lea, 2002:37)

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For the rural masses, who were excluded from political representation in the eighteenth century, food riots were another form of crime which came under the term social crime (Lea, 2002; Emsley, 1996). These riots were linked with the price of food, often bread. The price of bread was often raised in periods of shortage, causing the rural poor to protest and ask for lower prices (Emsley, 1996). The emergent market economy was more sensitive to rioting than any previous economic system (Polyani, 1944:186, cited in Reiner, 2000:24).  Previously riotous protest was a customary means, understood commonly by all, by ...

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