Historical Criminology

David Churchill, Henry Yeomans, Iain Channing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429589447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

This book sets an agenda for the development of historical approaches to criminology. It defines 'historical criminology', explores its characteristic strengths and limitations, and considers its potential to enhance, revise and fundamentally challenge dominant modes of thinking about crime and social responses to crime.

It considers the following questions:

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• What is historical criminology? What does thinking historically about crime and justice entail?

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• How is historical criminology currently practised? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to historical criminology?

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• How can historical criminology reshape understandings of crime and social responses to crime?

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• How does thinking historically bear upon major theoretical, conceptual and methodological questions in criminological research?

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• What does thinking historically have to offer criminological scholarship more broadly, and the uses of criminology in the public realm?

In this book, Churchill, Yeomans and Channing situate 'historical thinking' at the heart of historical criminology, reveal the value of historical research to criminology and argue that criminologists across the field have much to gain from engaging in historical thinking in a more regular and sustained way.

This book is essential reading for all criminologists, as well as students taking courses on theories, concepts and methods in criminology.

1 Historical thinking

DOI: 10.4324/9780429196911-2

This chapter’s purpose is rather daunting – at least for us. It aims to outline a conception of ‘the historical’, or ‘historical thinking’, fit for historical criminology. We are obliged to start at this basic level – what is ‘historical thinking’? what is ‘the historical’? – because there are so few satisfactory accounts to hand. Innumerable works offer suggestive reflections and theorizations on these themes; we draw on some of them below. Yet most follow a particular current of historical thinking rather than offering a unified framework. There is also an ample literature on history as a discipline, its assumptions and working practices (for example, Tosh 2015). But this tells us more about history as such than about the historical. Historians have no monopoly of wisdom over historical thinking; indeed, some of the richest insights are to be gleaned from others.¹ Hence, in what follows, we draw on work from a range of fields – principally from history, sociology and philosophy – to assemble a fairly unified framework for historical thinking. We fashion this framework from a sustained exploration of historical time. This is just one possible starting point for addressing historical thinking; as such, ours is a specific conception of the historical. Nevertheless, thinking through historical time helps to integrate the several traditions of historical thinking within criminology and offers a springboard for new directions and approaches.

We do not intend here to delineate a neatly bounded mode of enquiry called ‘historical thinking’. Indeed, we shall say little of its bounds – where historical thinking crosses into ahistorical thinking. We have no wish jealously to build fences or ward off incursions. We aim instead to expose what is at the core of historical thinking – its basic attachments and aversions. We consider historical thinking a broadly shared disposition, or sensibility, rather than a checklist of theoretical positions or methodological procedures. One can think historically in a number of different ways, leading in divergent directions. Our goal, then, is not to divine the ‘One True Path’ for historical criminology, but to offer a suggestive sketch of where historical thinking issues from, enabling readers to assess for themselves the sometimes competing claims of different scholarly approaches. Also, what follows speaks sometimes of ‘the historical’ and sometimes of ‘historical thinking’. It can be read either as a meditation on the historical reality of crime and justice or as an account of how to study crime and justice in an historical way. Put rather grandly, we tack here between discussions of historical ontology and historical epistemology. Our agnosticism reflects a suspicion that such philosophical niceties matter little for practical enquiry in criminology. Readers with strong views on such matters are welcome to read this chapter one way or the other, substituting the terms to suit their preference.

In what follows, we first outline a few alternative answers to the question of historical thinking. These answers – that identify historical thinking with particular data, specific methods or with study of the past – seem to us to offer an unduly narrow conception of historical thinking. Second, in the heart of the chapter, we analyse historical time as a time of change, an eventful time, a time of flow, a tensed time and an embodied time. Each of these temporal qualities provides a point of orientation for historical research in criminology; taken together, they constitute a framework for evaluating such research. Finally, we briefly outline some implications (and non-implications) of this account for historical criminology.

What counts as historical research?

Let us start by considering four imaginary research projects:²

1. A cross-national, quantitative study of violent crime and literacy, c. 1500–1750 – using manuscript archival records to quantify rates of each – which aims to uncover how educational attainment affects the incidence of interpersonal violence.
2. A study of local police reform, 2012–13 – drawing on reports of official inquiries and policy documents – which aims to explain how a notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional force was overhauled.
3. A study of memories of mass violence and human displacement in an episode of societal conflict, 1971–75 – based on in-depth interviews with survivors and their descendants – which aims to determine the conflict’s long-term repercussions and effects.
4. A life course study of ‘Douglas’, formerly a persistent offender – based on repeated, in-depth interviews conducted over the last 25 years – which aims to explain his desistance from crime.

Which of these projects are historical and what makes them so? One might assume that historical research is simply research about the past. This seems to align with the division of labour between sociologists and historians, criminologists and criminal justice historians (Elias 2009: 20–2; Lawrence 2012: 314–5). It suggests that project 1 is historical – though its aim ‘to uncover how educational attainment affects the incidence of interpersonal violence’ might seem to anticipate a general theory, not about the past as such but about an apparently omnitemporal relation between education and violence. The historical status of the remaining projects is still less clear: project 2 seems least historical, as it is about very recent events; projects 3 and 4 have rather longer timeframes, but they are still within living memory. This raises the question – looking back from the present – of when ‘the past’ begins? All four projects are about things that have happened – does that mean that project 2 is in fact about the past, albeit the very recent past? And if so, is it perhaps more historical – more centrally about the past, in and of itself – than project 1? Now consider project 3: supposing the episode in question is deemed to be ‘past’, is research on memories of that episode about the past or the present? Is it about both? Or neither? Last, consider how historians sometimes decry a study of the past – typically one with strong theoretical leanings – as ‘ahistorical’. Assuming such denunciations are not purely a defence of disciplinary self-interest, they suggest that a project’s being ‘about the past’ does not, in itself, qualify it as historical (see also White 2014: 18–19).

Alternatively, one might suppose that research is ‘historical’ by virtue of using primary historical sources. Again, this seems to distinguish what most historians apparently do (archival research) from the work of social scientists (research with living participants); historians work from existing materials, whereas social scientists generate new data (cf. Tosh 2015: 99–100). It also aligns with the view that archival work distinguishes ‘proper’ historical research from reliance on ‘theory’ to offer schematic interpretations of history (see Knepper and Scicluna 2010; Knepper 2014; Knepper 2016: 232–3; Guiney 2020: 80–1). All this suggests that historical research consists in a particular method – or rather family of methods, since historical ‘sources’ come in many shapes and sizes (written documents, images, sound recordings, material artefacts and so on). On this basis, project 1 is historical, as it uses sources (documents) from the past. The other projects do not work from such materials – project 2 uses recent documents, while projects 3 and 4 gather original data from living participants. Yet where does this leave oral historians who do, in fact, gather original data from living participants? Perhaps project 3 is a work of oral history – does that make it ahistorical? If not, then how do we distinguish oral history from interview-based research more widely, given that interviewees almost invariably draw upon their memories? Equally, we criminologists often have cause to look up old documents – statutes, official reports, policy papers and the like. When we do so, are we necessarily doing historical research? Surely there must be more to it than that.

Perhaps the distinction lies not in the materials themselves but in the way they are analysed – not in method, narrowly, but in methodology. There is much in this thought, but it begs the question: what is historical methodology? As a discipline, history does not discuss methodology in the sustained, rigorous and reflective manner of the social sciences (Godfrey 2016: 38; Gunn and Faire 2016; Guiney 2020). The standard primers on historical method emphasize ‘critical analysis’ of primary sources and the need to situate sources ‘in their historical context’. The first point does not get us far: all researchers reflect critically on their data, and there is little to distinguish ‘critical source analysis’ from rigorous documentary social research (compare Tosh 2015: 98–121 with Scott 1990: 19–35). ‘Historical context’ is a richer, if somewhat beguiling, notion. It directs us to understand research findings in light of the conditions and circumstances specific to the time from which they arise. As times change, so do these conditions and circumstances (Tosh 2015: 10, 108–9). That is all well – but most contemporary social researchers also situate their findings in the context of their time. Does this make pretty much all social research ‘historical’? Equally, what about those landmarks of historical sociology that are more attentive to long-term historical processes than to the specific conditions of particular epochs (see Elias 2009: 10–34) – are such works somehow ahistorical? Are not long-term processes themselves important historical contexts for local events (see Yeomans 2019a; also Elias 2009: 34). ‘Historical context’, then, discloses something of the nature of historical research, but to appreciate which contexts matter and why one must search for deeper assumptions underpinning historical thinking.

It is not easy, then, to specify what distinguishes historical research in criminology. In particular, we doubt the usefulness of conceptualizing historical research in terms of some distinct method (contextual, documentary research) or content (‘the past’); such an approach may suit the claims of history to disciplinary autonomy, but they hardly seem ideal starting points for a more encompassing conception of historical thinking. The next section outlines what we consider more promising starting points through an analysis of historical time.

Historical time

For us, the most fruitful way of understanding the historical is in connection with historical time. Historical research plainly has something to do with time. Consider the following claims: history is the ‘science of men in time’ (Bloch 1953: 47); ‘the historian… is committed to the detection and description of the shape of time’ (Kubler 1962: 12); the purpose of history is ‘to provide a specific temporal dimension to man’s awareness of himself’ (White 1978: 48). Yet time matters for other researchers too: witness the experimental scientist’s stop clock, the palaeontologist’s fossil timelines, the economics of time allocation or the metaphysics of time itself. What, then, is historical time? This section – which lays the foundation for the remainder of the book – explicates five qualities we consider central to historical time: change, eventfulness, flow, tense and embodiment. These are not discrete elements of historical time, but rather intimately connected aspects; discussion of one necessarily blurs into discussion of others. Here, though, we develop each aspect in turn, teasing out some basic theoretical insights, applying them to the imaginary research projects d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Historical thinking
• 2 Time and method
• 3 Theory and concepts
• 4 Pasts and futures
• Conclusion: Ten points of historical criminology
• References
• Index