A Poor Man's System of Justice: the London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Davis

Of the three major innovations in law enforcement in nineteenth-century England, the penitentiaries, the new police and the stipendiary magistracy, the stipendiary magistracy came first. Three years before Patrick Colquhoun published his influential Treatise on the police of the metropolis, urging the foundation of a centralized preventative police force, the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 established a system of paid magistrates for metropolitan London. The stipendiary magistracy sitting in police offices was further reformed in the 1820s and 1830s, the same decades which saw the organization of the metropolitan police. By 1838 the police courts had taken their final shape, remaining largely unaltered into the twentieth century. Side by side with the new police, stipendiary magistrates were the primary instruments of public order in Victorian London.

1984 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 20-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilfried Nippel

One fundamental question is already implied in the use of the word ‘policing’. A glance at the scholarly literature shows that ‘policing’ is used in the context of Roman history with respect to the aediles and the tresviri capitales, or as an equivalent of magisterial coercitio; or it is applied to the vigiles, the cohortes urbanae or the cohortes praetoriae of the Principate as well as to the respective praefecti; and, of course, to the various controlling bodies and agents of the Later Roman Empire. This is at least partly due to the fact that the fundamental nineteenth-century works reflect a usage of ‘policing’ which oscillates between the description of a function, i.e. securing public order, on the one hand and the designation of a specialized agency to fulfil this function on the other hand. This is due to the fact that the establishment of a specialized law-enforcement apparatus only took place during the (eighteenth and) nineteenth century. The institutionalization of a professional police force represents a fundamental change in societal as well as individual attitudes towards and demand for public order. It may easily be overlooked that the indisputable gain in security and public order had to be paid for with a considerable loss of flexibility in the interaction between rulers and ruled (which was now mediated by a bureaucratic organization), and with an intensification of control and discipline in the everyday life of most members and strata of society.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 263-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Smith

In 1839, the Constabulary Force Commission, created by Parliament to study the conditions of crime and policing beyond London and to make recommendations for jurisdictional reforms, published its findings in the First Constabulary Report. To illustrate for readers the necessity of establishing constabularies modeled after London's Metropolitan Police Force in counties and boroughs throughout England and Wales, Edwin Chadwick, utilitarian reformer and principal draftsman of the Report, interwove the Commission's recommendations with numerous testimonies from representatives of the so-called criminal classes that pervaded nineteenth-century society. These sometimes graphic confessions were calculated to shock as much as persuade, which made for popular reading, notwithstanding widespread political opposition to the Commission's proposals (Philips 69). Section twenty eight, for example, contains the account of “J– R–,” a nineteen-year-old ex-sailor from Manchester who had committed a series of petty larcenies before turning to more serious burglaries of homes and businesses, at which he became quite adept. This young-but-seasoned offender's confession included what were intended to be alarming revelations about the physical vulnerabilities of English houses. JR testified that he had “[f]ound none or very few difficulties in the way of committing crime. The readiness with which property was got . . . was an encouragement” (Lefevre, Rowan, and Chadwick 27). In recounting the details of his crimes (and citing anecdotal evidence from fellow thieves), he pointed out that most houses were entered easily with the use of skeleton keys or through cellar windows, and that householders and servants practiced few if any serious security precautions (27–28). JR concluded that he did “not know of any places or kinds of property so protected as to induce depredators to refrain from attacking them” but added, no doubt with pressure from the interviewer, that the “most important obstruction which could be placed in the way of depredations is a more efficient police” (29).


Author(s):  
David G. Barrie

This essay examines developments in law enforcement before the birth of the widely heralded “new” police in the nineteenth century, focusing on mainland Britain but drawing comparisons with European experiences to ascertain how British developments fit within an international context. The essay shows that policing arrangements in eighteenth-century Britain were extremely advanced in many parts of the country, and the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act was the culmination of decades of innovation. Modern policing practices evolved from the activities of local elites, private and public watching and prosecution schemes, and a burgeoning print culture. Rather than viewing policing in Europe with suspicion, many British reformers were receptive to and embraced continental policing ideas and practices, underlining the need to acknowledge the important role that intellectual transfer and national and local emulation played in the evolution of modern policing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


2020 ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
R. G. Kalustov

The article discusses the emergence and development, as well as existing approaches to understanding the concept of “public order”. The history of the formation of this category is examined by analyzing regulatory legal acts. This method allows you to track the change in value and determine how to correctly understand the “public order” today. Revealing the concept, ambiguity arises in understanding this category, in connection with which the most applicable approach is currently determined for use in practice by law enforcement agencies.


Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.


Author(s):  
Julian Wright

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.


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