Douglas Hay

Crime and Justice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England

Recent historical studies concerned with the period of the English industrial revolution illuminate many relationships between crime and the criminal law, and social and economic change. The creation and abolition of the capital code and the invention of the penitentiary and the police suggest the importance of threats to political authority in deciding policy. Other studies emphasize the place of crime in popular culture, while quantitative work shows the importance of economic fluctuations, moral panics, war and the new police in explaining the level of prosecutions. Most suggestive for further work is the upper class assault on popular mores, poor mens property, and old economic orthodoxies. New legislation and new levels of enforcement, as well as less premeditated changes in English capitalism, created crimes where none had existed, and probably caused a crisis of legitimacy for the English criminal law. What emerged may have been not only a modern system of criminal law and enforcement, but a modern criminal.

Master and Servant in England and the Empire: A Comparative Study

THE LAW OF MASTER and servant was a complex of legislation and related case law that defined the terms of the individual contract of employment for many hundreds of years, and was distinguished by the use of penal sanctions, notably imprisonment, for breach by the servant (but not the master). Reconstituted by repeated legislation from early modern times until the 19th century in England, it was repealed after one of the first organized campaigns of united trade unions in 1875. Yet the 19th century and the 20th century saw the extension of the same kind of legislation, and the legal doctrines based on it, to almost every jurisdiction in the empire and subsequently the commonwealth, as well as other parts of the common law world. It was crucially important in the organization of colonial labour regimes, and in the constitution of employment relations in England itself until repeal. Its doctrines continue to be felt in some parts of modem employment law. Much of the English and colonial history of master and servant legislation and its administration remains unexplored. While there is a growing international literature, the law has most often been treated as a local phenomenon with only the vaguest of links to its counterparts elsewhere in the world. Yet both in terms of legal doctrine and

Edward Palmer Thompson: In Memoriam

Edward Thompson died on 28 August 1993 after a long and lingering illness. Those who visited him at Wick Episcopi in the last few years, or saw him at the few conferences he then attended, must have predicted, as I did, that the end was near. But his peaceful death in his own garden nevertheless came as a terrible blow.