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THE IMPACT OF URBANIZATION ON MURDER RATES AND ON THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOMICIDE IN ENGLAND AND WALES, 1780–1850*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2010

PETER KING
PETER KING*
Affiliation:
Open University
*
Department of History, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6BJ[email protected]
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Abstract

Although higher murder rates have traditionally been associated with large cities, this view has recently been challenged by several historians who have argued that ‘homicide rates were negatively correlated with urbanisation and industrialisation’, and this is rapidly becoming the new consensus. By exploring the geography of homicide rates for one area undergoing rapid urbanization and industrialization – England and Wales, 1780–1850 – this article challenges this new view and re-assesses the relationship between recorded homicide rates and both modernization and urbanization. After discussing the methodological problems involved in using homicide statistics, it focuses mainly on the first fifteen years for which detailed county-based data is available – 1834–48 – as well as looking at the more limited late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century evidence. This data raises fundamental questions about the links historians have recently made between urbanization and low homicide rates, since the remote rural parts of England and Wales generally had very low recorded murder rates while industrializing and rapidly urbanizing areas such as Lancashire had very high ones. Potential explanations for these systematic and large variations between urban and rural areas – including the impact of age structures and migration patterns – are then explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 671 - 698
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank John Carter Wood, Ros Crone, Steve King, and all those who gave comments on this paper at the ‘History of crime’ Conference at the Open University, February 2009 as well as Bridget Lewis and Philippa Mitchell for their research assistance.

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32 Beattie does not analyse spatial variations in infanticide – Beattie, Crime, pp. 108–24.

33 Ibid., p.108.

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36 On not founds Beattie, Crime, p. 90.

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38 Based on the sources listed in P. King, ‘War as a judicial resource: press gangs and prosecution rates, 1740–1830’, in N. Landau, ed., Law, crime and English society, 1660–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 99.

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40 The 1834–48 data PP 1835, xlv; 1836, xli; 1837, xlvi; 1837–8, xliii; 1839, xxxviii; 1840, xxxviii; 1841, xviii; 1842, xxxii; 1843, xlii; 1844, xxxix; 1845, xxxvii; 1846, xxxiv; 1847, xlvii; 1847–8, lii; 1849, xliv. When a murder charge was reduced by the jury to manslaughter it was recorded as the latter.

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43 www.oldbaileyonline – for Central Criminal Court 1834–48; Gatrell, ‘The decline’, p. 342; PP 1835, xlv.

44 Figure 1 based on PP 1819, viii, pp. 28–31; PP 1828, vi, pp. 276–87; PP 1835, xl, pp. 22–5, and references in n. 40.

45 Gatrell, ‘The decline’, pp. 287 and 342–5; Spierenburg, A history, p. 209; Eisner, ‘Modernity strikes back?’.

46 J. Carter Wood, Violence and crime in nineteenth-century England. The shadow of our refinement (London 2004), p. 30; Wiener, Men, pp. 25–6.

47 The counties amalgamated had populations under 60,000 inhabitants.

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49 J. Langton and R. Morris, eds., Atlas of industrialising Britain, 1780–1914 (London, 1985), p. 31.

50 Ibid., pp. 32, 167–75.

51 Even when combined the Breconshire and Radnorshire population was only 78,000.

52 L. Schwarz, London in the age of industrialisation: entrepreneurs, labour force and living conditions, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 2; Evans, The forging, pp. 430–2.

53 Fisher, ‘Getting’, p. 56.

54 Ibid., pp. 50–61. In Norfolk, the crackdown came late in 1844 – twenty murder cases 1842–4, and twenty-one 1845–7. In Devon inquest costs were halved 1844–46 – sixteen murder cases 1842–4 and twenty-five 1845–7.

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56 Fisher, ‘Getting’, p. 49; Forbes, ‘Coroners’ inquests', p. 377; Forbes, ‘Coroner's quest’, p. 13.

57 Gatrell, ‘The decline’, pp. 247 and 293.

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67 Palmer, Policing, p. 435.

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74 For modern criminological theories – S. Jones, Understanding violent crime (Buckingham, 2000).

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76 TNA HO 26/ 1–11; PP, 1835, xlv.

77 P. Lawton, ‘Population’, in Langton and Morris, eds., Atlas, p. 17.

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82 Lawton, ‘Population’, p. 25.

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84 TNA HO 26/ 1–12. Further research will appear in P. King and J. Carter Wood, Ethnicity, crime and justice in England 1700–1825 (forthcoming).

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86 Jones, Crime, p. 78; R. Swift, ‘Crime and the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley, eds., The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), p. 166; R. Swift, ed., Irish migrants in Britain, 1815–1914 (Cork, 2002), p. 35.

87 Swift, ‘Heroes’, pp. 408–11; Macraild, The Irish, pp. 58–9; Wood, Violence, pp. 3–14 and 47–69.

88 C. Conley, Melancholy accidents: the meaning of violence in post-famine Ireland (Lanham, MD, 1999), pp. 3–17.

89 Ibid., pp. 20–8; R. Swift, ‘Behaving badly? Irish migrants and crime in the Victorian city’, in J. Rowbottom and K. Stevenson, eds., Criminal conversations (Columbus, OH, 2005), p. 114; O'Leary, Immigration, p. 174; on similar English traditions – Snell, Parish, p. 57.

90 Swift, ‘Crime’ p. 166–9; www.oldbaileyonline t17990508–21.

91 The Scots and Welsh were also over represented amongst the Old Bailey murder accused but not to anywhere like the extent that the Irish were – Conley, Certain, p. 45.

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93 See P. King, ‘The geography of recorded homicide rates in early and mid-nineteenth century Scotland’ (forthcoming).

94 L. Shelley, Crime and modernisation; the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on crime (Carbondale, IL, 1981), pp. 1–37.

95 However Eisner's current research using smaller administrative units within countries (similar to Figure 2) will hopefully provide the data needed.

96 E. Ferri, L'Omicidio (Turin, 1895), pp. 281–325.