London’s seasonal foreign trade reflected its access to northern and continental Europe and the City’s association with the East and West Indies, but coal and other coastal trades dominated daily port activity. London was a tidal river port centred below London Bridge, with waterfront industry spread more widely. Organisationally, it was complex, with many different interests. As foreign trade increased, legal restrictions on landing places for foreign produce were blamed by merchants for congestion. A campaign by mercantile interests for the introduction of docks followed. The author examines the motives here. For leading West India merchants, specialised dock facilities would enable them to control and discipline a directly employed labour force, reducing theft. The eventual outcome, the construction of docks by joint-stock companies, owed much to State support. Its involvement went beyond the introduction of docks. For the government, this was an element of a warehousing scheme designed to develop London as an entrepôt. General port efficiency would be promoted by appointing the Corporation of London as harbour authority.

This chapter establishes that Augustine held that the sins of Christians were venial sins and that these sins were always committed through weakness or ignorance, with the result that Christians remained virtuous while they committed these sins. In contrast, the sins of non-Christians were always damnable sins and these were committed through pride. Through a study of Augustine’s account of the theft of the pears, and of Adam and Eve’s Fall, this chapter shows that Augustine thought that sinning through pride could take two different forms, and that this supported his view that anti-social, other-harming actions (like theft or murder) were not inevitable in the earthly city.

This chapter examines further examples of property rights, including money and wildlife.

The shortages of goods, in combination with the proliferation of new control measures that changed the terms for (licit) market transactions, fostered new opportunities for ‘economic crime’ and incentives to violate or evade the controls. This chapter analyses economic behaviour to show how illegality was normalized in accordance with everyday needs, opportunities for access to goods, and the confusion of boundaries between licit and illicit commerce. This confusion also generated alarm that France was experiencing a serious moral decline.

Chapter 3 launches with Pseudolus’ opening scene which revolves around a letter. I explore Phoenicium’s epistle to discern how it determines Pseudolus’ comic course as well as audience expectations about what lies ahead, and consider what a letter composed by a meretrix reveals about literacy and the symbolism of writing on the Plautine stage. Next is the play’s protracted indeterminacy, which flies in the face of its textual exposition. Why is Pseudolus uncertain about how to proceed when he himself recites the letter that so clearly sets out the comic plot? The answer lies in this comedy’s claim to dramatic innovation. Pseudolus tells us that its epistolary interception is new to the comic stage, a nova res which inspires in the schemer a novum consilium that neither he nor we expect. But the play repeatedly undercuts its own novelty, a paradox reified in the element around which its innovation revolves – the stolen letter. I perform a close analysis of the false delivery scene in which this text is put into action, reading for its epistolarity but also laying bare the internal replication it effects and the resultant mise-en-abyme.

This chapter is concerned with divine mediation and resolution of interpersonal disputes in Roman Hieradoumia. Secular disputes could be submitted to divine jurisdiction by the performance of one or other of two rituals, the setting up of a sceptre and/or the deposition of a pittakion in the sanctuary. Several different categories of low-level dispute are discussed: disagreements over the ownership of livestock; theft of other people’s money or belongings; the non-repayment of loans of money or goods; and disputes between family members, which could be extraordinarily acrimonious. Familial disputes fall into various predictable patterns, reflecting the underlying fault lines within the Hieradoumian kinship system which arise from the ambiguous status of older women within the Hieradoumian village household.

Displacement and genocide, rather than fully eliminating the Haitian presence in Dominican territory, fomented new forms of contestation, tension, and conflict. Refugees’ prolonged patterns of contestation and resistance contributed to tense relations along the border throughout the 1940s. This chapter details ethnic Haitians’ methods of irregular resistance, which included secret farms, livestock-theft, the right of return, and in some rare cases, arson and vandalism. These incidents provide a window into some refugees’ political consciousness surrounding genocide, displacement, lost citizenship, and lost homeland. The chapter argues that ethnic Haitians challenged Trujillo’s territorial sovereignty and Dominicanization through land contestation, arson, and clandestine farming. Of these phenomena, clandestine farming was the most enduring and widespread form of resistance because it was the least dangerous and also functioned as a desperate survival strategy. The genocide continued throughout the 1940s in the form of isolated killings by which Trujillo’s government enforced the parallel policies of a closed border and Dominicanization. This chapter considers the ways in which desperate, irregular social contestation through nighttime farming and cross-border livestock-theft represented disturbing, latter-day echoes of colonial marronage.

Acquisitive crime is a wide-ranging category in which the offender derives material gain by illegal means, usually from another person, but sometimes from organisations. The category includes shoplifting, burglary, robbery, larceny, piracy, and fraud. There are some inherent similarities in the motivations underpinning these crimes, but the differences are worthy of examination and manifest in the investigative processes of detection and prevention. As with many other types of crime, there is no simple underlying theoretical position that leads to an explanation for acquisitive, there is no one personality type associated with theft or armed robbery or piracy. This chapter examines some of the complex psychological explanations for people acquiring property and goods that do not belong to them, including evolutionary models, mental disorder, psychopathy, gender effects, cyberpsychology and individual vs social factors.

This chapter explores the various responses of enslaved individuals to slavery, ranging from accommodation to full scale rebellion and everything in-between. It also examines the ways that slave-owners attempted to control their slaves, including brutal mistreatment (whipping) and positive incentives to loyal service such as the promise of liberation.

This chapter examines the role of the army in the evacuation of East Prussia’s civilian population. It discusses the effects of combatants’ proximity to their own civilians, showing that the failure to evacuate civilians from areas of operations was a deliberate choice made between the Party and the Wehrmacht. During the first months of East Prussia’s defence, the impetus behind ‘evacuation’ was not the safeguarding of the province’s population but the removal of property. As with earlier on the Eastern Front, orders were issued to ensure that military and civilian materiel was broken down, evacuated, paralysed, or destroyed, a policy whose effects would be felt well into the post-war years. Once the Soviet offensives commenced in January 1945, military concerns immediately gained the upper hand and concern for civilians was no longer a priority. Trains and ships were prioritised for ammunition and the wounded, while roads were cleared of refugees to allow the army unrestricted movement. By mid-March, any evacuation was halted and 100,000 civilians found themselves in Königsberg as the final Soviet storming commenced. These high numbers did not encourage the fortress command to surrender prematurely, ensuring that the civilian death toll reached the tens of thousands.

Chapter 3 introduces the foundations of the Maimonidean theory: the scope of tort law, its connection to criminal law, the classification of the different categories of tort law, and the various objectives underlying each of these categories. We argue that understanding Maimonides’s tort theory and providing a complete view of his theory requires three things: An awareness that Maimonides’ theory incorporates various goals and considerations that operate in concert; the understanding that Maimonides introduced different goals for different categories of damage; and a focus both on what Maimonides wrote in his Code and in the Guide and in his other works such as Commentary to the Mishnah and Responsa. In each category of damage one goal (or more) is (or are) more dominant than the others. A fundamental division into different types of torts emerges from the classification of the Book of Torts in the Code: The basic distinction between damages that are caused by a person’s property and damages that are caused by the person himself; the distinction between a person who causes physical injury to another and a person who damages the property of another; and the distinction between regular damage to nuisance and damages to neighbors.

In Chapter 2 we will present the difficulties facing those who seek to understand Maimonides’ tort theory as it appears in the Code alone, and according to the common interpretation (the “yeshivah reading”). Several contemporary scholars, as well as rabbis from the Lithuanian yeshivot, identified a different element as an alternative to the element of peshiah, i.e., the element of ownership, and some say ownership and strict liability, by virtue of which liability is imposed for damage caused by a person’s property. We will examine this approach critically and conclude that it does not accurately reflect Maimonides’ position, for it raises serious difficulties, both conceptual-principled and exegetical. We will point to a trend of new explanations of the Jewish sources through the speculum of the common tort theories in the twentieth century in the world of Jewish law. Chapter 2 will leave us with many open questions, which will be answered in the subsequent chapters. The book contains three main parts: (a) Questions; (b) Answers; and (c) Dialogue. Chapter 2 presents the questions to be dealt with in the book. Chapters 3–6 supply answers, and Chapters 7–8 offer a dialogue between Maimonides and various contemporary tort theories.

This chapter focuses on the question of resources. Who owned the wood required for firing the kilns, and who could set the price of that wood? Who had access to the equipment and tools that furnished the various workshops, and who controlled the expensive pigments required in the production of fine ceramics? Questions over ownership and price, access and control arose in all of the stages of the production process. For the representatives of the imperial administration, i.e. the officials who were posted in the local county capital, Fuliang, and had supervisory responsibilities over the production of the porcelains that would go on to make up the imperial tribute, there was most at stake. For these administrators, the fluidity that characterised the movement of resources amounted to a loss of control over the costs of production and thereby over the goods they needed to supply. The flows of natural resources brought about the desire of the administrators to stem those flows and assert their control over them, but ultimately, their control was entirely elusive.

This chapter consists of a literature review of girls’ and young women’s crime and deviance from a long-term perspective. It shows how certain themes have dominated European discourses and realities of female juvenile delinquency across several centuries and up until the present day, and how these various threats and transgressions have been countered by recurrent strategies. In assessing sexual misconduct, theft and vagrancy – three crime categories that were prevalent among prosecutions of young women – it identifies powerful and enduring narratives centering on concerns about girls’ sexuality and independence. Finally, in comparing responses to female juvenile crime and deviance across Western Europe since the eighteenth century, certain ‘solutions’ have proven dominant and very enduring: institutional confinement of criminal and problem girls on the one hand, and the pathologisation of female (juvenile) crime on the other.

Repulsed from Mobile, William H. Williams offloaded the convict slaves from the Uncas on to a different vessel, the steamboat Roanoke. As the Uncas continued on to New Orleans with the remainder of Williams’ shipment of slaves, the Roanoke took the inland waterways to Lake Pontchartrain, a maneuver that required no new slave manifest and that would lessen the odds of interception by a British cruiser seeking out illegal slaving ships. This chapter reviews the crimes for which many of the slaves were convicted, the most common of which was theft. Soon the Roanoke reached Port Pontchartrain. Williams desperately tried to arrange a meeting with New Orleans mayor William Freret to secure safe passage through the city for his convict cargo. Unsuccessful in doing so, Williams nevertheless placed the convict slaves on to the railcars bound for New Orleans. When he arrived at the railroad depot, city authorities confiscated Williams’ shipment of bondpeople.

In order to explore how juries sorted the guilty from the innocent, Chapter 6 compares and contrasts the rankings of sins and crimes in medieval English legal, religious, and literary texts. It demonstrates the way in which sins were commonly divided into offenses of thought, speech, and deed, and explores how theologians and others understood the importance of volition or free will in aggravating or mitigating the severity of an offense. The chapter explores the treatment of theft and homicide in legal treatises and literary and penitential texts as well in order to make sense of how juries determined who should walk free and who should hang for such offenses.