The use of ‘privileges’ in political discourse in the early modern Low Countries
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Archiv für Januar 2017
Fraktalität. Raumgeschichte und soziales Handeln im Alten Reich
Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Volume 43, Issue 4, Page 703-746, 2016. <br/>
Buchbesprechungen
Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Volume 43, Issue 4, Page 747-888, 2016.
Fraktalität. Raumgeschichte und soziales Handeln im Alten Reich
Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Volume 43, Issue 4, Page 703-746, 2016.
Kaufleute, Höflinge und Humanisten. Die Augsburger Welser-Gesellschaft und die Eliten des Habsburgerreiches in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts
Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Volume 43, Issue 4, Page 667-702, 2016.
Worrying About Crime: Experience, Moral Panics and Public Opinion in London, 1660–1800 *
<span class=“paragraphSection“>What did eighteenth-century Londoners think about crime? Traditionally, as epitomized in the predictable narratives of the <span style=“font-style:italic;“>Ordinary’s Accounts</span> (the biographies of condemned felons written by the chaplain of Newgate prison), crime was the product of the sins to which every English man or woman — ‘everyman’ — was vulnerable, and thus the threat posed was, above all, a threat that people might end up <span style=“font-style:italic;“>committing</span> crimes.1<sup>1</sup> From the late seventeenth century, however, stimulated by the vast expansion of printed literature about crime, the threat of becoming a <span style=“font-style:italic;“>victim</span> of crime was increasingly emphasized in public discourse.2<sup>2</sup> Ultimately, this led to the development of the sociological idea that crime was committed by a separate group, composed of people unlike the reader or observer, which came in the nineteenth century to be labelled a ‘criminal class’.3<sup>3</sup> The advent of public opinion about crime as a threat posed by <span style=“font-style:italic;“>others</span> has been portrayed by historians as having led to significant changes in criminal justice policy. John Beattie argued that the experience of crime, particularly violent crime in London, combined with the ‘deep anxiety’ it induced, drove changes in policing and punishment: ‘A widespread sense of increasing criminality in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was almost certainly responsible for a number of the initiatives taken in the City and in parliament in this period to make the law and its administration more effective’.4<sup>4</sup> Similarly, Elaine Reynolds argued that ‘there is sufficient evidence … to privilege a growing concern about property crime as the primary motivating force behind police reform in metropolitan London’.5<sup>5</sup> Changes in policy, the argument goes, resulted from anxieties about crime arising from both individual experiences and printed representations. With the explosion of crime literature in the century following the expiration of press licensing in 1695, Beattie notes, print ‘shaped the public’s sense of crime as a growing social problem’.6<sup>6</sup></span>
Presentism’s Useful Anachronisms *
<span class=“paragraphSection“>Marc Bloch once wrote, ‘The good historian resembles the ogre of legend. Wherever he senses human flesh, he knows that there lies his prey’.1<sup>1</sup> For nothing animates the historian so much as the sense of human presence. Where ogres of legend smell or hear their prey, historians track their subjects down from a distance, following traces left in documents, objects, on the environment. Historians are always at work in their present, its activities and feelings, all freighted with memories of the past and hopes for the future. That present establishes the historian’s conditions of work and observation, and so it is always within historical work in this ‘weak’ sense.2<sup>2</sup> The present can also shape historical work in a ‘strong’ sense, as its concerns become the avowed point of departure, that which sets the historical problem (<span style=“font-style:italic;“>histoire-problème</span>) and formulates its questions. Since we are always at work from and through the present, several consequences follow: we can employ insights and concepts developed after the period of study; we are bound to be curious about the genealogies that link the present with the past; and we use the past as a comparative sounding-board for what are ultimately judgements about the present. In that sense we are all ‘presentist’, and it is best that we acknowledge that we are bound to be so.</span>