Robert Shoemaker – författare

Victims and Criminal Justice is the first study of its kind to examine both the origins and impacts of key legal, procedural, and institutional changes introduced in England and Wales to encourage and govern prosecution. It sets out how crime victims' experiences of, and engagement with, the process of criminal justice changed dramatically between the late seventeenth and late twentieth centuries. Where victims once drove the English criminal justice system, bringing prosecutions as complainants and prosecutors, giving evidence as witnesses, putting up personal rewards for the recovery of lost goods or claim rewards for securing convictions, by the end of this period, victims had been firmly displaced as the state took virtually full responsibility for the process of prosecution. Combining qualitative analysis of a range of textual sources with quantitative analysis of large datasets featuring over 200,000 criminal prosecutions, the authors explore how victims were defined in law, what the law allowed and encouraged them to do, who they were in social and economic terms, how they participated in the criminal justice system, why many were unwilling or unable to engage in that system, and why some campaigned for specific rights. In exploring the shift in victim participation in criminal trials, Victims and Criminal Justice places current policy debates in a much-needed critical historical context.

London Lives is a fascinating new study which exposes, for the first time, the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of social policy. Calling upon a new body of evidence, the book illuminates the lives of prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants, revealing how they each played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive in their various circumstances of misfortune. In their acts of desperation, the authors argue that the poor and criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself, and shaped the evolution of the modern state.

London Lives is a fascinating new study which exposes, for the first time, the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of social policy. Calling upon a new body of evidence, the book illuminates the lives of prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants, revealing how they each played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive in their various circumstances of misfortune. In their acts of desperation, the authors argue that the poor and criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself, and shaped the evolution of the modern state.

By 1700 London was the largest city in the world, with over 500,000 inhabitants. Very weakly policed, its streets saw regular outbreaks of rioting by a mob easily stirred by economic grievances, politics or religion. If the mob vented its anger more often on property than people, eighteenth-century Londoners frequently came to blows over personal disputes in a society where men and women were quick to defend their honour. Slanging matches easily turned to fisticuffs and slights on honour were avenged in duels. In this world, where the detection and prosecution of crime was the part of the business of the citizen, punishment, whether by the pillory, whipping at a cart's tail or hanging at Tyburn, was public and endorsed by crowds. The Mob draws a fascinating portrait of the public life of the modern world's first great city.