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This chapter develops an acute sense of the contingency that necessarily unfolds in the wake of Hegel’s account of personhood, specifically in terms of the structure of contract. In the pursuit of one’s own interests in terms of property, Hegel’s analysis leads to the inevitability of exchange amongst persons (contract). The chapter aims to demonstrate that because contracts are contingent upon persons’ self-interests they are prone to violation: one may just as well respect their contract as violate it. Right, framed in terms of contract, dialectically mutates into wrong and crime. The chapter that the natural dimension of the individual, understood as immediate drive etc., is crucial to criminal violations of right. Subsequently, the chapter develops a sustained critical reading of Hegel on this speculative rendering of the structure of crime. Drawing from key theorists in postcolonial and critical race studies, the chapter accentuates the problematic colonial impulse permeating Hegel’s position, exposes the ways in which it grounds criminality in the ‘natural’, ‘metaphysical’ depth of the juridical subject.

This chapter gives a genealogy of suffrage restrictions in Maryland, which held a series of constitutional conventions immediately before, during, and following the emancipation of chattel slaves. Delegates debated the limits of political membership and the franchise in the context of a perceived crisis of “free Negro labor.” Using debate transcripts, this chapter explores the discursive nexus of labor, criminality, and the morally inflected status of white supremacy that continues to ground felon disenfranchisement provisions. The “free Negro” was persistently invoked throughout the debates, figured as inherently criminal, irrational, and dependent in order to reduce the threat that their new freedom imposed on the standing of white workingmen. The chapter explains how the nineteenth-century understandings of penality and citizenship have been reconfigured in the twentieth century in two ways: first, moving from “infamy” to “felony” as the primary marker of criminal exclusions, and second, moving disenfranchisement provisions from the state constitution to election law. These shifts split apart the discourses of punishment and citizenship to rationalize disenfranchisement provisions. These changes have not undone racialized conceptions of citizenship but instead mask the work of social and political differentiation performed by disenfranchisement: the maintenance of the ideal citizen as white and innocent.

Chapter 2 analyses Angela Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis telegraphed across American visual culture in the early 1970s, many of which highlight her Afro, demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies of racial and sexual difference can take visual form. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, this chapter tracks the images of Davis that circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. I argue that Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination, and that it therefore offers a powerful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s textual interventions into the iconicity of the black female body. Reading a range of Davis’s writings (her autobiography, her letters to George Jackson, her own defence statement) in relation to Piper’s artwork, this chapter shows that Davis also deployed language to contest the legacies of ‘ungendering’ and undo the visual logics that have determined black women’s visibility..

In 2002, scientists were reported to have discovered a “genetic predisposition to violence” in the form of the MAOA gene (monoamine oxidase A). Bioethicists reflecting on the discovery recommended that parents should use preimplantation genetic diagnosis to genetically test their embryos for the dangerous gene and encouraged states to screen newborns for those children who harboured the criminal tendency. This chapter shows that scientists never in fact discovered a genetic predisposition to violence, for discussions of the 2002 study that conceive of the study in that way fundamentally mischaracterize the results about MAOA. This mischaracterization has corrupted the bioethical discussions, leading to dangerous confusion about who does and does not bear a “predisposition to violence”.

This chapter outlines processes of exclusion of hereditary female performers that stretch from the first part of the nineteenth century through the twentieth and into the twenty-first. It describes the colonial period, examining how initiatives, laws and campaigns identified female hereditary performers as prostitutes rather than performers, and attacked—sometimes directly—their livelihood. These reforms saw courtesans and dancing girls disappear from high profile and, in nationalist terms, legitimate, cultural life. Thus, by default, an arena of illicit performing arts was created, and an overarching axis of exclusion brought into being in the terrain of Indian performing arts. The chapter then turns to the post-independence period. Post-independence India has seen a continuation and, to some degree, acceleration of the deterioration in the status and livelihood of professional female performers. The chapter focuses on the means and mechanisms by which this has taken place, looking at knowledge, discourse and representations as well as policies and law.

The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics as a negative determinant which could corrupt readers, and which both Victorian and modern critics have identified as predominantly concerned with plotting rather than characterisation. Contrastingly, I argue that sensation fiction is in fact very concerned with the creation of character and is sensitive to the varied ways in which the personality can be formed, modified and corrupted; the emphasis on plot is in fact an acknowledgement of the many uncontrollable factors which can dictate the course of a person’s life. Next, the relevant contextual background of ongoing scientific, medical and educational debates is explained, ranging from early theories of moral management, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and onwards to the development of degenerationist and eugenicist thought. Recurring topics of criminality, insanity and education are also introduced here, as are the theories of some of the prominent Victorian medical people whose work is drawn on extensively in future chapters. The Introduction ends with a summary of what the reader can expect in the rest of the book.

Wilkie Collins’s Armadale is compared with his short story ‘Mad Monkton’, both of which speculate about negative hereditary transmission. Whereas ‘Mad Monkton’ portrays the consequences of hereditary insanity as devastating and inescapable,Armadale engages with a broader range of hereditary threats, but does not depict them as insurmountable. I attribute this change to both Collins’s choice of genre and his growing sense of responsibility as a widely read author. As a sensation author Collins had an eye for the alarming, and in Armadale his imaginative speculations foreshadow the paranoia of developing degenerationist thought which expressed concern with numerous issues, including the hereditary nature of criminality and insanity, atavism, regression, miscegenation, and acquired characteristics which could develop into morbid traits in the next generation. By associating different types of degeneration with different characters, and by offering different reasons for the development of that degeneration, Collins raises questions about class and race. However, Collins crucially opposes the view that morality is irrevocably hereditary at the same time as he invokes the fearful consequences of if it were. Moreover, Collins attempts to create sympathy with, rather than to reject or isolate, social outsiders.

Vincenzo Ruggiero questions the centrality of Wacquant's account of the symbolic functions of punishment and argues that what is feared about the poor is less their criminal capacity than their indolence. The claim is that it is not primarily a question of the criminality of the poor that leads to their criminalisation but their implicit challenge – just by being there – to the work ethic and exposure of the failure of capitalism to produce secure employment for all. Ruggiero refers to traditions of urban social theory - Walter Benjamin, and Henri Lefebvre on the design of the city to render invisible the ‘socially useless’. He also considers the role of disorder and resistance in the structuring of the city

The introduction to the volume sets Richard Marsh in his historical context and argues that our understanding of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional authorship remains incomplete without a consideration of Marsh’s oeuvre. The introduction discusses Marsh as an exemplary professional writer producing topical popular fiction for an expanding middlebrow market. The seeming ephemerality of his literary production meant that its value was not appreciated by twentieth-century critics who were constructing the English literary canon. Marsh’s writing, however, deserves to be reread, as its negotiation of mainstream and counter-hegemonic discourses challenges our assumptions about fin-de-siècle literary culture. His novels and short stories engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates about aesthetic and economic value and interrogated the politics of gender, sexuality, empire and criminality.

This chapter ties Richard Marsh’s Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband (1895) to the anxiety surrounding the degeneration debate. Simultaneously crime novel, detective novel and Gothic fiction, Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband mobilises the discourses of eugenics and criminal anthropology as they were articulated by figures such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso. The chapter argues that the novel provides a unique contribution to the debate surrounding hereditary criminality by simultaneously and deliberately validating and critiquing the racist and sexist matrix that arguably informed late-nineteenth-century British culture and society. Unlike much other late-nineteenth-century fiction, the novel employs a pattern where racial and sexual discourses are repeatedly set on course only to be derailed, and derailed only to be brought back on track again.

Data is supplied by the RSPCA, the Dogs Trust, the Metropolitan Police Service, various NHS Hospital Trusts and, local authorities about dog attacks, bites and incidents. Primary data includes observations in London Parks and qualitative interviews with practitioners. Findings from a focus group of young dog fighters are included. Various data from police operations demonstrate links to criminal activity of those owning dangerous bull breeds. This data is presented, analysed and summarised before a comparative analysis of other primary research is presented.

This chapter balances the generally positive accent of chapter six by reflecting on indications that there remains evidence of lingering tendencies towards violence and insularity. The chapter considers how the enduring themes and dynamics of loyalist identity continue to attenuate processes of conflict transformation. While accepting the evidence of the previous chapter that individual former combatants are integral to maintaining and strengthening the peace, the chapter concludes that the influence of these dynamics in creating and sustaining the UDA and UVF leaves these organisations fundamentally inappropriate vehicles for advancing the tasks central to sustaining and strengthening the peace.

This chapter explores the cultural presence of the cointainer beyond its economic and maritime functions. Broeze claims that the containers have become a recongisable symbol of globalisation, transport, and global trade. He also considers the physical presence of the container on land, on railways and motorways alike, its growing presence in tv and film, and the use of containers in the transportation of culture, such as the movement of theatre or music equipment. He also looks at the negative aspects and connotations of container shipping, such as the means of enabling drug trade and human trafficking. The impact of containers on the global cultural mindset makes up the first half of the chapter, while the latter half explores the environmental impact of the container industry, including its topographical presence, the disposal of retired containers, and the destruction of wildlife habitats caused by the industry. It concludes with an exploration of the alternative uses for containers, ranging from residential purposes, to hosting brothels, or housing art installations.

The opening chapter introduces the broader story that the next seven chapters will tell, and makes clear that this is a study of policing which culminates in the mass black incarceration of late 1860s Baltimore. The book has two primary arguments: first, that Baltimore’s police institutions were from the onset shaped by a liberal order that assumed criminality as the essence of black freedom; and second, that the criminalization of black freedom in turn encouraged white police power. The introduction also defines three concepts central to these arguments – police, property, and manhood – while situating the book in existing historiography, especially that of 19th century criminal justice and American liberalism. Finally, it suggests that this history of the nineteenth-century is an antecedent to today’s stories of racialized police brutality and mass black incarceration.

The introduction discusses the twin market factors leading to illegal commerce: the rise of cacao and dearth of European consumer goods. It points out the colony’s location vis-à-vis non-Spanish Caribbean colonies (Curaçao in particular) and includes maps of the Venezuelan coast. The introduction articulates that this is a rich case study owing to Venezuela’s transition from imperial neglect to the object of persistent and forceful metropolitan reform efforts. It makes three broad arguments. First, communities on the coastal peripheries of empire formed ground-up moral economies that included contraband trade as a basic tenet within them. Second, subjects and officials living in areas of endemic illicit trade agreed upon acceptable levels of criminality and corruption. My book’s third argument is a larger articulation of this sense of negotiation. I contend that illicit trade in the Spanish Atlantic is, in fact, a story of empire making. Many coastal and maritime-oriented subjects felt a sense of statelessness that was intolerable by the standards of imperial law. Confounded by changes to the rules of commercial engagement and an uptick in enforcement, many otherwise loyal Spanish subjects still traded in an economy that was illegal by their empire’s strictures.

The chapter analyzes the cultural value of smuggled goods in Spanish America and Europe as a means to understand the acculturation to illicit activity that early modern Venezuelans experienced. For their cacao, Venezuelans received, not the exotic items typically associated with illicit trade, but rather mundane wares and foodstuffs such as flour, coarse cloth, liquor, and firearms. Inventories of contraband confiscated from homes and businesses suggest both the tremendous inability of the Spanish Empire to supply its more marginal colonies with simple trade and the ways that Venezuelans creatively used smuggling to deal with this dearth of subsistence goods. Furthermore, court cases of smuggling highlight the importance of women as retail distributors of contraband on land. All of these circumstances revealed the colonists’ viewpoint on illegality: the cultural superiority manifested in consuming even simple European items merited the complications of illicit trade including bloodshed, commercial policing, and property confiscation. Black-market commerce at even the pettiest levels initiated coastal residents into a criminal world where they developed justifications and subterfuges for their everyday actions. In essence, residents had been socialized into smuggling.

The conclusion examines smuggling’s consequences for the larger history of colonialism in the Atlantic world. It reiterates that smuggling is the story of empire building and that, despite the desires of coastal inhabitants and imperial policy makers, this was a collaborative process. Extra-state actors powered the economic development of empires. This process produced common cosmopolitanism as subjects of different empires and cultures interacted over trade and mobility. The conclusion also emphasizes the tension between fluid Atlantic histories and the early modern borders and regulations of empire that enabled and ensnared subjects in this period.

This chapter offers a summary of core features of the evolving law of gradual emancipation between 1790 and the 1820s. It focuses on three arenas of conflict: manumissions, both formal and informal, poor relief, and the movement of enslaved peoples into and out of the state of New Jersey. Throughout, it emphasizes the legal and extra-legal strategies of slaveholders looking to retain their properties and to limit their liability and their costs.

The chapter stretches across two centuries, from the antebellum period to the dawn of the twenty-first century, to reveal the blueprint of immigration control that marked, regulated, controlled, and expelled migrant peoples from the nation. This immigration control regime racially targeted Asian and Latina/o noncitizens as “racial bookends” to the twentieth century that allowed the state to associate in the public mind migration with criminality while issuing a strict legal definition that catalogued the migration of these two racial peoples as “criminal aliens,” invoking “’perpetual foreignness.” In this long survey of immigration control, the chapter considers how particular moments of economic crisis and depression, public health fears, foreign wars, and national security anxieties fed racial fears over new migrant groups that were subsequently labeled as “enemy aliens” and criminalized within an immigration control regime that resorted to carceral practices. What made this detention regime distinct from criminal law was the practice of plenary power and administrative punishment where the state enacted criminal prosecutorial power over immigration but denied due process to noncitizens.