Criminology has largely failed to examine crime and criminal justice in a rural setting, concentrating on urban crime. This collection challenges the enduring perception of communities and provides an analysis of rural crime.

"The most deeply researched and best written monograph on the pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry in English."--Abbott Gleason, author of "Totalitarianism" "None of us has been able to use a particular topic to so fully and broadly illuminate the relationship between the elite and the common people in the Imperial period and also to represent the great watersheds of Russian history in a new and very persuasive way."--Daniel Field, author of "Rebels in the Name of the Tsar"

As this account of crime patterns in medieval England shows, crime can perhaps tell us more about a society's dynamics, tensions, and values than any other single social phenomenon. And Barbara Hanawalt's approach is particularly enlightening because it looks at the subject not from the heights of the era's learned opinion, but from the viewpoint of the people participating in the criminal dramas and manipulating the law for their own benefit. Hanawalt's sources are those of the new social historian—village and judicial records supplemented by the literature of the time. She examined approximately 20,000 criminal court cases as well as coroners' and manorial court rolls. Her analysis of these data produces striking results. Medieval England, the author reveals, was a society in which all classes readily sought violent solutions to conflicts. The tensions of village life were severe. The struggle for food and for profits caused numerous homicides and property crimes. These felonies were committed in seasonal patterns, with homicides occurring most frequently during the difficult times of planting and harvesting, and burglaries reaching a peak in winter when goods were stored in houses and barns. Moreover, organized crime was widespread and varied. It ranged from simple associations of local people to professional bands led by members of the nobility. One of Hanawalt's most interesting findings explodes the Robin Hood myth of robbers who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Almost always, she shows, the robbers stole from the poor and kept for themselves. Throughout, Hanawalt carefully places the crimes and their participants within the context of village life in the later middle ages. Along with a description of the social and legal setting of criminal acts, she includes a discussion of the influence of war, politics, and economic, social, and demographic changes on the patterns of crime.

This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality—and of peasants—with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.

Just like nearly every aspect of human experience, crime, conflict, and violence have become increasingly global. Around the world, civil wars, of which there are more today than at any time since the end of World War II, displace greater numbers of people ever farther from their countries of origin. Transnational terrorism has reached a 50-year high, in terms of both its incidence and the number of reported fatalities. Cross-border criminal markets--illicit drugs, human trafficking, wildlife trade, and so forth--take a heavy toll on the many societies they affect. This Policy Research Report, 'Violence without Borders: The Internationalization of Crime and Conflict', offers a unified framework to take stock of the theoretical and empirical literature on crime, conflict, and violence and to discuss how the international community organizes itself to address security as a regional and global public good. The increasingly global effects of crime and conflict require an equally global response to violence.

Evidence from the west of England balances that already available from the eastern regions of England. Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest makes a major contribution to the historiography of nineteenth century crime. The work presents a new analysis of several important and controversial themes: the concept of social crime, petty crime and protest in the English countryside between 1800 and 1860. The bulk of the research into rural crime has traditionally emanated from East Anglia, the south and the east; however, the bulk of the evidence for this bookhas come from Herefordshire, in the west of England, adding to the historiography of nineteenth century rural crime. Based upon a rich vein of primary source material and liberally interspersed with court room revelations and newspaper reports this work is both informative and scholarly and would make a useful addition to the bookshelves of academics and students alike, without excluding the casual reader. TIMOTHY SHAKESHEFF is lecturer in modern British social history at the University College, Worcester.

Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest makes a major contribution to the historiography of nineteenth century crime. The work presents a new analysis of several important and controversial themes: the concept of social crime, petty crime and protest in the English countryside between 1800 and 1860. The bulk of the research into rural crime has traditionally emanated from East Anglia, the south and the east; however, the bulk of the evidence for this book has come from Herefordshire, in the west of England, adding to the historiography of nineteenth century rural crime. Based upon a rich vein of primary source material and liberally interspersed with court room revelations and newspaper reports this work is both informative and scholarly and would make a useful addition to the bookshelves of academics and students alike, without excluding the casual reader. TIMOTHY SHAKESHEFF is lecturer in modern British social history at the University College, Worcester.