Apart from anything else, reading Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660–1914, Drew Gray's ambitious general history of crime and criminal justice, brings home that field's massive growth in recent decades. In particular, the proliferation of new interests and methods since the 1990s has brought to crime history a sprawling set of diverse research agendas on social conflict, state building, civilizing processes, media influence, gender roles, and various “expert” discourses. Given the expansion not only of the meaning of “crime history” but also the productivity of research in the field, the need for a new generation of overviews of where we are now, how we got here, and where we should go next is all too apparent.

Gray's particular challenge lies in fundamental, wide-ranging, and interrelated social changes across the period he considers. Not only did laws themselves alter dramatically, but so did the cultural understandings that gave them meaning on the ground. For example, England (Gray largely confines himself to that component of the United Kingdom) shifted from being a relatively lightly policed society in which—sometimes violent—community self-regulation was the norm to one with a professionalized police force and broadly accessible court system. Moreover, a society in which corporal and capital punishment were frequent and public became one in which physical chastisement was limited, imprisonment dramatically expanded, and execution reserved for a tiny number of offences. Britain's transition toward an industrial, imperial, and (increasingly if imperfectly) democratic society also influenced crime, policing, and punishment.

Gray has organized his book into a first section focusing on thematic issues and a second, shorter section tracing the evolution of the criminal justice system. Following a historiographical overview (in which Gray stresses the vexed issue of the validity of crime statistics), Gray opens the first section with a consideration of how the media have presented an often distorted image of crime and criminals, whether by creating ghoulish criminal icons (epitomized by Jack the Ripper), encouraging broader “moral panics,” demonizing particular social groups, or elevating exceptional figures (such as Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin) to heroic status. In the following chapter, long-term changes in the reality and imagination of violence—a focus of research since the 1980s—receive substantial attention. Two subsequent chapters address property crime: the first offers a typology of such offences (embedded in a consideration of changing understandings of “property” across nearly three centuries); the second considers the impact of war, the importance of individual criminals’ “life cycles” to offending patterns, and the controversial notion of “social crime.” Two chapters examine women as victims and perpetrators respectively before the first section's final chapter considers juvenile crime.

Section two considers the evolution of the criminal justice system in England, focusing on the key institutions of the magistracy, the police, the courts, and the prison system. Each of these institutional contexts is examined in terms of a particular developmental trajectory; however, Gray is at pains to avoid suggestions of automatic, teleological determinism, stressing the roles of competing actors with varied (and often conflicting) interests, the importance of contingent policy-making decisions, and the impact of unintended consequences. Building on many years of research experience into the topic, Gray gives particular attention to summary justice, from its administration by Justices of the Peace through the nineteenth-century evolution of “police courts.” The evolution of professionalized policing is traced in all its complexity, taking into account the ambivalent reactions to the new police, the gradual expansion of their tasks, and the increasing degree of specialization (such as through the rise of the detective). The shift from reliance upon private initiative in prosecutions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to institutional actors—particularly the police—in the nineteenth is stressed. Two final chapters consider the widespread use of capital punishment in the eighteenth century and its long-term decline; here, the search for alternative punishments played a central role, with periods of reliance on transportation (to America and then Australia) and the more enduring emergence of imprisonment—though with various levels of reformative emphasis—as the main punishment for criminal offenders.

Gray highlights key findings by criminal justice historians, for instance, their overturning of earlier assumptions that pre-nineteenth-century Britain was an “unpoliced,” nonviolent, and complacently deferential society. All the chapters are marked by Gray's in-depth, even exhaustive, examination of the respective topics expressed in an open and straightforward, often decidedly casual, style. Gray places a strong emphasis on tracing not only historical but also historiographical developments: shifts in leading questions, methodological preoccupations, and topical interests. Debates among historians—about the value of crime statistics, the thesis of a “civilizing process,” the law's contribution to capitalist hegemony, and the role of patriarchy in the justice system—receive detailed consideration, and Gray gives fair-minded attention to all positions. (Some further editing would, however, have helped: among other typographical errors, for example, American historian of violence Randolph Roth is mistakenly—if consistently—given the surname “Rolf.”)

Gray's book makes an immensely valuable contribution to the history of crime, not least since he brings it to life as the vibrant field that it is, characterized not only by dramatic tales from the archives, but also by conceptual nuance, empirical detail, and methodological dispute. However, the book's very success in this regard raises, at times, a slight danger that Gray's relentlessly conscientious elucidation of historiographical subtlety and contradiction across decades of research may leave some readers—particularly among his target audience of university students—overwhelmed by the level of detail and conceptual bet hedging. This may well be an unavoidable result of giving an accurate portrayal of the current state of crime history research; however, it also suggests how much further work, both in terms of empirical research and clarifying theoretical synthesis, remains to be done. In this process, Drew Gray has certainly set a standard that subsequent work will be hard pressed to match.