Historians of crime face some of the most daunting material in social history. Often it seems as if crime, like “the poor,” is “always with us.” Taking on over a hundred and fifty years in the history of English crime, William Meier’s text is ambitious in its scope. From simple burglary in the late Victorian era to the intricacies of the interwar confidence trickster to the modern global drug market, Meier touches on a wide variety of “property crimes” that each could easily merit its own dedicated volume.

Methods may change but the goal of property crime remains the same—to obtain goods that do not belong to the perpetrator. This presents a particular problem for the historian in placing crime in its specific historical context. Even the impressive “English miracle” of the statistical decrease in crime in the nineteenth century has been questioned by recent historians such as Harold Taylor (4–5). Meier concludes that other evidence bears out the statistically reported “miracle” as well as a rise in crime in the following century. Meier’s overall thesis that crime in this period was the product of socialization in a consumer economy and that professional criminals were created by the institutionalization of punishment and reform begun by the Victorians places him against those historians who see crime as either rebellion against an increasing police state or, as in the eighteenth century, a reassertion of tradition against a creeping modernity (166–67). Unlike the Victorians who argued for the existence of a born criminal class doomed by heredity, Meier argues that the criminal class in Britain was “produced and reproduced by the repeated interaction of individual agents, penal institutions, and social conditions” (163). In refusing to describe criminals, even professional criminals, as a sort of antisociety, Meier argues that English property crime is much more a product of its greater historical context than some rebellion or reaction against it.

Meier’s analysis covers widely varied types of property crimes, but the empirical foundation of his work centers on the fabulous records and archives of London. Crime in the capital is simply much better and more accurately recorded than anywhere else in England. Meier is also very concerned with urban and later imperial trends in crime that lend themselves to a metropolitan-centric view. Although much of his first chapter, which treats 1850–1900, revolves around the incident of the 1865 Cornhill Burglary and its exposure of Britain’s professional criminals, the real reaction to the English miracle in policing and crime control seems to have driven criminals into the arms of methodological change. Anyone, even without safecracking skills, could commit armed robbery. In the early twentieth century until the Second World War, the story is a similar one. The mobility of the automobile revolutionizes shop breaking, and the police forces only belatedly catch up with these criminal “flying squads” (64–65). Demobilization and the following economic depression bring a social instability that encourages the development of lifelong criminals. Meier’s examination of the postwar era until the 1970s, covered in chapter 5, reveals a similar story of young working-class men whose careers were interrupted by mandatory national service and redirected by experienced criminals in their first incarcerations (120–27). In response to the increasing consumer taste for illicit drugs, the post-1970s era of crime involved drug dealers and drug lords whose careers mimicked those of entrepreneurial corporate giants. Like robbery in previous decades, these criminals were “schooled” in the very institutions designed to punish or reform them (137–58).

In this study of the evolution of property crime from robbery, especially shop breaking, to the eventual creation of a global drug economy, Meier is at his most convincing in these core chapters on property crime in which he illustrates in superb detail how criminals changed as a reaction to better policing methods and new police technologies. He also tells an important story and reminds us that most property crime is perpetrated by people with origins in the working classes of England. These criminals were not born but made by existing socioeconomic conditions and a flawed prison system that created the very behavior it was designed to deter. The chapters on confidence tricksters, mainly men, and shoplifters, mainly women, however, do not fit as easily into the overall interpretive framework. True, the author shows that in both cases the performance of class identities was a key to a criminal’s success, but a deeper explanation of the gendered nature of these crimes is lacking in the analysis (68–108).

Despite the lack of attention to gender in the creation of crime and criminals, Meier’s refreshing broad chronological approach, his willingness to tackle the issue of the “criminal classes,” and his solid arguments for the combined effect of economic change, technological adaptations, and state policy make this book a must read for those interested in the place of crime in British history. His emphasis on the continuation of a less privileged working class even in the era of the welfare state reminds us that we have not left the Victorians so very far behind.