As Peter King points out in the foreword to this engaging, thoroughly researched, and well-written book, the pioneers of historical investigation into workplace appropriation and customary rights concentrated primarily on preindustrial, eighteenth-century society. While subsequent studies by David Philips, Jennifer Davies, and others did much to further understanding of workplace appropriation, and how the courts and manufacturers responded to it in the nineteenth century, there remained notable gaps in the scholarship in terms of how this practice was regulated, policed, and punished, especially in industrial heartlands. Such scholarly neglect was surprising, for as Barry Godfrey and David Cox note, theft from the workplace is likely to have constituted one of the largest categories of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Policing the Factory is, therefore, a very welcome and important book that is likely to be regarded as the seminal text in its field for many years to come. Exploring workplace appropriation in the worsted industry in the north of England (mainly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), the book is primarily concerned with the internal and external (legal and organizational) control of theft from factories. It also explores the nature and pattern of workplace appropriation and the extent to which it survived the rise of factory-based discipline and surveillance. The scope of the book is ambitious—covering a broad time frame that witnessed significant developments in workplace production, industrial relations, policing, and summary justice. However, the wide remit helps to give the study significance beyond the immediate confines of the subject matter. Indeed, while the book is likely to be recognized as the first comprehensive investigation into nineteenth-century workplace appropriation, perhaps its greatest strength is the contribution it makes, and the insights it offers, to a range of important historical and criminological areas.

For instance, in exploring how manufacturers, often with the support of legislation and the courts, introduced surveillance and disciplinary techniques to control workers and protect industrial capitalism, Policing the Factory will be of particular importance to scholars interested in the emergence of institutionalised power, control, and sanction. Moreover, in examining how the internal rules and regulations of the factory were enforced through both informal and judicial means, the book provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between the policing of private space and the criminal law—an area of historical inquiry that has largely taken a backseat to law enforcement in the public sphere. Like other scholars have done, Godfrey and Cox view the factory as a tool for regulating and disciplining the industrial masses, but, significantly, in charting the prevalence of workplace appropriation and the inability of manufacturers to curtail it, Policing the Factory exposes the dangers of overstating the extent to which the emergence of new industrial institutions were able to control and reshape working-class attitudes and behaviors. Indeed, the argument advanced offers a nuanced and empirically based corrective to some of the overly simplistic theories on institutionalized power that have been advanced in recent years.

Although the authors, through detailed investigation of conviction rates, present a nuanced analysis of judicial bias, their conclusions are of particular significance in illuminating the ways in which the criminal law and the summary courts typically favored employers. From the mid-eighteenth century, statutes were introduced to make it easier for industrialists to bring offenders to justice, to criminalize behavior that might previously have been tolerated, and ultimately, to help extend the remit of the criminal law into workplace relations. With conviction rates for workplace appropriation being higher than those for comparable property crimes and with magistrates from manufacturing backgrounds being more likely to convict than those who were not, a picture emerges of a legal system in which the odds were stacked against employees. For the most part, magistrates were willing to recognize and uphold “factory law”—that is, the rules framed by industrialists that governed the internal structure and organization of the factory. Indeed, in such environments, workers “entered a largely private sphere of law and morality which overlapped with, and was bolstered by, civil and criminal legislation” (78).

By focusing on the extent to which workplace appropriation survived the onset of industrial capitalism and by exploring through court trials how offenders defended their actions, Policing the Factory also offers insights into the mentalities of the lower orders and how they were affected by the economic, social, and institutional developments of the nineteenth century. Whereas groundbreaking studies into the acquisition of perquisites in the eighteenth century have often viewed such behavior as a defense of customary rights, Godfrey and Cox find that those prosecuted for workplace appropriation in the nineteenth century rarely invoked notions of custom or tradition, instead seeking to explain their actions on grounds of morality and fairness (although whether this reflected a cultural change among workers or was a defense strategy in court is, as the authors note, less clear).

The book sheds a great deal of light on early surveillance techniques that have significance for the development of crime prevention in the private sphere and, more broadly, the development of modern policing. Of particular interest and value is the large number of private policing schemes that were established in the first half of the nineteenth century to investigate, detect, and prosecute crime. It would have been helpful, though, had the authors given more attention to exploring and substantiating their claim that “a private policing agency as dynamic and regionally important as the Worsted Committee [established in 1777 to detect and prosecute workplace theft] must have had an impact on the development of policing in Yorkshire; if not England” (140). Moreover, the police historiography in which the authors locate their research and that helps to inform the basis of the above hypothesis is dated. Though consisting of important and seminal studies, it offers too simplistic an interpretation of reform that has long since been critiqued, nuanced, and developed (all but one of the histories of public policing cited in the book's main chapter on policing were published in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s). Engagement with recent studies that stress the importance of developments in the periphery, civic emulation, and experiments in detection, prosecution, and crime prevention to police reform—themes that seem to be of direct relevance to the hypothesis advanced—will provide much more effective conceptual frameworks in which to locate and test what is an intriguing line of inquiry.

These caveats, however, should not detract from what is an extremely impressive book that will be essential reading for scholars interested in criminal justice history, labor history, and historical criminology.