Paul Ocobock argues in the introductory chapter of this edited collection that vagrancy laws are unique. Rather than focussing on a specific action or inaction, such laws criminalise a ‘state of being’. It is in exploring the momentous behind such laws and the people who have been subject to them in different historical and geographical spaces that the 13 essays in this book are presented as sharing a common theme.

The first three chapters are set in England. A. L. Beier, in chapter 1, examines labour laws, vagrancy Statutes and Labour discipline between 1350–1800, arguing that legislation increasingly disciplined the work force, stating occupations (tinkers, musicians and so on) as illegal or subject to licence, alongside greater powers to force labour from those perceived to be vagrants. Linda Woodbridge in chapter 2 focuses on the demobilised soldier in early modern England and representations in literature and theatre of the time. In chapter 3, Beier adds to the collection once more, with a focus on the journalism of Henry Mayhew in Mid-Nineteenth Century London. In an engaging essay, Beier discusses the emergence of the concept of a ‘criminal underclass’, defined by their moral failings. Mayhew's journalism provided colourful accounts of this ‘underclass’, including an exploration of the language they used to avoid detection of their activities from the police. This distinct language Mayhew used as evidence of their cultural distinction as a separate ‘class’, one which was rapidly increasing as the ‘respectable poor’ of low-paid artisans joined their ranks in an industrialising city.

Chapters 4 and 5 move to more exotic locations of India and Mauritius under Colonial rule. David Arnold discusses the development of welfare in India. He argues that catastrophic levels of poverty and famine were initially responded to by British rulers in a laissez-faire manner, but with a subtext of obligation to provide an infrastructure that could protect the rural poor from the worst of this, through public works, that increased over time. Richard B. Allan focuses on the development of vagrancy laws in Mauritius following the abolition of slavery in 1853, asserting that rather than be viewed as a means to provide a ‘new system of slavery’, the agency and resistance of deserting slaves and indentured workers to such legislation provide a nuanced and complex interpretation of social control in post emancipation colonial plantation contexts.

Chapters 6 and 7 continue the focus on global perspectives with Thomas Holloway's discussion of official responses to beggars and vagrants in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and Andrew A. Gentes interesting focus on the links between exile and vagabondage (Brodiazhestvo) in Tsarist Russia.

Vincent DiGirolamo, in chapter 8, gives an engaging and thought-provoking account of the lives of ‘newsboys’ in nineteenth-century US cities. Travelling from city to city, stowed away on freight trains, living in makeshift shelters and hideaways of the cityscape and with an apparent code of their own, the newsboys could pull together a living selling the cheap new newspapers developing at the time. DiGirolamo presents the conflicting discourses of the time − that of newsboys as vulnerable young runaways, subject to increasing protection and regulation from the state, or as rabble rousing gangs with a wanderlust, and mythologised in the very papers they sold. Their existence and the potential for independence they had are thus directly tied to the capitalist press proliferating at the time, that they in turn played a key role in spreading. Thus, the interdependency of ‘vagrants’ with new forms of itinerant labour and transport links in the modern era is cleverly evoked.

Frank Tobias Higbie remains in North America in chapter 9 with a short but thorough essay on the meaning of vagrancy, tied to discourses of the hobo, and with an examination of who ‘the hoboes’ actually were.

Chapter 10 by Andrew Burton and Paul Ocobock examines vagrancy and Colonial rule in British East Africa and Robert Gordon in chapter 12, the (unenforced) vagrancy legislation in contemporary Papua New Guinea. These have an interesting slant on how vagrancy laws, rather than a means to control the indigenous population, can also be understood as a means to assert ‘white prestige’ and control unruly members of the white population. Chapter 11 by Aminda M. Smith presents an interesting examination of the re-education of Beijing's beggars and unemployed by the Communist regime. The final chapter is perhaps the only one with a distinct focus on homelessness, a contemporary ethnographic account of the homeless population living in Tokyo's Ueno Park by Abby Margolis. A descriptive essay that asserts upholding the ‘culture’ of homelessness, in the park context, becomes an occupation for residents, it brings the collection to the present day.

Whilst the breadth of the book is admirable, it may also underpin a key weakness. The similarities between different groups that over time have been subject to vagrancy laws can appear a flimsy premise when reading the detailed essays. The breadth can at times make it unclear how these accounts fit together or what the narrative argument being made in the collection is. I would also have liked to have seen more of a focus on the dwellings of these vagrants. The term homelessness in the title is rather misleading given the focus on labour laws and labour markets as being key to understanding the drive or need for vagrancy laws. Acknowledgment of the clear parallels that these historical accounts of the itinerant poor have with contemporary issues would also have strengthened what is an already dense collection. Scholars with an interest in historical or global accounts of the repression and resistance of the poor, and the impact labour laws and labour markets have on this repression and resistance will find much to interest them however.