Peter King's reputation as a masterful historian and as a leader among historians of crime and the law is sustained by his latest book. His familiarity with archival evidence, the clarity of his presentation, and his agile deployment of statistics “are remarkable. Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840, which combines the republication of five articles with five new chapters, is an impressive examination of the English legal system in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.

This periodization is worth noting. An examination of recent titles by historians of crime reveals that they attend either to the eighteenth century or to the Victorian period. King stresses that “the period from the late 1770's to the early 1830's , with all its complex local initiatives and ideological currents, witnessed important changes in its own right; it deserves to be regarded not just as a problematic borderland but as a rich territory for historical investigation” (254). King asserts that the “high profile changes in the criminal justice system in England” in this period were most often directed not by the central government, through parliamentary legislation, or even by the courts at Westminster but, instead, that they were made at the “margins.” More specifically, in the four parts of his study King charts attitudes related to gender, youth, nonlethal violence, and customary rights through careful and methodical examination of the lower courts in a variety of different locations in England and Wales that, he asserts, “systematically pursued policies which often had a major role in shaping how justice was actually experienced on the ground”(1).

King's examination of summary justice shows how the informal, discretionary practice of law by magistrates, jurors, and judges and their court-based decisions influenced, shaped, and dictated how crimes were identified and defined and what statutes were written. King makes an important contribution, especially given that there are very few sources that record the practice of summary courts, their trial proceedings, or the musings of the justices who administered them. This flexible, pragmatic approach to justice has been well known to historians of crime, but King is the first person to document it with precision.

In his chapters on juvenile delinquents, King demonstrates that youths who committed crimes in the first two decades of the nineteenth century were more often indicted for their crimes and that they received harsher treatment than youthful criminals had previously. In the 1820s the number of indictments of youth decreased and was replaced with informal sentencing practices that often included placing the offender in an institution with a reformatory agenda. King adeptly deploys his examination of the London Refuge for the Destitute to show that the English state paid to cover the expenses of London's criminal youth, kept the refuge financially afloat, and changed the mission of the refuge from the alleviation of poverty to the reform of juvenile delinquents.

Regarding gender, King argues that as a group women involved in criminal activity received punishments that were less harsh than those received by men who committed similar crimes. He disputes the thesis of the “vanishing female offender” and shows that both urban and rural areas saw sustained female participation in crime over the period. In part 3, King argues that nonlethal violence, previously considered somewhere between a civil and a criminal offense, was criminalized during the period. In the mid-eighteenth century, the myriad “minor acts of aggression” (229) so typical of early modern life had been handled summarily with proceedings characterized by frequent confessions punished with nominal fines; by the early nineteenth century, more pleas of “not guilty” reflect a rise in the severity of punishment, which typically featured imprisonment. Part 4 examines the case of gleaning as a way to test the “custom to crime” thesis. King convincingly shows that despite efforts to criminalize customary rights, their exercise continued unimpeded by magistrates, judges, and jurors who disregarded the precedent set by “landmark cases” such as the “Great Gleaning” case of 1788, Steel v. Houghton et Uxor, and refused to inflict heavier punishment on certain customary practices. In his qualitative analysis of gleaning, King makes his most convincing argument, urging historians to reorient their study of law from an examination of the big cases featured in the English Reports to everyday practice in the lesser courts. Although the evidence is more difficult to locate, it more closely reflects how ordinary people and legal authorities interacted in a legal context to create law.

King's study presents a sort of methodological compromise with the cultural turn by combining some textual analysis with heavily quantitative evidence drawn from legal sources. However, there is never any doubt about where he thinks the “real” answers lie. In chapters 2–8, figures and charts dominate the presentation of his arguments. With the exception of the last part of the book concerning gleaning, King subordinates the cultural explanations for his arguments about juvenile delinquents, gender, and nonlethal violence by cordoning them off to the last few pages of each chapter. King seems unconvinced by cultural explanations (see, e.g., 242) and contends throughout that further regional studies are necessary to understand the questions at hand.

But what can statistical analysis of verdicts really tell us? Will more comprehensive data on the ages of defendants, their occupations, and their pleas tell us how the men and women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about law and crime? Are these statistics a “smoking gun” that enables us to argue conclusively that there was a one-to-one relationship between cause and effect? Does scholarship in history after the cultural turn still assert that we can prove these types of causal relationships? King's work on gleaning stands as a powerful counterargument to the assumptions that frame most of the book. For some historians, the quantitative analysis in chapters 2–8 and its explanatory approach will be less persuasive than the qualitative and interpretive mode that undergirds King's argument in chapter 1 on summary courts and in chapters 9 and 10 on gleaning. The search for an exact causal relationship inhibits our view and prevents us from asking certain questions. In several places, King's material gestures toward a deeper understanding of gender, sexuality, masculinity, and femininity with which cultural historians of the law have grappled. Legal sources alone cannot provide sufficient insight about these topics, and his approach does not force him to confront them. Even more striking were the references to imperial events and developments, which deserve further investigation as we put English legal history into play in a comparative global context. Diana Paton's book, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC, 2004) documents several phenomena relating to gender, the body, and punishment that overlap with some of the concerns addressed by King's evidence, yet his work is not in dialogue with that scholarship. As we develop new approaches and directions in the history of crime and law, we must search out methodologies that combine the insights from both cultural and social history mindful of global and imperial history. Even when he does not pursue these lines of inquiry, King's work serves as an excellent signpost for these new directions.