Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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8 paul lawrence

argued that the Weltstädt would “suck the country dry,” until it grew weary and died

“in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste.”

Finally, it was also common for

critics to focus on the horrendous living conditions which still prevailed in many

cities, especially in the early part of the century. Slum areas were seen as a haven for

criminals, but many religious ﬁgures and social reformers were also genuinely moved

and concerned by the plight of the lower classes.

The city during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century was thus often simultane-

ously a symbolic ﬁgurehead of progress and light, and a contested terrain wherein

the problems of health, housing, degeneration, and crime (among others) were

debated. Of all the problems associated with city life, however, the degenerating

nature of the urban environment and its effect on poorer, weaker citizens was seen

to be the most imperative. The “problem of the poor” was still unsolved in Europe

at the turn of the century, and it is to this sphere that we now turn our attention.

Poverty, Welfare, and Eugenics

The problems of poverty and the persistence of “the poor” had been widely discussed

across Europe as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Many studies of major

cities had investigated the living conditions of the working classes and the urban

poor. During the 1880s, for example, the French politician and writer Othenin

D’Haussonville published a long series of articles on Parisian poverty in the respected

Revue des deux mondes. In Germany, impressive empirical social research was con-

ducted under the aegis of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy).

It was in England, however, that the most detailed studies were produced. The social

investigator Charles Booth published his 17-volume Life and Labour of the People in

London between 1889 and 1903, with detailed color-coded maps showing the extent

of poverty in the capital, street by street. This tradition of social investigation and

public concern continued in England well into the twentieth century. Indeed, the

century opened with the “thunder-clap” of another such survey – Seebohm Rowntree’s

study of the outwardly prosperous city of York, which concluded that over 27 percent

of the inhabitants were in fact living in poverty. Further research, conducted in the

interwar period by social scientists, appeared to conﬁrm the persistence of poverty

despite widespread improvements in standards of living for many. Llewellyn Smith’s

New Survey of London Life and Labour 1930–1935 argued that 500,000 Londoners

were still living below a poverty line ﬁxed in accordance with that used by Booth

forty years earlier.

The empirical social survey was probably most common in England during the

early twentieth century, which is interesting in itself given that the measurement of

per capita income shows that Britain was clearly the richest country in Europe at the

time. Elsewhere, however, concern over the condition of the lowest social strata was

also in evidence. In Germany, housing provision and the problems of overcrowding

were particular issues. In 1907, for example, the socialist Rosa Luxemburg was

prompted to write “In the Shelter” to criticize the Berlin authorities (and even her

own party) for their neglect of the homeless. In France the work of the human

geographer Alfred Sauvy demonstrated for the Revue d’économie politique that, even

during the 1930s when urban populations became a majority in France, poor

standards of living were the norm even for many with jobs. Of course, the studies

urbanization, poverty, and crime 9

of poverty undertaken in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century were usually not

conducted to the exacting standards of today’s social scientists. The research of Booth

and Rowntree in particular has been subjected to considerable scrutiny, and the valid-

ity of their ﬁndings often questioned. What is important, however, is that the problem

of poverty was one which remained noticeable enough, even during the 1930s, to

provoke concern, investigation, and action. In particular, it is interesting to note

the early growth of nascent welfare state systems across much of Europe. The exact

forms of state-sponsored initiatives varied, of course, but the growth of government

intervention in the social sphere was common across Europe during the period

1900–45.

Germany was in many ways a pioneer of this process. Compulsory insurance

schemes had been introduced under Bismarck, including schemes covering sickness

(1883), accidents (1884), and invalidity and old age (1889). However, these schemes

only applied initially to industrial workers. Although they were extended in 1911 to

include salaried workers, the poor remained excluded. The Weimar republic intro-

duced an ambitious program of welfare after World War I – including a constitutional

guarantee of a range of social rights for all citizens. However, the implementation of

social welfare initiatives was hampered by the economic and political turmoil of the

interwar period. Compulsory unemployment insurance, for example, was introduced

in 1927 but collapsed under the pressure of mass unemployment in 1928.

Other countries also began to instigate a diverse range of welfare initiatives. In

England, the involvement of non-governmental agencies (including both the philan-

thropic organizations set up by the middle classes and the mutual assistance schemes

set up by workers themselves) remained crucial at the turn of the century. However,

while a mix of state/private agencies continued to administer welfare, state provision

gradually rose to the fore. Britain introduced the ﬁrst compulsory unemployment

insurance scheme in 1911, pensions were administered by the government from their

introduction in 1908, and local authorities were empowered to build and manage

council housing. By 1939, 12 percent of housing stock was owned by the govern-

ment, whereas the comparable ﬁgure for Germany and France was less than 1 percent.

In Italy, although technically under central direction by a totalitarian regime from

1922, the inﬂuence of the Catholic church (especially in the areas of education and

social assistance) ensured a continued mix of state/private welfare here too. France

has traditionally been seen as a laggard in relation to welfare policy, partly perhaps

because the slow pace of urbanization and industrialization made such initiatives less

urgent. While France was a pioneer in the area of family policy, relief to the able-

bodied remained meager until after World War I (and even, some argue, until the

1930s). The situation in the USSR is harder to determine, partly because accurate

data is usually unavailable. However, it is clear that (as in Germany) industrial workers

remained the primary focus of welfare initiatives during the early part of the century.

Accident and sickness insurance was provided in 1912, but was restricted to workers

in key ﬁrms which were important to the government’s plans for industrial

advancement.

Clearly, then, broadly analogous moves towards greater state intervention in the

social welfare of citizens can be traced across Europe. It is somewhat harder, however,

to assess the causes of this process. It might be argued, of course, that the rise of

state welfare was an inevitable and desirable consequence of urbanization and

10 paul lawrence

industrialization. Only the state had the resources to attempt to manage the rapid

change and economic vagaries of industrial society. However, this assessment does

not fully explain why rural, non-industrial nations witnessed similar trends in the

period. Sweden, for example, a primarily agrarian nation with a strong monarchy

until 1917, introduced compulsory universal pensions in 1913. Equally, it might be

contended that industrial labor used its growing political inﬂuence to secure improve-

ments for workers. However, this does not explain why contemporary industrial

nations like the USA and Japan have still not introduced full welfare systems. World

War I could be cited as setting a precedent for increasing state intervention in every-

day life, but many welfare initiatives had begun long before 1914. National politics

also certainly had a role to play in determining the timing of welfare reforms. In

Germany, for example, Bismarck clearly intended his social insurance legislation to

allay socialist unrest. In England, the burst of reforms introduced by the Liberal

government between 1906 and 1914 coincided precisely with the rise of the Labour

Party. It is likely, therefore (as with all historical processes), that a wide range of

factors led to the adoption of welfare policies across Europe in the period 1900–45.

Concern for the plight of the poor may have been one variable but, given that most

state welfare was initially aimed at those in work, was arguably not the most signiﬁ-

cant. Despite this, however, most available evidence suggests that the new welfare

policies were efﬁcacious in ameliorating the lives of the poorest. Welfare, combined

with the economic recovery prompted by the end of World War II, meant that abso-

lute poverty was much less widespread in 1950 than at the start of the century, and

that standards of living throughout Europe had generally improved.

However, this cozy tale of progress is not the whole story. While, as noted above,

many commentators had been moved and shocked by the plight of the poor, and

had argued successfully for state intervention and political solutions, there were other

strands of thought. Welfare itself, for example, was not universally seen as progressive.

Some believed that permanent systems of welfare would only lead to inertia on the

part of the poor. Many agreed with a German commentator writing in Germany in

1914, who debated “whether the extraordinarily extensive welfare system provided

here for the sick and the weak truly beneﬁts the health of the people, and whether

the system of the old Spartans, in which the inferior were banished and abandoned,

would not be more suitable.”

Even those generally amenable to the working class,

such as the French commentator Édouard Cormouls-Houlès (who wrote an 800-

page study of welfare and unemployment – L’Assistance par le travail ), believed that

permanent programs of relief would stiﬂe initiative and institutionalize dependency.

A proportion of those who were opposed to state and political interventions in the

sphere of social welfare turned instead to the collectivist social policies proposed by

science and medicine.

Notions of degeneration in connection with urban life were not new to the twen-

tieth century. A diffuse and nebulous concept, the term “degeneration” was common

in medical and criminological writings, in ﬁction, in scientiﬁc texts, and in works of

philosophy at the turn of the century. Essentially, degeneration was a negation of

conﬁdence in universal progress and of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Far from species

evolving into ever more sophisticated forms over time, the concept implied that some

people were “degenerating” into lower, more animalistic forms of being. While

degeneration could affect the effete aristocrats of the upper classes, it was far more

urbanization, poverty, and crime 11

commonly linked to urban environments and particularly the slum areas where

the very poor lived. The ﬁlthy, squalid existence of the poor was seen to have a det-

rimental effect on their physical, mental, and moral health. Alarmingly, degenerative

changes were seen to be hereditary, thus threatening the very future of developed

nations.

Such ideas remained persistent well into the twentieth century. Taking England

as an example, early twentieth-century concerns were often focused on the degenerate

physical and moral condition of the urban poor. Masterman, writing in the wake of

the shock revelation of the poor health of the urban working class during recruitment

of soldiers for the Boer War, described the characteristic physical type of a town

dweller as “Stunted, narrow-chested, easily wearied; yet voluble, excitable, with little

ballast, stamina, or endurance – seeking stimulus in drink.”

This theme of actual physical difference declined as the century progressed, but

was replaced by a focus on the poor standard of mental health of the lowest segment

of the population, and on the social problems (alcoholism, vagrancy, petty criminality)

seen to be associated with this. The Report of the Women’s Group on Public Welfare,

from as late as 1943, identiﬁed a putative “submerged tenth” – a strata of “problem

families” at the bottom end of the social spectrum – “always at the edge of pauperism

and crime, riddled with mental and physical defects, in and out of the courts for child

neglect.”

Such views of the very poorest remained relatively common across Europe

during the period until after World War II.

Concerns over the moral and physical health of the poor collided with another set

of fears in the interwar period: fears of demographic decline and the reproductive

health of nations. Put simply, while the period 1750–1850 had been one of rapid

population growth, the period 1850–1950 witnessed a shift towards decreasing fertil-

ity. This shift was becoming apparent by the turn of the century, and became a source

of increasing consternation to many middle-class observers. Many believed that the

fertility of the poorer classes had remained robust, while the urban elites were becom-

ing increasingly less likely to have children. Hence, societies were in danger of being

“swamped” by the offspring of the poor. Such concerns were particularly pronounced

in France, where the birth rate was especially low in the interwar period. Dr Henri

Sicard predicted in 1932 that “the increased swamping of superior classes of society

by the lower classes will certainly resort in the complete bankruptcy of the nation in

gifted, capable and energetic individuals.”

Similar concerns were voiced across Europe. In Italy, Mussolini himself sought

to counter those who cited Malthusian claims that declining population sizes would

lead to increased standards of living. In an essay entitled “Numbers as force,” ﬁrst

published in 1928, he branded this contention “absurd.” Italy, and many other

states, introduced policies designed to encourage women to remain in the domestic

sphere and to bear larger families. Government campaigns with slogans such as

“equality in difference” and “motherhood is a social function” were designed to

encourage this.

Ideas about degeneration and the hereditary transmission of problematic social

traits, and fears over the reproductive health of nations, all primarily focused on the

poorest elements of society as weak, unproductive, and sick. In many nations eugenics

societies were formed which aimed to tackle the problem not by welfarist policies,

but via medical and scientiﬁc interventions, including sterilization projects and

12 paul lawrence

selective breeding plans. In many ways, the eugenics movement is most closely associ-

ated with Germany under National Socialism. Certainly it was here during the 1930s

that it assumed its most extreme form, but it had a long genesis. At the same time

as the welfare legislation of the 1880s was being introduced, a vociferous lobby

argued that the biological laws of natural selection should be allowed to function

freely. Between 1890 and 1930 the inﬂuence of those advocating biological purity –

Rassenhygiene – grew. The defeat of World War I arguably provided a turning point,

with eugenics henceforth seen as a promising means via which to reinvigorate the

German people, and the economic crisis of 1929 bolstered the view that the existing

welfare apparatus was unsustainable. The Nazis introduced a heightened focus on

race as an issue in eugenics, but also in many ways merely enforced, in extremis, pre-

existing ideas.

Given some of the horriﬁc eugenic programs implemented in Nazi Germany

(including the systematic murder of up to 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled

people) it would be reassuring to believe that eugenic theories were largely conﬁned

to Germany. This was not the case. Eugenics societies were set up in many countries.

England’s, for example, was instigated in 1907, just two years after that of Germany.

It has often been argued that British eugenics focused more on issues of “class” than

on “issues” of race, as in the German case. However, such distinctions have recently

been called into question as primarily a postwar claim. Moreover, even after World

War II, liberal intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley, while deploring the Nazi practices,

still advocated “humane” and “scientiﬁc” ways of genetically improving the human

race. In France, too, a eugenics society was set up in 1912, which involved itself

heavily in natalist policies. However, there was a harder edge to French eugenics,

too, which has often been ignored. A key ﬁgure, Charles Richet, for example, argued

that “no sentimental ranting will make me acknowledge the right of unfortunate

individuals to bring into the world children as unfortunate as they: epileptics,

alcoholics, degenerates, neurasthenics, criminals.”

In Scandinavia a focus on mental

health issues led to sterilization legislation in Denmark (1929) and in Sweden (1934

and 1941). In Finland, 2,000 people were compulsorily sterilized between 1935

and 1955.

It can be seen, therefore, that social conditions and public responses to social

problems were very mixed in Europe during the period 1900–45. While welfare ini-

tiatives undoubtedly ameliorated living conditions for many of the working class,

concerns over city life, persistent poverty, and demographic decline all coalesced

in an enduring image of a degenerate, feckless “underclass.” This non-productive

residuum, and indeed the urban poor in general, were routinely linked to crime

in this period, and developments in the area of crime and policing form the subject

of the next section.

Crime and Policing

Even the most cursory glance at trends in crime and policing during the ﬁrst half of

the twentieth century shows the extent to which they were intertwined with the

themes of urban life and poverty discussed above. In the ﬁrst instance, crime and

criminality remained closely associated with the urban environment by both popular

and academic writers. In the academic milieu, the distinction made by Weber,

urbanization, poverty, and crime 13

Durkheim, and others between rural and urban life has already been noted. It

remained common to associate the transformation from one to the other with “mod-

ernization” – the rise of modern, industrial societies. However, during the interwar

period a number of sociologists sought to highlight speciﬁc links between facets of

this modernization process and rising levels of criminality. Robert Parks, for example,

working within the School of Urban Studies at the University of Chicago, noted that

certain sections of cities were characterized by high levels of residential mobility, by

poverty, and by a dearth of community organizations. This led, he posited, to a lack

of “social organization.” The same areas displayed high rates of prostitution, drunk-

enness, and crime. Hence, he postulated that a lack of “social organization” – typically

absent in periods or areas of rapid urbanization – could be causally linked to rising

levels of criminality. In other words, the breakdown of stable, face-to-face rural com-

munities and the rise of urban environments characterized by high mobility and

anonymity were seen to lead inevitably to higher rates of crime.

Parks’ work built on Durkheim’s concept of “anomie” – the breakdown of rules

and norms of expected behavior during periods of social change. Another sociologist,

Robert Merton, added to this work in 1938 with a more subtle analysis of anomie

as the disjunction between goals valued by society and the ability of individuals to

attain these goals. It was the mismatch between what individuals were socialized to

desire and what they were actually able to attain that led to crime. Thus it was not

necessarily the dislocation of social values produced by rapid urbanization which

made cities centers of crime, but rather the juxtapositioning of poverty and wealth

in a society which valued material prosperity and attributed status accordingly. While

many of the theorists contributing to this debate worked in the United States, it was

highly inﬂuential in perceptions of cities and crime in Europe during the interwar

period and remained so for many years.

However, while the causal chain of “rapid social change–poor urban living condi-

tions–the breakdown of social norms and restraints–crime” might seem logical

enough, many historians have recently sought empirically to challenge the assump-

tions implicit in this type of theory. Howard Zehr, for example, studying France and

Germany, claimed that, rather than a rise in crime overall, modernization and urban-

ization caused a shift from violent crimes like assault to acquisitive crimes such as

theft. Eric Johnson, however, has looked at Germany in detail and ﬁnds the reverse

– that property offenses were declining in some urban areas during industrialization

while violent crime was rising. No clear connection between patterns of urbanization

and crime trends emerges. Moreover, many of the debates over urbanization and

crime revolve around methodological issues. The nature of the data used to arrive at

conclusions about crime trends is necessarily problematic (in that it only measures

recorded crime rather than actual crime) and hence it is hard to make comprehensive

statements about cities and crime. Sufﬁce it to say, however, that enough historical

evidence has now been presented to undermine the clumsy structural theories of the

interwar period, and the notion that the urban setting necessarily leads to criminality.

Indeed, recent research has challenged the idea that it is possible even to make a clear

rural/urban distinction, arguing that the boundaries between city and countryside

are much more ambiguous than previously assumed.

However, to return to the period 1900–45, the signiﬁcant point is that, regardless

of sociological debates, a “commonsense” connection was often made between cities

14 paul lawrence

and crime. What is also often apparent is that criminality was not located uniformly

throughout the city. Crime was closely associated with the poorer areas of the urban

environment, and criminality was usually located in the lowest social strata. At the

start of the twentieth century, the criminal justice systems of Europe were thus over-

whelmingly focused downwards. Partly, of course, this was due to a lack of recogni-

tion of the involvement of the middle and upper classes in criminal activities. The

term “white collar crime” was only coined in the pioneering work of Edwin Sutherland

in 1939, and the insurance and share frauds perpetrated by ofﬁce workers and

company directors were customarily marginalized in contemporary discussions of

criminality. Despite the fact that a single case of insider dealing (a form of share fraud)

could have a greater economic impact than thousands of petty burglaries and thefts,

the police were often ill-prepared for the investigation of such complex crimes. It

was not until World War II, with the advent of rationing and a black market (especially

in gasoline or petrol), that the middle classes came into regular contact with the

police at all.

Thus, criminality was primarily seen to reside among the lower classes, and there

were a number of ways in which this connection was made. In the ﬁrst instance,

concerns over the degenerating effects of slum living on the poor often overlapped

with debates about crime. Eugenics movements routinely associated race (or rather,

foreigners) with crime, but also considered issues of class and social status as signiﬁ-

cant. In fascist Italy, for example, youngsters from deprived backgrounds were seen

as inherently predisposed to criminality, and hence the fascist police often used their

increased powers to put “suspicious” youths into custody. Even among those who

did not perceive explicit physical or hereditary links between the poor and criminality,

distaste for the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in which many of the poorest

still lived meant that the morality of the poor was tainted by association. Richard

Jervis, a senior police ofﬁcer in the north of England, believed that “slums, drunken-

ness and crime are inseparable. How can it be otherwise?”

Neither of these mecha-

nisms for associating the poor with crime (physical and moral deﬁciency) was new to

the twentieth century, but they proved persistent. However, it might be argued that

the emergent academic discipline of criminology also served to perpetuate the asso-

ciation of the poor and criminality.

The early twentieth century was marked in many European nations by an expand-

ing franchise, by a growth in the power of organized labor, and by a better-educated

and more vocal working class. Hence, it became increasingly less easy for social elites

to adopt openly repressive policies towards the poor (as had arguably been the case

in the nineteenth century). However, it might be contended that the new pseudosci-

ence of criminology helped to enable the continued regulation of the poor. Because

early criminology sought the identiﬁcation of a new type of person – the criminal (as

separate from any criminal acts which he/she might commit) – it provided an expla-

nation (and perhaps a justiﬁcation) for a criminal justice system targeted on a speciﬁc

section of the population. By viewing crime as “an inevitable outcome of a particular

kind of character or constitution,” criminology provided an explanation not only for

the existence of a class which was constantly criminalized, but also for the very exis-

tence of an impoverished sector of the population.

By shifting attention away from

speciﬁc criminal acts (which might be explained by environmental factors such as

poverty) to criminals themselves, and by claiming a competence beyond the legal

urbanization, poverty, and crime 15

sphere (for example by analyzing vagrants, the “feeble-minded,” and inebriates as

potential criminals), criminology was thus conceivably another mechanism which

enabled the continued association of the poor with crime.

While this particular reading of the emergence of criminology is by no means

uncontroversial, it is certainly likely that the links perceived between criminality and

the poor during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century may have had a role to play

in the maintenance of power and inﬂuence within societies. However, it does seem

apparent that there was a gradual shift during the period to 1945 from an undiffer-

entiated view of the mass of the urban poor as suspect and potentially criminal to a

perception that criminality was located within a few, closely deﬁned groups of the

poor. While the bulk of the working class was no longer viewed with suspicion by

elites (as at the end of the nineteenth century), very visible groups such as gypsies

and vagrants were increasingly targeted. The distinctive dress and lifestyle of traveling

peoples such as Sinti and Roma, for example, often came to appear increasingly

incongruous in European societies typiﬁed by urban milieux and ﬁxed working pat-

terns. Gypsies were thus seen by many as inherently criminal, and increasing efforts

were made to observe and regulate their movements. In France, an ofﬁcial circular

noted that gypsy caravans were “all too often composed of criminals” and from 1912

all such individuals had to carry a carnet anthropometrique – an identity card giving

details of their family tree. Similar initiatives can be traced through much of Europe.

Thus, while perceptions of the link between the poor and crime changed signiﬁcantly

in the ﬁrst half of the century (and were arguably eroded to some extent) cities,

poverty, and crime remained conceptually linked up until World War II.

Any discussion of perceptions and patterns of crime, however, requires at least a

brief mention of the mechanism of enforcement: the police. If the poor and their

environs were seen to harbor criminality, what did this mean in terms of policing?

Developments in policing during this period were diverse and are hard to characterize

succinctly. Certainly, there were clear moves towards the police we know today. For

example, professional training was developed. At the start of the period, training for

most ofﬁcers consisted of a few weeks at best, or an afternoon with a handbook at

worst. By the end, training academies and professional development were the norm.

Equally, the period was also marked by the growing use of technology by the police.

Most forces gradually adopted motorized transport and progressive police chiefs

(such as Dr Wilhelm Abegg, of the Police Section of the Prussian Interior Ministry)

urged the deployment of forensic science. There were also early experiments with

radio technology, although the sets were initially so cumbersome that an ofﬁcer was

required to strap the apparatus to his back. In the liberal democracies, at least, declin-

ing statistics for attacks on police ofﬁcers appear indicative of growing public accep-

tance of the functions they performed. However, there is clearly another side to this

story. As touched upon above, most police forces were closely involved in the regula-

tion of the poor. While some were sympathetic, many ofﬁcers displayed harsh atti-

tudes towards vagrants, gypsies, and others on the margins of society. Also, more

obviously, in day-to-day beat policing most ofﬁcers still spent much of their time

traversing the poorer areas of towns and cities. Given this, it is likely that perceptions

of the involvement of the poor with crime became self-fulﬁlling. The greater scrutiny

given to slum areas may have meant that more crime was detected there in propor-

tion to other areas, thus reinforcing public perceptions and leading the police to

16 paul lawrence

concentrate even more of their efforts there, which in turn led again to yet more

crime being detected.

Police forces across Europe were also routinely involved in the often violent sup-

pression of political and economic protest during the period. Hunger Marchers in

London in 1932, unemployed demonstrators at the Paris Bourse in 1903, socialist

protestors in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 1910 – all were on the receiving end of police

brutality. While there was arguably an increasing divergence between the police in

totalitarian regimes and in liberal democracies during the interwar period, even here

ﬁrm distinctions are hard to draw. World War II certainly provided ample evidence

of police heroism in the service of their citizenry. In Italy, for example, the carabiniere

Salvo D’Aquisto gave his life in place of 22 civilian hostages who were scheduled to

be shot in German reprisals on September 23, 1943. In Denmark just fewer than

2,000 police ofﬁcers were transported to Buchenwald in September 1944 for non-

compliance with the occupying Nazi authorities. Equally, however, forces in France

and Holland have been judged at least partially complicit in the implementation of

the genocide programs of National Socialism. Clearly, then, while the police were in

many ways instrumental in the social control of the poor and working class, simplistic

generalizations of their duties and functions must be avoided.

Conclusion

Looking back on Europe during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, it is easy to

discern much that seems familiar. Major cities were assuming the topographical forms

they still bear today; the state was beginning to adopt greater responsibility for the

social welfare of its citizens; the police were increasingly being seen less as an unwar-

ranted intrusion into daily life and more as the arbiters of security for all. However,

large cities were still new enough to warrant debate over their merits during the

period, there were wide discrepancies across Europe in the amelioration of poverty,

and the police were closely involved at times in the repression of the poor and the

working class. Thus, while it might seem relatively easy to construct an image of

this period as intrinsically “modern,” a nuanced approach to the intertwined themes

of urbanization, poverty, and crime reveals signiﬁcant incongruities alongside the

familiar.

NOTES

1 Cited in Andrew Lees,

Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought,

1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 207.

2 Peter Hall,

The World Cities (London: Wiedenfeld, 1966), p. 18.

3 Patrick Geddes,

Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and

to the Study of Civics (London: Ernest Benn, 1915), p. 220.

4 Cited in Anthony Sutcliffe, ed.,

Metropolis 1890–1940 (London: Mansell, 1984), p.

266.

5 Cited in Joachim Schlör,

Nights in the Big City (London: Reaktion, 1998), p. 66.

6 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) in

The Sociology of Georg

Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff, ed. (Glencoe IL: Free Press, 1950), p. 410.

urbanization, poverty, and crime 17

7 Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 332.

8 Lees,

Cities Perceived, p. 208.

9 C. F. G. Masterman,

The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life

in England (London: Fisher Unwin, 1901), p. 17.

10 Lees,

Cities Perceived, p. 277.

11 J. Fleming, “Night Life in the Great German Cities” (1914), cited in Schlör,

Nights, p.

207.

12 Masterman,

Heart of the Empire, p. 8

13 Cited in John Macnicol, “In Pursuit of the Underclass,”

Journal of Social Policy 16/3

(1987): 297.

14 William H. Schnieder,

Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in

Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 113.

15 Ibid, p. 181.

16 Cited in Paul Lawrence, “Images of Poverty and Crime: Police Memoirs in England and

France,” Crime, History and Societies 3/1 (2000): 70.

17 For this argument, see David Garland, “The Criminal and his Science,”

British Journal

of Criminology 25/2 (1985): 131.

18 See Annemarie Cottaar and Wim Willems, “Justice or Injustice? A Survey of Government

Policy towards Gypsies and Caravan Dwellers in Western Europe in the 19th and 20th

Centuries,” Immigrants and Minorities 11/1 (1992): 42–66.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875–

1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). An interesting conceptual analysis

of the rise of welfare states.

Clive Emsley, Eric Johnson, and Pieter Spierenburg, Social Control in Europe 1800–2000

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). Part two of this volume contains a range

of essays addressing the theme of policing during the period 1900–60.

V. A. C. Gatrell, “Crime, Authority and the Policeman-State,” in The Cambridge Social History

of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 3, F. M. L. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990). An elegant piece which argues for an interpretation of the English police as a

mechanism enabling elite control of the working class. Applicable more widely.

Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994 (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). A comprehensive overview of the rise of urban

Europe.

Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). An excellent guide to the multifarious

opinions generated by urbanization.

Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, 1900–1945: Modernity and Crisis

(London: Routledge, 2001). A useful reader containing a range of primary and secondary

source extracts pertaining to German cities during the period 1900–45.

Gerard Oram, ed., Conﬂict and Legality: Policing Mid-Twentieth Century Europe (London:

Francis Boutle, 2003). A collection of essays addressing the nature of policing in a range of

countries.

Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989). An extremely readable discussion of the rise of notions of

degeneration.