Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750 (review)

In his most recent book Clive Emsley tests the generally accepted, and somewhat Whiggish, assumption that English society became significantly less violent in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Linking the study of crime with other fields of scholarship—including work on the interrelated histories of gender, domesticity, sport, and the crowd—Emsley maintains that while certain types of violence may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century (due to both state intervention and cultural shifts), interpersonal conflicts still often ended tragically. Throughout this period of dramatic change, Emsley helpfully reminds readers, the state willingly sanctioned forms of violence such as death by hanging as prescriptive devices and general deterrents to transgressive behavior.

A prominent historian of British crime, Emsley boldly challenges methodological orthodoxy in this book. He questions, for example, the general tendency of scholars to measure the violence of societies by citing murder statistics alone. To broaden the parameters of the field, he explores violence in a variety of different social spaces including city streets, the home, immigrant neighborhoods, and football pitches and boxing rings. Like Martin Wiener in his recent Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (2004), Emsley has produced a history of crime and violence that questions how cultural ideals about masculine self-restraint, control, chivalry, and notions of fairness informed legal decisions and operated, more generally, as guiding principles in British courts of law.

Emsley is not content, however, simply to tackle these significant issues. He also uses the history of crime and violence as a lens through which to study the development of English ethnicity and national identities. His consideration of the relationship between Englishness and violence allows him to chronicle how foreigners and foreign cultures, at least until the middle decades of the twentieth century, were routinely cast in nationalist narratives as violent and unruly others, discursive foils to the liberty-loving, freeborn English man and woman. In exploring the intricacies of violent behavior in the modern period, Emsley is also careful not to replicate the assumptions of Victorian elites (and others), who tended to attribute the most egregious acts to a chronically rough, slum-dwelling, and shadowy underclass. To counter these views, he points to incidents of domestic violence in "respectable" working-class and professional middle-class households, occasionally violent and confrontational Cambridge student "rags," and duels between aggrieved members of the upper classes.

Emsley relies on a broad range of sources in dissecting this culture of English violence. Drawing on the annual Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, police files in the National Archives, and press accounts from The Times, the Daily Herald, and the Daily Sketch, he begins each of his chapters with an attention-grabbing anecdote before proceeding with incisive analyses of topics ranging from the role that violence has played in political protests and industrial disputes to the mythic status of the English "bobby," ultimately reconstructing a surprisingly variegated portrait of interpersonal assault and conflict in both public and private social spaces.

In each of his case studies, Emsley problematizes many of the narratives constructed by historians of crime and violence. In a chapter on sport, for example, he illustrates how the introduction of the Queensberry rules to boxing and the creation of the Football Association (both of which attempted to encode hegemonic, nineteenth-century ideals of gentlemanly restraint and fair play) never eliminated rowdy and violent outbursts at British athletic events. In another chapter on foreigners, Emsley tests nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century assumptions about the inherently violent natures of Irish, Chinese, and Jewish immigrants. While acknowledging that violence did indeed occur within certain ethnic communities (citing the deportation of London's most notorious drug dealer, Brilliant Chang, in 1925), he is careful to note that the English glossed over the violence of empire and justified anti-immigrant riots as acts of extreme provocation.

Emsley's observations about the occasionally violent nature of English politics are...