How to Write the History of Organised Crime

For an anti-social activity, organized crime has brought great pleasure. From the American television series The Wire, back at least as far as Dickens's Oliver Twist, audiences have been captivated by criminal gangs, as Daniel Pick (Birkbeck) observed at this workshop. Yet historians, usually so alert to new fields of research, especially those which may have mass appeal, have largely passed over the gangsters. The workshop, organized by Christian Goeschel, Julia Laite and Hilary Sapire (Birkbeck), and funded by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the Economic History Society, aimed to address the potential and problems in histories of organized crime.

The first panel, chaired by Sunil Amrith (Birkbeck), examined particular cases. John Dickie (UCL) considered the parallel histories of three Italian criminal groups, the mafia, camorra and 'ndrangheta, arguing that they shared similar cultures and vocabularies as 'honoured societies', and similar origins in mid nineteenth-century prisons. Dickie suggested that the mafia has had a remarkably unchanging history over 150 years, characterized by their invisibility and infiltration of the state. The camorra, in contrast, have been hampered by their members' penchant for ostentatious dress, while the 'ndrangheta learned over time to operate more discreetly.

Christian Goeschel set out to attack Nazi myths about Weimar-era crime and the Nazi government's success in combating it. He discussed the honour codes of ex-convict mob organizations, arguing that they were cultural and social, as well as functional, groups. Goeschel portrayed them as operating continuously during the Nazi period, although conceding that many members were killed by repression. He adumbrated the epistemological problems in these histories, not least a selective programme under the Nazis to archive police files that were seen as documenting the degeneracy of the Weimar era.

Julia Laite discussed the relationship between organized crime and prostitution in twentieth-century London, suggesting connections with licit commerce and social and cultural life. She stressed the difficulty of writing the history of organized crime given the role of moral panics in the press and of changing legislation in constructing discourses which frame the archival record. Laite argued convincingly for the need to reconstruct the agency of prostitutes, who have often been portrayed as victims of organized crime rather than as agents making choices, albeit with limited options.

The issue of organized criminals' self-representation was developed in a discussion that stressed the interaction between public representations of criminal organizations and their actual activities. John Dickie suggested that there was a 'feedback loop' between public representation and reality.

The second panel, chaired by Hilary Sapire, developed many of these themes. Paul Lawrence (Open University) pointed out that the term 'organized crime' was only used sporadically in Britain before the 1980s. There were British criminals with elements of an 'organization' before this, such as a systematic operation to steal car parts from the Dagenham Ford works and assemble them into complete cars. However, those involved were not career criminals with the hierarchy and long-term structure associated with organized crime proper. He argued for the growth of a new kind of truly organized crime during the 1970s, characterized by networks involving British populations in Spain, and associated particularly with drug smuggling.

John Sidel (LSE) examined the role of the state in organized crime across South East Asia. He suggested that organized crime was not simply the consequence of weak states, but arose via complex forms of interaction with the state, including through the operation of markets and property rights. Representations of criminal groups did not arise organically from society but were consciously constructed, often by the state, to define working-class groups as criminals and a threat to order.

Daniel Pick (Birkbeck) emphasized the potential of exploring gender in the historicization of organized crime, and the ambiguous role of the state as well as the ways in which it can collude with criminals without necessarily being corroded by them. He also advocated study not only of the reasons for the growth of such activity, but also of the historical circumstances in which...