A new book by Ian Hernon examines pivotal ‘crimes’ in world history and the long-term effect they had on the societies in which they were committed.
At its simplest, history could not have happened without crime. The structures of competing societies were kick-started by the need to impose rules and common standards. Such societies became wealthy through trade with others, and trade also needed rules which could be observed – and then broken – to someone’s advantage. Wars of invasion, of cultural or religious domination, even those of survival, have been launched by actions which broke someone’s law. Both William the Conqueror and Harold Hardrada had at least an equal claim to the throne of 11th century England. Did that make their invasions, one failed, the other successful, more legal or less? Who was the criminal, regardless of the victor’s advantage in writing history?
Throughout the Middle Ages, the concept of a war crime, as we know it, was obscure at best, and laughable at worse. Genocide, the despoliation of land, the slaughter of women and children, evinced little more than a shrug. But in the ‘enlightened era’ which began what we now regard as the modern age, the rules or war and law were codified to create, in theory, common standards of behaviour and decency. At first they benefited only the powerful, the rich and the privileged. Excluded were the poor, the landless, and those whose race or religion reduced them to mere ciphers. The rise of empires based on technology and trade, rather than mere subjugation, led to further confusion about what constituted criminal behaviour, while the splintering of faiths and the growing movement of reason against religion further muddied the waters. From those murky waters, despite millennia of codes and laws to restrain criminality, emerged the Holocaust. Every tinderbox needs a spark, every gun a bullet, to provide the initial impetus for cataclysmic events.
One criteria I used in choosing pivotal moments was that an event based on a single crime had wider implications than was realised at the time. Another is that some events were regarded as society-changing but, with hindsight, have not proved as significant as previously thought. The Suffragettes, for example, engaged in acts – including bombings and kidnap attempts – which would now be regarded as terrorism. But they achieved the vote despite such behaviour, not because of it. Female labour was needed during the Great War and the arguments for universal adult suffrage had by war’s close been won by both men and women. I have also chosen certain crimes to stand for many others of the specific era. The slaughter in East St Louise is a good example of that, as part of the epic struggle for civil rights and racial equality in America.
History is made up of accidents, of people in the wrong place at the right time, and vice versa. Together, isolated incidents make up a great sweep of events. In this book I aimed to prove that without the weedy teenager Princep’s stroke of ‘luck’ at Sarajevo there would not have been a Great War, for example. But his action triggered a series of events which led inexorably to a global conflict which changed the world forever, leading eventually to both Hitler and Stalin, and the rise of America as a superpower. Without Princep the drift to war may well have continued as an Imperial Germany sought dominance and the military machines on all sides became unstoppable. But someone, or something, else would have provided the trigger and the consequences of that may well have been different. Similarly, for reasons connected to the reality of war and the fear of revolution, if the Amritsar massacre had not happened the British Empire may well have crumbled under its own weight and heavy expectations, but the path to Indian independence, the jewel in the imperial crown, may have taken a different course.
It is hard to believe that without the Tolpuddle Martyrs the right of workers to unite in trade unions could have been successfully dodged by successive governments – the tide was too strong. Similarly, after both the French and American revolutions, the tide towards universal (male) suffrage was irresistible. But from the 18th century through the Luddites and the Peterloo Massacre it was clear that conservative administrations understood the power of riots and mass vandalism far better than the power of words and reasoned argument. Crime produced the fear of revolution which led first to draconian measures, such as the transportation of the Tolpuddle men, and eventually to governmental retreat and genuine reform. But it was a long and bloody road.
Throughout relatively modern history crimes have been forced on people because of unjust laws. This is not to justify law-breaking against the person, but to acknowledge that law-breaking against the state or institutions has been a necessary tool in the fight against repression. That has proved equally true, however, in both the struggles for freedom and democracy and for Fascism and the totalitarian state. Crime, and by that I mean mainly violence, does change societies, just as war creates nations and redraws the map of the world.
On more mundane social fronts, crime has also had a strong influence, although one which is harder to pinpoint. Large-scale flouting of sanitary laws did, albeit for misguided reasons, help the great Bazalgette create a sewer system which was copied across the world and which saved countless lives. Individual crimes, from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping to the Ruth Ellis murder have, through public reaction, changed the laws of the land. And the portrayal of others, including the Brink’s heist and the Great Train Robbery, have influenced the way the mass media shapes public opinions and attitudes.
A United Nations session in Vienna in April 2009 discussed “fault lines, turning points and defining moments” in a debate on crime prevention and criminal justice. They included the financial crisis which broke in 2008, the resulting economic catastrophe, climate change, energy and food shortages, and terrorism. It was accepted that criminals have posed a threat to people, property and activity since time immemorial. For centuries the concern was more about conventional crime, namely offences against individuals and assets, in the awful forms of murder, fraud and theft. These uncivil behaviours persist. Yet, in the past quarter century, the nature of crime has changed. It has become organized and transnational; it has reached macro-economic dimensions; it has turned into a global business operating in collusion with legitimate activity and a widespread threat to the security of cities, states, even entire regions.
As one UN speaker noted: “The response has been robust, but not effective. Security forces with war-grade weapons are patrolling cities and fighting gangs. Armies are being mobilized to fight drug traffickers. Navies are chasing pirates and smugglers. Jet fighters and satellites are being deployed to stop drug trafficking. The UN Security Council has dealt with the issue of national security threatened by organized crime in a number of countries. Around the world organized crime has changed strategic doctrines and threat assessments. It is causing alarm among citizens, politicians and media alike.”
There is a new lexicon of crime which would have bewildered the citizens of the first half of the 20th century. Although many existed then under the radar and often under different names – drug smuggling, people-smuggling, money-laundering, illegal gambling, fraud, tax-dodging, the flouting of prohibitions, most notably The Prohibition, which turned splintered gangsterism into the Mafia – but others did not. Perhaps the greatest threat comes from cyber-crime which can cripple or destroy economies and defence systems. The Web has been turned into a weapon of mass destruction, threatening vital infrastructure and state security. Ernesto Savona, director of the organisation Transcrime wrote: “Public attention to organized crime is mostly limited to homicides and headline arrests of kingpins. Online, however, silent organized crime has infiltrated legitimate economies without the violent muscling that the media would cover. The global annual cost of cybercrime is estimated at US$ 388 billion.”
The economic crisis no doubt increases the threat of crime. Institutional weakness in fragile states is being exploited by criminal groups that can count on corruption and impunity. Worldwide, tight household budgets are calling for increased demand (and therefore supply) for cheap goods, including those pirated and counterfeited, or those produced by forced labour. The return of migrants and the reduction of foreign remittances are encouraging the smuggling of, and even trafficking in persons. A growing number of hungry, angry and unemployed youth are now susceptible to joining gangs, crime syndicates, or terrorist groups. The financial sector, facing widespread illiquidity and insolvency, is being penetrated by cash-rich organized crime groups: money-laundering has never been easier, nor on such a grand scale.”
Organized crime threatens human security and hinders economic and political stability at an enormous cost to development. There is intricate cooperation between the licit and illicit economies. Drug trafficking wreaks havoc in fragile states and corrodes institutions in ‘consumer’ countries. Such violence calls into question the effectiveness of the ‘war on drugs’ policies that target the supply, rather than the demand for illicit drugs. Links between organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism are surfacing in Latin America, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa and . Drug control is coming under pressure, not because of the threat drugs pose to health, but because of our failure to deal with a criminal black market that has profited from the drugs trade. Efforts to fight organized crime have been disjointed. The rules of behaviour are not in place, and the mechanisms for monitoring compliance are incomplete.
It is not all doom and gloom, however. Crime rates in the developed world have fallen over the last 20 years and comparative statistics for the G7 nations show that many places are now safer to live than in the halcyon days of the 1950s. And despite the economic crisis creating rampant unemployment and social breakdown in some western cities, robberies, car thefts and even murders have fallen substantially. In some cases, such crime has practically vanished. While violent crime has fallen by 32 per cent since 1990 across the U.S. as a whole, in the biggest cities the figure is 64 per cent. The fall began around 1991 in the US, and is mirrored in Britain, France and other EU countries.
The reasons are complex and sometimes contradictory. Some experts say more intensive policing along with scientific advances like DNA testing have contributed to falling levels of crime. A majority of crimes are committed by male offenders aged 16-24 and the post-WWII baby boom resulted in a ballooning in that age bracket two decades later. That impact is in the past; now the population of western countries is ageing.
University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt cites the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s with cutting the US crime rate. Mr Levitt argues that there were fewer children growing up in poverty and therefore fewer more likely to turn to crime. Others have argued that the expanding prison population is evidence of fewer criminals on the streets – hence lower crime rates. But other countries have reduced the number of prisoners behind bars and still seen a fall in crime.
A bigger police presence in many cities has been credited with helping to rid streets of crime, along with technology and tactics. Social changes also mean young people in wealthy countries are likely to stay living with their parents and remain in higher education, which results in a generally better behaved generation. Britain’s 18 to 24-year-olds are far less likely to drink or to have sampled an illegal drug than those a decade earlier .
While the threat of close-up-and-personal crime is receding in the developed countries, the actuality of large-scale criminal operations, the blurring of lines between crime, terrorism and the state, and the nature of cyber-crime and its offshoots, remain the dominant factor in global politics and social progress. Crime is continuing to make the modern world.
Crimes That Made The Modern World by Ian Hernon, is published by Red Axe. For Tribune special offer, see below