BRITISH CRIMINOLOGY BEFORE 1935

"Criminology", as a professional academic discipline, did not exist in Britain before 1935, and was established only gradually and precariously thereafter. So whatever this essay is about, it cannot be about criminology in quite the sense we think of it today. Instead, it examines some of the lines of emergence of that discipline, and in particular, the theoretical and insti-tutional processes which gave rise to a scientific criminology in Britain. Given the short space available to me here, this can be no more than a very selective account, highlighting a few important currents, while ignoring much that would be essential to a proper genealogy of the subject. My cen-tral concern will be to show that the development of British criminology can best be understood by concentrating less upon the spread of ideas from abroad and more upon the ways in which penal and social institutions acted as a practical surface of emergence for this kind of knowledge. What is presented is not an abstracted history of ideas, but instead an attempt to situate criminology within the institutional practices and power relations which have formed its immediate context and foundation. It should be possible, in turn, to situate this history of institutional pragmatics within a wider field of social forces—see Garland (1985)—but no such analysis is attempted here. By convention, modern scientific criminology1 is said to have begun with • Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology, Univerjity of Edinburgh and currently Visiting Professor a