Policing the Factory

Reviews / Votes

Grounded in extensive archival research, Policing the Factory is the most detailed and nuanced study of workplace theft in the nineteenth century undertaken to date... Policing the Factory is at its strongest in presenting a wealth of archival material that carves a detailed and illuminating historical narrative, touching on important questions of capitalist development, labour discipline and socio-legal history... In its attention to ambiguity, acknowledgment of the partiality of the archival record, and questioning of simplistic historical models of the development of law, social control and capitalism it is an outstanding study. It demonstrates just how important the study of the local is in contributing to sophisticated and nuanced understandings in criminal justice history. As such it is a study that should of great interest to criminologists, social-legal scholars and historians concerned with temporal perspectives in criminal justice. -- Dean Wilson, Plymouth University * Law, Crime and History * The issues of workplace appropriation, private policing, and the use of the law as an instrument of social control have received a considerable amount of attention in the last few decades, and in this volume Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox provide a useful summary of several ongoing debates and make useful contributions to the growing body of literature on these subjects ... Godfrey and Cox make effective use of the relevant secondary literature and have been exhaustive in their examination. -- Michael Weaver, University of Texas-Pan American * The Historian *