Chapter 8: Historical Criminology as a Field for Interdisciplinary Research and Trans-disciplinary Discourse

Criminology has long enjoyed a reputation as a ‘rendezvous discipline’ – a scholarly field where a range of subject areas naturally overlap. Criminological research draws on diverse sources and methods, including from forensics and biology in the natural sciences, to social sciences such as geography and legal studies. It is curious, then, that a true interdisciplinary convergence of history and criminology has progressed slowly, and trans-disciplinary discourse remains limited. This tension is exposed at the clear point of convergence – historical criminology – and it has thus far prevented formation of well-demarcated methodological parameters for scholars from different disciplines working in essentially the same space. Instead, there is currently a spectrum of different approaches falling under a loose label of ‘historical criminology’, which itself remains contested. This spectrum can be conceived extending from traditional historical research at one end to sociological criminology at the other. Scholars have tended to position their research at arbitrary points across this continuum and then assert that it is ‘historical criminology’, but the lack of specificity has meant confusion. Some scholars, for instance, lean towards using archival research to inform contemporary policy debates, while others employ criminological theory to explain patterns and trends in the histories of crime. This ambiguity has allowed each researcher the freedom to take full advantage of this trans-disciplinary flexibility and shape historical criminology to his or her preferred approach. The reciprocal cost of this freedom is that it may cause confusion for some readers because the research appears to fall outside the bounds of normal and accepted disciplinary practices.