It was exciting to attend the British Crime History conference which was held in Manchester, at the Friends Meeting House, on 5-6 September.
This was a great opportunity to meet other teams currently working on British social and cultural history project, using the latest methodologies and approaches, as well as traditional story telling.
There were particular intersections with the Mariners project in papers addressing crime and mobilities, crime and race, and gendered approaches to the past. The Clive Emsley award went to Libby Collard for her remakale paper on mapping the black presence in 18th century criminal justice records, using the mighty Old Bailey online archive to track black witnesses and other participants in the criminal justice process. She concluded that racial demarkation of the city was much less than might be supposed from qualitative sources.
There were also fascinating papers on issues of gender and youth, infanticide, institutionalised girls, sex workers and prisons, and the significance of space and locality for crimes as varied as motor bandits, and timber workers in rural Scotland. Religious themes were pursued by Alexandra Cox and Stuart Sweeney who looked at the religious lives of the those transported to the Americas from the UK and Ireland in the era before convict transportation to Australia.
One highlight for me was the final keynote paper by Hallie Rubenhold, who gave us a prelude to her new book on the notorious Cribben murder case.
My head is spinning with new ideas for approaches by the Mariners team to religion, race and empire in the merchant marine, a world that often intersected with that of criminal justice.