International Journal on Criminology Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 3

International Journal on Criminology - Volume 2 Issue 1 - Spring 2014
The Global Criminality Age
Alain Bauer
To conceptualize twenty-first century
crime, we need to start by setting it
in a wider framework, a longer time
perspective. Crime has considerable historic
depth. The phenomenon is anything
but new and not just a matter for large
cities or national governments. Identity
theft, illegal immigration, drug trafficking,
terrorist attacks, human trafficking, and
financial crime are developing between
continents and hemispheres. Yet, there is
too often a tendency to overestimate just
how new these world problems are. Without
a historic perspective, it is difficult to
judge how the problems are changing.
The generation living just before
World War I was the first to have to tackle
crime on an international scale. Toward
the end of the nineteenth century, governments,
commentators, and opinion-makers
had begun to ponder over the shrinking
world ushered in by technologies and
their cultural, social, and economic impact
on criminal behavior. They noticed that
alarming changes in ordinary criminal
behavior were occurring, alongside the
emergence of new forms of crime, such as
anarchism, white slavery, and imported
criminality. A new breed of experts that
went by the name criminologists used the
language of science in attempt to obtain
a planetary vision of the phenomenon.
Initial Globalization of Crime
In a remarkable, little book that
passed largely unnoticed, the English Professor,
Paul Knepper, describes the emergence
of international crime 1 in imperial
Great Britain in the years between 1881 and
1914. He explores how the international dimension
is the only practical way of understanding
crime in Great Britain in this period
and beyond. To do so, we need to look
back over the progress made in transport,
communication, and trade relations, resulting
in an interconnected world. This is the
era in which policemen, journalists, novelists,
and other commentators described the
rise in professional criminals and international
fraudsters who used the new technologies
of the age against their victims.
However, this internationalization
was not purely technology-based. It also
had an imperial dimension. This means that
the conditions in which the political authorities
of the British Empire encouraged this
international-scale crime decoding work
needs to be kept in mind. As a result of this,
the Colonial Service turned to analogies to
comprehend individuals and communities
that could not be understood according to
conventional patterns of thought. The "colonial"
investigations resulted in comparisons
between domestic criminality and the
sense of a "globalized criminal class”.
Fear of International Conspiracy
The process should be completed
by research into migrations. In response to
a wave of Anti-Semitism following the assassination
of Czar Alexander II in 1881,
millions of Jews fled to the West. This
huge migration fostered foreign criminality,
persecuting the persecuted, surfing the
wave, profiting from, or revealing true self
through it. Anti-Semites raised the specter
1
The Invention of International Crime—A Global Issue in the Making (1881–1914), Palgrave
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