International Journal on Criminology Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 4

International Journal on Criminology
of this type of criminal behavior and stirred
up fear of a population imported from
within the protective borders of the Russian
Empire. This led to the passing of the
Aliens Act, the first legal attempt to control
immigration in Great Britain and the first
step toward an international policy seeking
to establish identities by making passports
and identity papers obligatory. The fear of
foreign crime was based not only on the
poverty of these communities and where
they came from but on an alleged international
conspiracy.
They were suspected of controlling
a large portion of the "white slavery" market
and trafficking in women and girls for
prostitution. In fact, Jewish philanthropists
invested a great deal of money in the fight
against this scourge. One measure was the
creation of a Jewish Association for the Protection
of Women and Girls. This problem
quickly attracted international attention
and prompted a coordinated international
response. The National Vigilance Association,
founded in 1885, organized the first
international conference to discuss the
problem which resulted in the signature of
the first international treaty on the subject
in 1904. Supporters of this legal framework
saw immigration, accelerated by steam
ship travel, as the principle source of this
scourge, coupled with the market in "artists"
and the new acceptance of women moving
around alone in the modern world.
A First "Londonistan"?
The assassination of the Czar in 1881
also marked the beginning of a new type of
criminal behavior: the anarchist attack. In
the early 1880s, anarchists or those who
claimed to follow this political movement
began to launch bomb attack campaigns in
Europe and North America, murdering half
a dozen heads of State, including US President
William McKinley in 1901. London
became an anarchist refuge and the era was
marked by the tension produced by their
presence. We could call it the first “Londonistan”…
A first foiled attack was recorded
in 1894 when a French anarchist was killed
as he tried to destroy the Greenwich Observatory.
The "International Anti-Anarchy
Defense Conference" held in Rome in 1898
to respond to these threats ended without a
final agreement being reached.
For the Record: Chicago and Marseille,
Textbook Cases
At the end of the nineteenth century,
in a developing trade in white women
and other forms of international
trafficking, Marseille, located at the heart
of trade routes between Africa, Europe,
America, and Asia, was ideally situated as
a center for criminal forms of trade. The
authorities became concerned about hired
thugs with their tightening grip on the city.
The sharp rise in drug trafficking tipped the
balance: in the 1920s, this highly structured
underworld, headed by gang bosses, their
enforcers and henchmen, and governed by
its traditions (the law of silence) prospered
with the help of rampant police force corruption,
close ties between criminals and
local politicians and, above all, a boom in
alcohol and drug trafficking. Marseille became
the nerve center of the trade between
North America (an important growth area
for consumption) and Asia (for production).
Although for a long time, the leading
Western countries and Japan took on a role
of "lawful dealers", waging an opium war to
reestablish the drug trade in China despite
it having recently been outlawed there (between
1839 and 1842, then 1856 and 1860),
changing attitudes were fuelling a trend toward
prohibition almost everywhere and
led to the signature, in January 1912, of the
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