Preliminary Programme

This paper aims to study the way of contacts and cooperations between western european gendarmeries in the interwar period. Focusing on Belgian gendarmerie, we analyze official and unofficial relations between military police forces (French and Dutch one's). With the gendarmeries archives, our objective is to highlight, on the ground, in the units, causes, chronology and practices of contacts between gendarmes in the border areas, and in hieararchy. We're also interested in stakes of cooperations and in the consequences of this relationships. How do they take part in circulation of knowledge and practices into gendarmeries firstly, and secondly, how do they take part in gendarmeries transformations? The interest of interwar period is obvious, because of gendarmerie's grows, but also because of social and political tensions, on one side, because of structuration of official International police cooperation during this period, on the other. Consequently, it can be stimulating ton confront this well-know and structured police cooperation with a more informal one's. (Show less)

In 1876, 14 foreign consulates decided to address problems caused by conflicting consular judicial systems serving the around 80,000 Europeans working and living in Egypt, and established an international legal regime, called the Capitulations and the Mixed Courts. This regime ensured that foreign nationals were not subjected to Egyptian or Ottoman legislation in criminal, civil, commercial, and fiscal matters and were only accountable to their own courts of law. These courts and their police apparatuses have been only studied from a legal perspective, but their records have not been used for further research at all. Judges from Europe, most notably from the low countries (4 out of 8), were dispatched to sit on the courts and used their networks to create a first experimental regime of international law and police cooperation. The courts employed nearly 1,000 clerks and lawyers, French, Italian, Greek, and Levantine, and they were, according to Jasper Yeates Brinton, Judge at the Mixed Courts, ‘the intellectual elite of the country, lawyers of great ability and eloquence, singularly articulate.’
The foreign consuls reiterated their alliance in joint attempts to rationalize crime control and surveillance over ports, immigration, and trade. They dealt with ordinary crime, but here, we will especially concentrate on transnational security considerations. In 1882-1883, the Khedive set up the Commission des Indemnite’s Egyptiennes to settle disputes after uprisings and arson in Alexandria. The foreign consulates also constituted a “Délégation Hygiénique en Sanitaire” (1883-1885) that dealt with threats pertaining to the spread of illness and contagious diseases in the ports, and that brought cases for the Mixed Courts as well.
The courts’ law and language derived from the Code Napoleon and their jurisdiction extended to all suits “between Egyptians and foreigners and between foreigners of different nationalities.” Increasingly, trade disputes cases were rivaled by political trials. The consuls allowed each other’s secret agents free reign in monitoring, arresting, or conspiring against purportedly subversive citizens. The British consul Kitchener, for example, lamented about the Czarist manipulations. Nevertheless, the judges had tenure, were appointed by the Sultan, and gave their loyalty to the courts rather than to their country of origin.
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During the 1970s, the new social science history replaced legal history as a means of writing the history of crime. But is it really advisable, or even possible, to abandon legal history? This paper examines a legal controversy from the 1920s involving the League of Nations.

During the 1920s, the League of Nations commissioned a worldwide study of human trafficking. Dr Snow hired 8-10 researchers to conduct undercover interviews with prostitutes, pimps and brothel-keepers in 112 cities across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Americas. The report, published in 1927, described a worldwide traffic in women, linked to drugs, and operating under the guise of supplying artistes for music halls and cabarets. The League’s research caused a sensation in international diplomatic circles, and in the United States, a national controversy over the man the New York Times referred to as ‘the mysterious 18-R’.

The report pointed to the activities of a white slave trafficker, disguised as a New York theatrical agent, known only as 18-R, who claimed to have sent more than a hundred girls into white slavery in Panama. The researchers interviewed women in Panama who had been trafficked by 18-R and the man himself in his New York office. When the United States Attorney for New York, Charles Tuttle, demanded to know his identity so that he could be prosecuted in federal court, Dr Snow refused. Tuttle carried out his own investigation, including interviews with legal authorities in Panama. He concluded that Snow researchers had uncovered no real evidence; their fieldwork offered nothing more than rumours than circulating among the music hall industry. Snow contended that there was a fundamental difference between social science evidence and legal evidence and that proof of the international underworld did not rely on any single case meeting a legal standard.

Drawing on archival materials at the League of Nations archives, the Rockefeller archives, and the New York Public Library, this essay reconstructs the controversy surrounding the case of the ‘mysterious 18-R’. The significance raises not only raises questions about the relationship between social science evidence and legal evidence in trafficking, but about the relationship between social science history and legal history.
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At the end of the First World War policemen of different nations were convinced that law enforcement would be confronted with new forms of international crime. Especially the neutral countries, which economies had not been devastated by the war, were worried that they would be the target of all sorts of international criminals. In the Netherlands this fear was formulated by a captain of the Koninklijke Marechaussee (Royal Gendarmerie). He argued that it was high time to go a step further than the goals set at the international police-conference in Monaco in 1914, just before the outbreak of war. He was of the opinion that cross-border criminality could only be combated by international cooperation. For that purpose an international police-organisation had to be constructed. In preparation he wrote a letter which was send all over the world to colleagues. Captain Marius van Houten ideas met with a lot of sympathy. The question is if the policemen’s vision of what the international criminal was corresponded with reality, was the image an reflection with the practical world? An answer to this question is not easy but is relevant because this vision was the prime reason for establishing the first official international police-organisation named International Criminal Police-congress or ICPC. In this paper we will try to explore the arguments and check their validity by comparison to historical facts. (Show less)