Preliminary Programme

As legal historians have long shown, the transposition of European law and justice into colonial contexts was a complex affair which varied greatly according to factors such as the nature of indigenous legal systems and the degree of imperial toleration of legal pluralism. Especially when dealing with white settler societies, such accounts have often taken a macro- or top-down approach, focussing on key political moments or positive legislative enactments whereby imperial or colonial rulers instituted shifts in legal structures so as to adapt them to the colonial context. Concentrating on criminal law and criminal justice, this paper argues that the everyday uses and practices of justice within colonies were equally important in bringing about the adaptation of European structures and norms. It focuses on Quebec between 1670 and 1892, a society which passed through two different colonial regimes (French, then British), and then a partial legislative union with other colonies to form Canada. Throughout the period, the uses of criminal justice in the colonial context, both by ordinary citizens and by local judicial personnel, were often at variance with metropolitan norms. For example, strategic considerations led to the existence of separate penal norms for the colony's indigenous population through to the first decades of the nineteenth century. Or again, following the British conquest of the former French colony in 1759/1760, the criminal justice system became a site of constant bilingual exchanges, despite its supposedly English nature. And the professionalization and bureaucratization of the police and the criminal justice system in the nineteenth century, with its attendant decline in citizen participation and distancing from the English ideal of community policing and community justice, was largely brought about by administrative decisions at the very base of the system. Legislation regarding such colonial adaptations often lagged far behind actual usage, if there was any positive legislation at all, and political discourse remained largely blind to such everyday adaptations. In sum, local usages by local colonial populations drove legal change and the adaptation of European law and justice as much as political decisions or legislative enactments. (Show less)

This paper examines ‘confinement’ as a privileged instrument of justice used to respond to deviance of women. It intends to reflect, in a transversely and synthetic way, on the confinement of women between 18th and 20th centuries, in the Belgian sphere. The differences of treatment between men and women, in judicial and criminal matters, are well established. We want to focus, here, on deviance and confinement of women. What use of justice is made by the authorities/the state to control and discipline women? We aim to study the social group of female detainees on one hand and institutions of confinement on the other (legitimacy of this measure). The main objective is to perceive continuities/recurrences and changes on two axes. 1) What is the profile of the women detained (deviant behaviour, causes of criminalization) and 2) what are the objectives of confinement (formal discourses versus practices)? (Show less)

In the early modern period the word ”police” did not mean a corps of law enforcers, but a set of welfare-promoting ordinances and their administration. Police ordinance were more flexible than traditional law and especially concerned the government of towns, where new ”vices” threatened the old social order. A Danish ordinance from 1701 on the administration of the police grouped this legislation in 12 chapters, which concerned everything from offences against religion and manners, vagrancy, sumptuousness, illegal trade and communal matters such as the removal of refuse and fire safety.
The police ordinances have been seen as a modernizing, disciplining means to increase the power of the absolutist state by many historians. Studies on early modern policing, however, have questioned the effects on social life. The Swiss historian Peter Blickle and his students have also emphasized the conservatism and communal aspects of the police legislation and thus seen it as an example of ”state building from below”.
In this paper I will discuss the interpretations of the early modern police with examples from a study on the police administration in the Danish county of Aalborg in the 18th century. Most of the examples are from the main market town of Aalborg, which had a population of app. 5000 inhabitants. The cases show that the citizens typically demanded ”good police” concerning violation of their privileges, water pollution and vagrants, but resisted the inquisitory methods of the royal police force that had been founded in 1682. Finally the police was put under the control of the magistrate and adapted to local needs in the end of the 18th century. This conflict was also present in the small market town of Saeby and was the cause of two riots in 1790 and 1818. In the countryside policing primarily meant protection of the urban privileges until 1791, where an ordinance on the rural police was issued to address the corrosion of the feudal and communal order in the wake of agricultural reforms. In general my study confirms that the police ordinances were demanded by the subjects and primarily attempted to conserve the traditional social order - not only the communal, but also the paternal estate order. It is doubtful whether this effort had any effect. In the long run the creation of a professional police force might even have corroded traditional order. (Show less)

In recent years, the United Nations has embarked on various programmes to address and stimulate the relative accessibility of legal services available to the poor. The UN Development Programme to foster democratic governance includes a focus area concerning ‘access to justice and rule of law’. Legal entitlements for women also receive special attention. These programmes are informed by the idea – articulated by Hernando de Soto and others – that property rights, and thus accessibility to legal means to protect those rights, are essential in fighting poverty. For example, in assisting disadvantaged Congolese women and South African and Indian peasants with problematic access to land rights to protect their legal entitlements in courts of justice, the UN endeavours to enhance these parties’ social resilience and to help them to more effectively address the conditions of their poverty.
The propositions at the basis of these programmes depart from a certain reading of the social-economic and political-institutional history of Europe, the cradle of democracy. Europe’s rich legal tradition is an essential aspect of such notions. The extent to which – in the past – broader layers of European populations could draw upon this legal tradition to protect property rights and thus ensure resilience thus merits attention. This paper links to questions of how legally empowered the poor in fact were in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Hence, it contributes to the historical contextualisation of current assumptions about the role of law in combating poverty. To examine the accessibility of law courts, it will focus on the pro bono procedure during the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the Low Countries, today Belgium and the Netherlands. It will examine changes in the ways legal aid was granted to poor households and address (changes in) the ideas regarding pro bono help as a means of poverty relief, procedures and pro bono aid in practice. By examining attitudes to and practices of the pro bono procedure, it will shed light on the accessibility of law courts in the studied period. (Show less)

Only a few decades ago, a bluntly linear vision on the history of policing still dominated. It was believed that informal self-policing was gradually replaced by a formal (state) police system. This shift was generally situated around the transition of the Ancien Régime to modernity. The formal police systems supposedly occupied the field of social control, largely marginalizing informal social control strategies developed by neighbourhood networks, associations and patronage relations. The assumed effectiveness of the modern police was contrasted with the lack of efficiency of their early modern predecessors. This vision of a linear formalization of policing has been firmly rebuked by the latest generation of historians. By focusing on the appropriation of the police forces from below and the complex interplay between police and populations, they have demonstrated how strategies of formal and informal social control are strongly interwoven, in very different, both early modern and modern contexts. This historiographical tendency has led to more nuanced visions on the relations between police and populations, and this is of course an important achievement. However, the quest for analyzing the complexity of grass-roots dynamics has (partly) obliterated the question of change in the long run in general, and of shifts in the power balance between citizens and police institutions in particular. In this paper, we want to bring the question of continuity and change back to the forefront: how did relations between populations and the police evolve during the last three centuries? The pitfalls of univocal linearism will be avoided by starting from the hypothesis that the rhythms of change in this relation diverged depending on social groups, institutional settings, and thematic fields of tension. In other words, the shifting margins in between which the dynamic relations between police and populations are being continuously (re)negotiated have to be addressed. The possibility of reverse movements in the formalization processes is explicitly taken into account. The long-term dynamics for the period 1750-1950 of the interactions between police and population are explored both through a case-study on the Brabantine cities of Antwerp and Brussels which draws on the police archives of these cities, and by confronting these cases with the findings of international historical research on police-public relationships in Europe, 18th-20th centuries. (Show less)