Nature of crimes: industrial to modern
New Crimes in the Eighteenth Century
By the eighteenth century, the nature of crime in Britain was changing in response to new economic conditions. Two crimes in particular captured the public imagination: smuggling and highway robbery. Both thrived because of gaps in the state’s ability to police a large, sparsely supervised country, and both acquired a romantic popular reputation that distorted how they were actually experienced by victims.
Smuggling became a major organised activity along the south and east coasts of England. High customs duties on tea, brandy, tobacco and silk — imposed partly to fund expensive wars — made illegal importation enormously profitable. Gangs such as the Hawkhurst Gang in Kent and Sussex operated openly in the 1740s and 1750s, sometimes numbering in the hundreds and terrifying communities into silence. Smuggling was not seen as a serious moral crime by many local people who benefited from cheap smuggled goods; this popular sympathy made it very hard to police.
Smuggling flourished in the eighteenth century because high customs duties made it hugely profitable, policing was thin along the coastline, and local communities often sympathised with or participated in the trade. Organised gangs such as the Hawkhurst Gang operated on a significant scale in the 1740s and 1750s.
Highway Robbery
Highway robbery was facilitated by the growth of coach travel and the movement of goods between expanding towns and cities. Highwaymen preyed on travellers and coaches carrying valuables. Figures such as Dick Turpin — a real criminal executed at York in 1739, though far more brutal in reality than his romanticised legend — became popular folk heroes. The actual experience of highway robbery was violent and terrifying; the myth of the “gentlemanly highwayman” was largely a literary invention. By the late eighteenth century, improved roads, better banking and organised thief-taking had reduced highwaymen significantly.
Industrial and Agrarian Disorder
Industrialisation generated entirely new categories of collective crime — criminal by law, but understood by participants as protest. The Luddites were skilled textile workers in the Midlands and North who smashed the frames and machinery that were replacing them in 1811–1813. The government treated the movement as insurrection: the Frame Breaking Act of 1812 made machine-breaking a capital offence, and troops were deployed in larger numbers than Wellington then had in the Peninsular War. By 1813, the movement had collapsed under military and judicial repression.
Agricultural labourers in the south of England staged a similar protest in 1830. The Swing Riots took their name from the fictional “Captain Swing” — a threatening letter signed by this name was sent to landlords across the southern counties demanding higher wages and the withdrawal of threshing machines. Around 1,500 incidents of arson and machine-breaking were recorded. The government’s response was severe: 19 rioters were executed and around 500 transported to Australia.
Victorian cities generated new forms of crime suited to their conditions. Overcrowded slums in London, Manchester and Birmingham hosted gangs of pick-pockets, prostitution networks and receivers of stolen goods (“fences”). The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, in which five women were killed in the East End of London, highlighted the extreme poverty of urban slum life and the limitations of the Metropolitan Police’s detective capacity. The case was never solved and became a landmark in the public understanding of urban crime.
The Swing Riots of 1830 involved agricultural labourers destroying threshing machines across southern England. The government executed 19 rioters and transported approximately 500 to Australia. The protests reflected desperation over low wages and mechanisation — but the law treated them as straightforward criminal disorder.
The twentieth century introduced a proliferation of new crime categories, most of them tied to new technologies or social changes. The spread of the motor car created offences such as speeding, drink-driving, driving without insurance and vehicle theft. By the late twentieth century, car crime was among the most commonly recorded crime categories in England and Wales. Football hooliganism emerged from the 1960s onwards, linked to gang culture, alcohol and urban deindustrialisation. The government responded with legislation including the Football (Offences) Act 1991 and banning orders.
Terrorism became a defining crime of the later twentieth century. The Provisional IRA conducted a sustained bombing campaign in Britain from the 1970s, including the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 and the Brighton hotel bombing of 1984. Islamist terrorism became the dominant concern after the 9/11 attacks of 2001; the 7 July 2005 bombings in London killed 52 people and reshaped counter-terrorism policy. The internet enabled cybercrime on a scale previously impossible — organised fraud, ransomware attacks, identity theft and the online distribution of illegal material became major challenges for law enforcement by the 2000s and 2010s.