Abstract :
Although higher murder rates have traditionally been associated with large cities, this view
has recently been challenged by several historians who have argued that ‘ homicide rates were negatively
correlated with urbanisation and industrialisation ’, and this is rapidly becoming the new consensus.
By exploring the geography of homicide rates for one area undergoing rapid urbanization and
industrialization – England and Wales, 1780–1850 – this article challenges this new view and re-assesses
the relationship between recorded homicide rates and both modernization and urbanization. After discussing
the methodological problems involved in using homicide statistics, it focuses mainly on the first fifteen years
for which detailed county-based data is available – 1834–48 – as well as looking at the more limited late
eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century evidence. This data raises fundamental questions about the
links historians have recently made between urbanization and low homicide rates, since the remote rural parts
of England and Wales generally had very low recorded murder rates while industrializing and rapidly
urbanizing areas such as Lancashire had very high ones. Potential explanations for these systematic and
large variations between urban and rural areas – including the impact of age structures and migration
patterns – are then explored.
