// Panel 4B //
Geographies of Crime

Discussant: Professor Stephen Legg // University of Nottingham // Geography

Abstracts

Dr Baijayanti Chatterjee // University of Calcutta // History

River Dacoities in Lower Bengal: A Note on the Palot and the Nalchar-Tulatolly Gangs

The crime of river-dacoity was a special feature of lower Bengal due to the presence of an extensive network of waterways that provided the major means of transportation to both people and merchandise. This essay deals with the social ecology of crime in the deltaic tracts of Bengal through the study of two dacoit gangs that infested the eastern districts in the late-colonial era: the Palot river gang that operated in the districts of Bakarganj and Khulna and the Nalchar-Tulatolly gang that raided the watery tracts of Dacca and Tippera districts. All the members of these two gangs were related to each other by either blood or marriage.  

Through a study of hitherto little consulted administrative reports on these two gangs this paper attempts to explore how the topographical conditions of lower Bengal fostered and encouraged organised banditry. The article also attempts to document the efforts of the British Government to tackle the problem of dacoity in lower Bengal by bringing the said gangs under the operation of the “Criminal Tribes Act (III of 1911).”

Biography

Baijayanti Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of History at Seth Anandram Jaipuria College, University of Calcutta. She completed her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 2018. Her area of research broadly, is the history colonial Bengal.

Dr Danielle Beaujon // University of Illinois at Chicago // Criminology

Mapping Algerian Criminality: Policing and Colonial Discourse in the French Mediterranean, 1918-1939

The police were haunted by the criminals they believed lurked within the narrow, densely-packed streets of the Casbahs of Marseille and Algiers, two cities claimed by France but separated by the Mediterranean. In Algiers, the Casbah referred to the ancient citadel inhabited by “native” Algerians, but journalists in Marseille appropriated the term to describe their city’s North African immigrant neighborhoods, too. In the wake of World War I, North African soldiers brought to France for the war effort started an enduring pattern of circular migration, both legal and illicit, between Algiers and Marseille. The sudden explosion of trans-Mediterranean movement created, too, a redoubled circulation of colonial discourses of criminality. French newspapers and official reports produced narratives of the supposedly inherent criminality of North Africans, painting a picture of Arab men as hyper-sexual, proud, fanatically religious, and at once violent and lazy. In this paper, I argue that the police began to link the pervasive ideas of North African criminality to physical urban space– the neighborhoods that the police identified as North African. Using colonial techniques and specialized brigades, the police of Marseille and Algiers inscribed the “Casbahs” as zones of inherent danger, thereby creating an increased scope of police power.

Biography

Danielle Beaujon is a Bridge-to-Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate in the department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned her PhD with distinction from New York University’s joint program in History and French Studies. Danielle is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in a global context. Her current book project, entitled Controlling the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918-1954 interrogates the quotidian relationship between police officers and North Africans in these two Mediterranean port cities.

Jasper Heeks // King's College London // History

‘We are always a little apt to imitate Melbourne in the good town of Dunedin’: Trans-Tasman links and legacies in discussions of larrikinism in late-nineteenth century New Zealand

First acknowledged in Melbourne in 1870, larrikins were male and female youths typically aged twelve to twenty, whose deviant and delinquent antics and acts provoked outraged across the Australian colonies. Historian Melissa Bellanta describes her book, Larrikins: A History (2012), as ‘the story of the rough adolescent subculture that thrived in the largest places of population [in Australia]’. However, urbanisation and discussion of the changes it brought were not restricted to the most populous cities, and neither was larrikinism exclusive to Australia. This paper explores how news of larrikins became part of local narratives concerning urban development in New Zealand. New South Wales may have been the ‘mother colony’ and Britain the ‘mother country’, but Melbourne was the birthplace of larrikinism, and it was to the Victorian capital that observers across the Tasman Sea looked, especially in the 1870s. The paper examines the linkages and legacies between New Zealand and Victoria that were formed on the back of proximity in distance and colonisation and gold rushes that were a series of trans-Tasman events and left long-lasting patterns and connections, and how these ties intertwined to form a continuum along which the progress and severity of larrikinism in New Zealand could be measured.

Biography

Jasper Heeks is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at King’s College London researching overseas reactions to deviant and delinquent Australian ‘larrikin’ youth, 1870-1940. His project explores circulations and networks of news, the connections between places and communities, and how larrikins figured in transoceanic discussions of street gangs, crime, education, urban life, modernity, and empire. Jasper has co-authored a chapter with Dr Simon Sleight on ‘Urbanization: Youth Gangs and Street Cultures’ in the Oxford Handbook on the History of Youth Culture, which is accessible digitally via the OUP website.