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In 21st century Britain the rich are protected while the poor punished. Rich Crime, Poor Crime shows how contemporary British society is founded on a legacy of past plunder and dispossession by elites against the rest. Over centuries, power and property have been consolidated in the hands of a few and coded in legal systems that favoured the rich and created extreme inequality.
Colin Webster puts a spotlight on Britain’s hereditary and new ruling classes, whose inherited entanglements in land ownership, war and conquest, new world slavery, finance, trade, industry and empire allow them to accumulate and grow capital and wealth at the expense of others. He reveals a system facilitated by political corruption and wealth that accommodates serious wrongdoing – such as corporate, banking and accounting fraud, money laundering and tax evasion – and does substantial harm to fellow Britons. Examining the conditions of extreme inequality that give rise to poor crime and rich crime – and to the social response to both types of crime – we find them to be deeply implicated one with the other.
Rich Crime, Poor Crime is vital reading for academics and professionals interested in the fields of history, sociology, criminology, and politics.
In this brilliant book, Colin Webster shows that today’s billionaire kleptocrats and oligarchs are, in reality, the capitalist ‘children’ of their robber forebears. With a critical eye firmly on the violent and plundering historical role of states, companies and the upper classes Webster provides a passionate, detailed and sweeping review of the myriad abuses of humanity that became enshrined in elite-state formations and law, alongside the power they came to wield with colonial expansion. As the winners of the economic system strode and plundered the globe’s resources, new forms and extremes of damage to populations were unleashed, sanctified in law. A work of scholarship, insight and relevant example, Rich Crime, Poor Crime reinvigorates debate about the complex roots of harm in the societies and economies we all inhabit. This is a history of harm absolutely for our time today.
Colin Webster is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Leeds Beckett University, UK, and a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Criminology.
Introduction: Crime, Inequality and the Rule of Law
Part I. Taking the Long View
Chapter 1. Capitalism and Crime in Early Modern England
Chapter 2. Accumulation by Dispossession: Land Grabs, Enclosure and Trespass
Chapter 3. Property, Poverty and the Rule of Law
Chapter 4. State Crime: War and Plunder, Slavery, Empire and Famine
Part II. Rich and Poor Crime in Modern Britain
Chapter 5. Rich and Poor Britain
Chapter 6. Offshoring: Corporate, Financial and Tax Crime
Chapter 7. Capturing the State: Corruption, Outsourcing, Privatization and Austerity
Chapter 8. Poor Crime: Economic, Welfare and Policy Cycles
Part III. Connecting Rich and Poor Crime
Chapter 9. Coding Capital: Protecting the Rich and Punishing the Poor
Chapter 10. Conclusion: ‘There’s one law for the rich and another for the poor’