Immigrant Communities, the Police and the Courts in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century London1

Abstract

Research on English courts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has indicated the vital role that ethnicity and migrant status played in determining the ways the accused were treated. This article examines the experiences of immigrant communities in dealing with police and the courts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century London. The criminal justice system and its main officials – police, magistrates and judges – had a serious tendency to discriminate against migrant minorities. Yet the treatment of different ethnic groups at the Old Bailey suggests that the criminal justice system was rarely systematically biased against immigrants. So, although the Irish were overrepresented amongst defendants at London courts and often given harsher verdicts and sentences at the Old Bailey, other ethnic groups, such as the Welsh, were sometimes treated more favourably. The treatment meted out to migrants accused of crime at the Old Bailey reflected the complex and ambivalent attitudes of the London population. The micro-history case studies examined also show that any attempt to generalise runs into major difficulties. To understand both the justice and the injustices meted out by the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century criminal justice system historians have to use both micro-studies and quantitative sources, for both the shadows and the light that each casts on the other are indispensable.