SOLDIER, SAILOR, BEGGARMAN, THIEF: CRIME AND THE BRITISH ARMED SERVICES SINCE 1914 by CLIVE EMSLEY and BLACK MARKET BRITAIN, 1939–1955 by MARK ROODHOUSE
| Published date | 01 September 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2013.00636.x |
| Author | GERRY RUBIN |
| Date | 01 September 2013 |
SOLDIER, SAILOR, BEGGARMAN, THIEF: CRIME AND THE BRITISH
ARMED SERVICES SINCE 1914 by CLIVE EMSLEY
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, xv and 216 pp., £60.00)
BLACK MARKET BRITAIN, 1939±1955 by MARK ROODHOUSE
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, xii and 276 pp., £65.00)
The topics covered in each of these books, that is, the enforcement of
military law since 1914, and wartime and post-war black market regulation
and activity between 1939 and 1955, rarely feature within the pages of this
journal. Indeed, while research into the history of criminal law in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is thriving, the twentieth century remains
relatively neglected. And as sub-categories of criminal law, both twentieth-
century military law and the enforcement of wartime controls over domestic
economic life from 1939 have received only minimal attention from socio-
legal scholars. Academic lawyers' interest in matters military has, of course,
been strong in the international sphere, whether engaging the international
law of armed conflict or exploring international criminal law. But socio-legal
analysis of the military discipline system has, with a few exceptions, tended
to escape the scrutiny of the academy. Understandably, with significant
changes in the nature of warfare and with a much reduced all-volunteer and
non-conscripted armed forces, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the `footprint' of the military within domestic society is much lighter than it
has been in the past. Military law could therefore be perceived as comparable
to those nineteenth-century pluralistic, localized, and specialized self-
enclosed legal systems, such as canon law or Stannaries law, about which
Harry Arthurs wrote many years ago.
Yet to ignore the structure and operation of service discipline law would
be to neglect, among other things, an understanding of shifts in civil-military
relations and the tensions betw een operational effectiveness and the
democratic impulse for civilian supremacy over the military, the increasing
juridi ficat ion of mi litar y law (per haps an alogo us to the i ncrea sed
juridification of industrial relations since the 1970s) and, indeed, a deeper
understanding of continuing notions of pluralism in legal systems.
Clive Emsley's book offers an overview of the pattern of enforcement of
military law since 1914 suggesting, in particular, that civilian criminal
experience, with some important qualifications, has been replicated in the
armed forces since 1914. Just as homicides, assaults, sexual offences, thefts,
criminal damage, fraud, and embezzlement are features of civil society, so
also do they feature within the military community. As the author notes
(p. 200):
Crime is one element of any society. If service personnel commit crimes it is
essentially because they are members of a society and it would be surprising if
membership of the armed forces changed them in such a manner so as not to
reflect that society.
Emsley acknowledges that given the critical need for obedience to command
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ß2013 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2013 Cardiff University Law School
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