Histories of Transnational Crime

Histories of Transnational Crime provides a broad, historical framework for understanding the developments in research of transnational crime over the centuries. This volume provides examples of transnational crime, and places them in a broad historical context, which has so far been missing from this field of study. The contributions to this comprehensive volume explore the causes and historical precursors of six main types of transnational crime: -piracy -human smuggling -arms trafficking -drug trafficking -art and antique trafficking -corporate crime. The historical contributions demonstrate that transnational crime is not a novel phenomenon of recent globalization and that, beyond organized crime groups, powerful individuals, governments and business corporations have been heavily involved. Through a systematic historical and contextual analysis of these types of transnational crime, the contributions to this volume provide a fundamental understanding of why and how various forms of transnational crime are still present in the contemporary world. In the past two decades, the study of transnational crime has developed from a subset of the study of organized crime to its own recognized field of study, covering distinct societal threats and requiring a particular approach.

Gerben Bruinsma has been director of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Amsterdam, a national research institute of the National Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) from 1999 till 2014 and, currently senior researcher of the institute. He is also professor of environmental criminology at VU University of Amsterdam (from 2009). In the past he held positions as professor of criminology at Twente University and Leiden University.

He studied sociology and criminology at Utrecht University and finished his doctoral dissertation ‘Crime as a social process. A test of the differential association theory in the version of K-D. Opp’ at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In the 90s he was co-founder and director of the International Police Institute at Twente University. He initiated and developed a bachelor and master program in criminology at Leiden University in 2002. He is former president of the Dutch Society of Criminology and one of the founding fathers of the European Society of Criminology, editor of various journals and had a great number of advisory and board positions in the field. From September 2014 till 2015 he serves as President of the European Society of Criminology. Bruinsma has been a visiting professor of the universities of Cambridge (2006) and Maryland (2014). In 2009 he received the Freda Adler Distinguished International Scholar Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. He researched and published on juvenile delinquency, organized crime, police, crime places, criminological theory and methodological issues. He published last year in Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, British Journal of Criminology, Policing, and European Journal of Criminology. With David Weisburd he edited the Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice (10 volumes, 5,620 pages), New York: Springer, 2014. His current interests are environmental, theoretical and historical criminology.