Voices in the Justice System: Agency of Victims, Plaintiffs, Witnesses and the Accused in Global Perspective

Program

12:00 Walk in and refreshments available

12:45 Opening and introduction

13:00-13:45 Professor Robert Shoemaker, University of Sheffield



Victims in the English Criminal Courts, 1674 to the Present: From Obligations to ‘Rights’



This paper presents the findings of an interdisciplinary project which has traced the changing role of victims in English criminal justice over more than three centuries.  It documents the evolution from the early-modern reliance of the state on victims as the chief prosecutors of crime to the modern system of state-controlled public prosecution, noting that the gradual marginalisation of the victim over time contributed to the late twentieth-century rise of campaigns for victims’ ‘rights’ and current efforts to pass a new ‘victims’ law.  Combining legal and social history with quantitative analysis, it presents findings from a large database of prosecutions at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, to document the origins and consequences of these major changes in English criminal justice.

13:45- 14:15 Dr Marjolein Schepers, KU Leuven



Navigating the justice system: changing trajectories in sex work and migration in 19th-century Antwerp

This paper focuses on the trajectories of individuals in navigating regulations on sex work and migration in nineteenth-century Antwerp. This case study sheds a light on the tensions between regulationism of the mid-nineteenth century and rising abolitionist attitudes concerning prostitution, as well as the changes in the sector because of population growth, intensifying rural-to-urban migration, urbanization, globalization, and an increasing influx of sailors. Historians focusing on relations between sex work and migration have generally focused on either women taking up prostitution as a survival strategy or circulatory networks of elite prostitution between major European cities (Keusch 2017; cf. Greefs and Winter 2020). Our initial research in the police archives of Antwerp however demonstrates that the lines between formal and informal commercialization of sex were much more blurred, as were the boundaries between licit an illicit prostitution, and the mobility networks within the sex industry (cf. Vanhees 2022). In this paper I will discuss the case study of 19th-century Antwerp in context of the international historiography on sex work and migration, and present the database this research project departs from. It contains information on about a thousand individuals who worked in the sex industry in Antwerp and were mentioned by name in the police inspection files or prostitution registers. I will present the ongoing research and some highlight some individual trajectories, discussing the agency of women in navigating the regulation of prostitution and migration.

14:15-14:30 Coffee break

14:30-15:00 Dr Dries Lyna, Radboud University



The Hindu merchant and the Dutch paper fetish: Examining civil suits in 18th-century colonial Sri Lanka



Studies on early modern legal culture increasingly focus attention on the (limited) agency of ‘users’ or ‘consumers’ of justice, and the strategies devised by litigants and witnesses in relationship to the institutional codes of the legal system. Besides carefully drawing the Dutch colonial empire into these debates, this paper explicitly wants to highlight the neglected potential of direct and cross-examinations in civil suits to study the concept of Justitznutzung. Eighteenth-century colonial Sri Lanka will serve as a cross-cultural legal laboratory where litigants negotiated uncodified Sinhalese, Tamil and ‘Moorish’ laws with Roman-Dutch law. Using the 1778 case-study of Hindu merchant Wiereragewen prosecuting his in-laws over the inheritance of his late wife, this paper explores how the translation of Roman-Dutch codified law into the plural legal context of littoral Sri Lanka created a legal grey area that offered considerable opportunities for litigants and their legal representatives, with direct and cross-examinations as the perfect playground to devise a winning legal strategy in civil suits.

15:00-15:30 Karlijn Luk and Samantha Sint Nicolaas, Leiden University and IISH



Tolerant Migrant Cities? The Case of Holland, 1600-1900



During the sixteenth and seventeenth century some 600,000 foreigners settled in the cities of the province of Holland in the Dutch Republic. At the same time these urbanized coastal areas also became increasingly attractive for large numbers of migrants from other cities or provinces within the Dutch Republic. In current debates Dutch early modern cities are portrayed as prime examples of harmonious societies in which migrants and native born lived peacefully together. This image is remarkable when one considers that before 1800 migrants made up ca.25 to 60% of the urban residents. Their culture, language and customs were different  from locals and many of them ended up in the poorest layers of society. So, this raises the question how credible the image of the tolerant Dutch cities really is and how this changed over time?

This presentation will introduce the research project Tolerant Migrant Cities? The project examines the daily lives of migrants through the eyes of the courts in the highly urbanized coastal provinces of the Netherlands (Holland) between 1600 and 1900. It aims to reveal patterns of continuity and change in: 1. Treatment of migrants by criminal courts; 2. Violence and conflicts between migrants and native born. This presentation will pay special attention to the position of migrant defendants before the courts as well as the motivation of judges, statements given by the accused, as well as victims and witnesses, and information on the context of crimes committed.

15:30-15:45 Coffee Break

15:45-16:30 Professor Nandini Chatterjee, University of Exeter



The price of a life: diya or compensation for loss of life and limb in late Mughal (early 18th century) India



This paper tells a story from early eighteenth-century India, about a murdered man, his widow and daughters. The man was the poor Muslim retainer of a wealthy Hindu landlord and was killed in the course of a dangerous mission into neighbouring territory. In seeking compensation from his employer, and in receiving monetary compensation (diya in Islamic law), the murdered man’s widow and daughters reveal to us their expectations of social superiors but also their understanding of law and legal processes in late Mughal India. More broadly, the incident and its record allows us to explore cultures of employment, especially the mutual expectations of landlords and retainers, but also reveals the limits of justice in an highly unequal context. Finally, in discussing how the key document relates to a household archive that was re-assembled by the historian herself, the paper illustrates a methodology for writing legal history that can create narratives out of otherwise meaningless fragments, and reveal rich and embedded stories about people who would otherwise remain forever obscured from view.

16:30-17:00 Sophie Rose, Leiden University



Voices from the archives: excavating non-elite perspectives on sex and marriage from Dutch colonial court cases, 1700-1800.



The archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Caribbean colonies in which the West India Company was active contain a wealth of information on not just trade and governance, but also the intricacies of daily life in overseas Dutch settlements. A particularly rich set of sources is the range of judicial archives originating from colonial courts scattered throughout the Dutch early modern empire, containing criminal and civil proceedings, verdicts, interrogations, and testimonies.  These latter two document types offer unique windows into the actions, beliefs, and concerns of people whose perspective is usually not recorded in official colonial documentation, such as women of various walks of life, enslaved individuals, and low-ranking company servants.

This talk will start by introducing the judicial archives of the VOC and WIC and the work that has been done by the Resilient Diversity Project to facilitate the identification of relevant court cases for historical research through the creation of indices. This will be followed by a deep dive into several specific court cases from the VOC and WIC archives that illustrates the insight into the worldviews of ordinary men and women that can be gained from them. The focus here will be on norms and ideas around marriage and sexuality: beyond the official doctrines of colonial law and company policy, how did non-elite members of colonial societies think about issues such as sexual violence and infidelity?

17:00-18:00 Drinks

Location:

International Institute of Social History, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam