Introduction: Difference

The previous chapter focused on the functions of law in the criminalization of an indigenous white class in Victorian England. Under new legal regimes, identities assumed new meanings. The main aim of this chapter is to illustrate the contribution of the new human sciences, and especially of criminological positivism, to the construction of the status of crime and criminals for both the indigenous poor and those deemed racially inferior and irredeemable. The language of science lent itself formidably to the structures of authority based on models of rationality, which seemed to provide the most potent explanations of the modern world. In the nineteenth century, scientific taxonomies and popular fiction shaped narratives in highly contested ways, fitting newly discovered forms within classificatory systems complemented by legal ascription. The history of criminal and scientific discourse illustrates how racialized constructions were enhanced during a key moment in which Western identity strove for a new assignation. Drawing upon social constructionism, this chapter documents the interaction between those who do the defining, and those who are defined. Those weighted negotiations resulted in new identities, as one came to exclude its Others through a particular medium – a scientific discourse. Race was the key ‘scientific’ concept through which the gradualism of liberalism reconciled itself to the coercion of imperial rule. The language and concepts of Victorian racism served to accommodate the incorrigibles in the metropolitan and colonial social order. The defective constitution of those defined as inferior natives, coupled with a conflated notion of hereditary and of biological determination of conduct, is explored here through early positivistic criminology.