The qualitative treatment of crime and justice in the last two chapters, though important in itself, provides a necessary contextual foundation for the largely quantitative examination of these issues that begins with this chapter. With an understanding of how crime was defined, how it was prosecuted, and how contemporaries thought about it, one can more effectively evaluate the immense body of criminal and social statistics that the often-biased German legal system generated and state administrators recorded in their conscientious attempt to keep tabs on their society and its lawbreakers.

The following examination of the statistical evidence relating to criminal activity during nearly fifty years of rapid industrial and urban expansion between the foundation of the Reich and the onset of the First World War overlaps in many ways with the picture of crime and justice drawn in the previous chapters by using qualitative evidence. Furthermore, it adds considerably to a growing body of empirical evidence demonstrating that many long-maintained assumptions about the causes of crime, based on the supposed dislocations engendered by urban and industrial growth, “modernization,” and urban living have very little explanatory power. It shows, rather, that the genesis of criminal activity during, and likely before and after, the industrial revolution was far more directly related to economic hardship, repression of ethnic and political “undesirables,” and changing legal definitions and enforcement patterns, all of which applied both to the countryside and to the metropolis.