A transatlantic history of ideas on crime and punishment

Volume 24 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History out now

This edited volume aims to contribute to the understanding of the development of knowledge on the ‘criminal question’ as it circulated to and from the Argentinian context between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Around 1880, new perspectives on crime and punishment, initially also based on ideas imported from European contexts (e.g. the ‘Positivist School’ in Italy), began to be discussed in Argentina; this challenged the fundamental arguments in the realm of criminal law.

Emphasising how the transnational circulation of ideas contributed to this transformation, the collected articles analyse the dynamics of adaptation, rejection and interaction between the Global North and the Global South. Instead of a applying the simple notion of a ‘reception’ of ideas from Europe in South American ‘peripheries’, the authors focus on creative innovations in criminal law made by Argentine authors in local contexts.

In addition, the book identifies other relevant aspects of the transnational circulation of knowledge on crime and punishment that have so far received little attention in the historiography. This volume presents the research results of the cooperation project with Argentinian legal historians and criminologists, funded as a Max-Planck-PICT project, 2019–2022.