Studying at York
Bad Business: Organising British Crime since 1918 - Semester 1 - HIS00177H
- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
Module summary
According to the 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, serious and organised crime costs the UK at least £37 billion each year. The Integrated Review ranked the threat it posed alongside that of terrorism. Contemporary experts consider this threat ‘a distinctly contemporary phenomenon, a malady of modernity, and the consequence of recent human activity.’ But is it? While social scientists dispute the value of the term ‘organised crime’, which they consider a recent American import, they accept that demand for illegal drugs transformed Britain’s underground economy from the 1970s onwards. This course challenges this notion of historical novelty. Together we will chart how a maturing economy increased criminal opportunities and transformed the way full-time criminals organised themselves to make crime pay. It is a topic that takes us from the interwar world of Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders to the contemporary one of McMafia.
Surveying the history of profit-driven crime since 1918 in the first part of the course, we chart the emergence and growth of recognisably modern organised crime groups long before the explosion in illegal drug use at the century’s end. Along the way, we familiarise ourselves with the police reports, witness statements, phone intercepts, company filings, court transcripts, interviews, memoirs, press reports and other sources from which researchers construct this history. In the second part of the course, we explore emergent themes like the role of networks in criminal careers, the gendered nature of organised crime and organised crime as a route to social mobility amongst others.
Related modules
Students taking this module must also take the second part in Semester 2.
Module will run
| Occurrence | Teaching period |
|---|---|
| A | Semester 1 2024-25 |
Module aims
The aims of this module are:
- To introduce students to in depth study of a specific historical topic using primary and secondary material;
- To enable students to explore the topic through discussion and writing; and
- To enable students to evaluate and analyse primary sources.
Module learning outcomes
Students who complete this module successfully will:
- Grasp key themes, issues and debates relevant to the topic being studied;
- Have acquired knowledge and understanding about that topic;
- Be able to comment on and analyse original sources;
- Be able to relate the primary and secondary material to one another; and
- Have acquired skills and confidence in close reading and discussion of texts and debates.
Module content
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1 and a 3-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11 of semester 1. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing Weeks (RAW). Students prepare for and participate in eight three-hour seminars in all.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
Narrating the criminal past - chronology and sources
- The crime historian’s modi operandi
- Expert narratives
- Media narratives
- Interwar gangland
- An underworld at war
- Villains’ postwar paradise
- OCG, OMG - contemporary crime
- Weighing the evidence
Indicative assessment
| Task | % of module mark |
|---|---|
| Essay/coursework | 100 |
Special assessment rules
None
Additional assessment information
For formative work, students will produce a text commentary.
The summative assessment will consist of two parts, to be submitted together:
a) Two text commentaries of 500-750 words; and
b) One 1,500-word essay.
The commentaries comprise 50% and the essay 50% of the overall mark for this module. Summative assessments will be due in the assessment period.
Indicative reassessment
| Task | % of module mark |
|---|---|
| Essay/coursework | 100 |
Module feedback
Following their formative task, students will typically receive written feedback that will include comments and a mark within 10 working days of submission.
Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative work during their tutor’s student hours. For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For summative assessment tasks, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.
Indicative reading
For semester time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:
- Andrew Davies, City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2013).
- Dick Hobbs, Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Heather Shore, “Organised Crime, Criminality and the ‘Gangster’,” in Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash (eds.) Murder and Mayhem: Crime in Twentieth Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).