From the Publisher
'Juvenile Delinquency and The Limits of Western Influence, 1850-2000 is a significant addition to a new body of literature that is challenging and changing the historiography of juvenile justice. In this new book of essays, smartly framed and introduced by Heather Ellis, the study of youth crime and juvenile justice is located in a global context, with an emphasis on both national variations and comparative analysis. This volume goes far beyond the prevailing Western paradigm to explore varieties of juvenile justice between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century in colonial India and the Netherlands Indies, Hungary, Spain, Germany, East Asia, the USSR, United States, Britain and Turkey. Going beyond reductionist accounts of Western influences, the authors grapple with culturally diverse meanings of 'delinquency,' local and global variations in institutions of social control, and how justice systems vary between and within states. This book will no doubt encourage further investigations of the transnational circulation and exchange of ideas about juvenile justice. A must-read for scholars and researchers willing to go beyond a nation-based narrative.' - Tony Platt, San José State University, California, USA, and author of The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency
'This is a major contribution to a wave of new research exploring the phenomena of juvenile delinquency and juvenile social control in long-neglected historical and geopolitical contexts, providing global perspective in a field that has been focused on locales in the West. The well-conceived anthology productively unsettles this insular Western gaze through studies centering on East Asia, India, the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Hungary, to name a few examples but does far more than provide illustrative accounts from an assortment of non-western national contexts. Rather, in their sustained critical reflection on the East-West distinction itself, all of the assembled authors challenge the logic of this binary, showing how demographic, cultural, and institutional currents actually circulate both western and eastern impulses within specific historical and community contexts. Their collective focus on general themes of colonialism, migration, and war provides a helpful unifying frame for these diverse case studies, ensuring their similar engagement with local, national, and transnational dynamics of global exchange. The anthology not only succeeds in escaping the western gaze, and unsettling the East-West divide, but situating the historical construction and control of juvenile delinquency in a larger world system.
These are fascinating historical studies in their own right, and they collectively offer both an array of specific insights into what seemed a largely settled history of juvenile delinquency and youth justice, and a general call for more global perspective. As such, they invite a global turn in the great tradition of critical revisionist historical research in juvenile justice, while also challenging contemporary research to take sk of this living world system, where ideas and practices related to juvenile delinquency and juvenile social control circulate still today.' - Geoff Ward, University of California Irvine, USA
