The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey

Abstract

The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a longterm, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process. Part of a formal theory of cultural development designed to explain the emergence of the modern Western state, this civilizing process is taken to include a wide variety of forms of interpersonal relationships ranging from the rise of the concept of politeness to the relationships between classes. The core claim of the theory is that the state effectively monopolized the use of violence over the course of the 16th to 20th centuries, becoming an important actor in both the control of the cultures that encouraged violence, and in the direct policing and control of violence itself.The bureaucracies that characterize this shift undertook information gathering on an unprecedented scale, designed in part to inform later decision making, and the digitization of these records makes it newly possible to study the civilizing process in a quantitative fashion. The data here come from the detailed records of the Central Criminal Court, or Old Bailey, in London (11, 12). The Old Bailey has heard trials for serious crimes in London and the surrounding counties since the 16th century, and forms one of the longest-running bureaucracies in the modern Western world.We analyze the 112,485 trial records, encompassing more than 20 million (semantic) words of testimony recorded between 1760 and 1913, a period during which trial reports were at their most comprehensive. We focus on the lexical semantics of spoken testimony: the meaning-laden words used by speakers that can be grouped as synonyms at different thresholds of similarity. Our methods allow us to study the explicitly named semantic structures of these texts over more than 2 orders of magnitude in resolution, from the word-stem level (2.6 × 10 4 categories) to a synonym set level, with 1,040 categories, to a highly coarsegrained representation with only 116 categories.We report...

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Major Transitions in Political Order

“…In the left-hand panel of Fig. 4, we show how speech during trials for violent and non-violent crimes became increasingly distinct, tracking the bureaucracy's increasing concern to manage, specifically, the violence of its population [2]. This plot tracks the strength of signals, at the one-gram level, that distinguish transcripts describing crimes the court considered violent from those it did not.…”

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