Acknowledgements
The research for this book was conducted as part of the project Crime and gender 1600-1900: A comparative perspective, directed by Manon van der Heijden, and funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). I am particularly grateful to Manon van der Heijden for her encouragement and companionship. I would like to thank her for the many inspiring discussions we had about crime and gender in the past, for the cooperation she has shown and for her careful reading of the manuscript. It was a privilege to be part of a wonderful research team, to which I was officially affiliated from 2012 to 2014 and of which I continued to participate on a more informal basis after those years. Sharing thoughts, discussing parts of this book and co-authoring papers with Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, Jeannette Kamp, Sanne Muurling and Jaco Zuijderduijn was extremely inspiring. This book benefitted from discussions with all team members, including Bjørn Gallée and Clare Wilkinson. I would like to thank Clive Emsley, Joachim Eibach, Nicholas Terpstra and Pieter Spierenburg, who as members of the Advisory Board gave advice and shared their knowledge on the history of criminality so generously during the valuable meetings we had.
I very much appreciate that I had the opportunity to discuss my work on many occasions with colleagues and friends, in Leiden, in the Netherlands and abroad. My colleagues from the Social and Economic History section and the Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence research group at Leiden University provided a supportive environment during the past years. Without the sabbatical granted by the Institute for History I would not have been able to complete this book.
This book owes a lot to the Werkgroep strafrechtsgeschiedenis that in the 1970s to 1990s laid the foundation for the history of criminal justice in the Netherlands, which produced many key publications and datasets. I would like to thank two members in particular. Sjoerd Faber’s help with decoding the Dataset Criminal Justice and Criminality in Amsterdam was indispensable. Pieter Spierenburg generously shared his notes and invaluable knowledge on the history of criminality in Amsterdam. I sincerely regret that he could not see the completion of this book. This project builds upon the research this group of Dutch historians and colleagues conducted on the history of criminality, and benefitted greatly from the research and data collections they established.
Colleagues and friends provided help. Maarten Hell shared his knowledge and archival notes on the darker sides of the history of Amsterdam; Jeroen Touwen answered my questions about statistics. I owe many thanks to Bjørn Gallée. His help with the collection of data and endless investigations in the archives were invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
I am indebted to Ivo for his support. Spending time together with our own boefjes, Yara, Nathan and Iskander, is the most valuable and welcome distraction from work.