For 350 years, African and European slave merchants traded with each other on the African coast as equals. Europeans generally recognized and accepted African rules on who could and could not be enslaved. When they did not, then trading relations would break down. The African names database allows the identification of the major slave-trading groups, at least for the nineteenth century. For most parts of the African Coast the ruling authority’s role was not to sell large numbers of people, but rather to provide a secure environment in which slave trading could take place. A wide-ranging database of African sellers shows that while large traders certainly existed, the great majority of sellers sold just five or fewer captives. The chapter evaluates the positions of four major Africanist scholars on relations between Europeans and Africans in light of the new quantitative work. It concludes that only one, John Thornton, has made arguments consistent with the new findings. Also it is now clear that slave traders in Africa, like those in Europe and the Americas, fronted a large labor force for growing provisions, guard-duty, and distribution of trading goods, especially in West Africa. Abolition is not likely to have had economic motives either at the level of the individual or the state.

Chapter 2 analyzes kinship both between employer and servant and between the female attendant and her other family members in service. Ladies-in-waiting usually owed their positions at court and in great households to connections within their kin group, sometimes through active negotiations and promotions that appear in surviving records, but mostly through maneuverings that occurred behind the scenes. The surviving documents allow me to argue that courtier families used kinship ties to build networks of influence. In return, employers gained new servants from connections already known and trusted. Marriages within the household were well rewarded and female attendants often took advantage of opportunities to wed fellow servants and promote their children, siblings, cousins, and even grandchildren into similar employment. This chapter also asserts that the familial networks of ladies-in-waiting paralleled the dynastic networks that made for effective monarchy. Although only one royal body, usually male, ruled the kingdom, a king could not rule successfully in isolation; rather monarchs employed consorts, siblings, and other kin to govern and enhance royal prestige. Similarly, courtier families worked together to promote members of their kin group and parlay influence into rewards.

The many years of service evident in the careers of some ladies-in-waiting who received annuities for decades while continuing to complete responsibilities in the royal household demonstrates that the opportunities of court service were valued by many. Such service offered one of the only salaried professional positions available to women in later medieval England, and for many was a true career. Families sought to promote their daughters at court because female servants could seek to gain not only remuneration but also intangible patronage opportunities for themselves, their families, and their associates. Employment in elite households enhanced servants’ loyalty, built and deepened relationships, and also heightened the status of the royals and nobles who bestowed rewards. Including gender in the analysis helps us to recognize the porous boundary between domestic life and political life at the royal court, and, in an era when politics was all about access to the decision-making monarch, female courtiers enjoyed and benefitted from such informal routes to access. Although in service, and always answerable to the needs and commands of their queens and aristocratic employers, understanding the history of ladies-in-waiting underscores how they nevertheless found ways to exercise agency and access political power in medieval England.

In this chapter, we test the effects of community policing in the Sorsogon Province of the Philippines. The intervention generated a four-fold increase in police-citizen interactions in treated villages, but consistent with meta-analysis of all six sites in this volume, we found no effects of the intervention on crime rates or citizens’ attitudes about public safety. To disaggregate the effects of different aspects of community policing, we sequenced the implementation of community engagement (CEP) and problem-oriented policing (POP) but found no effects on the harmonized outcomes of either CEP on its own or the combination of CEP and POP. Finally, we present suggestive evidence of positive impacts on the specific types of crimes that barangays’ problem-oriented policing teams elected to focus on, indicating that while community policing cannot address all of a community’s problems en masse, it may improve specifically targeted issues.

In this chapter, we test the efficacy of community policing in thirteen districts throughout rural Uganda. As in many authoritarian regimes, police in Uganda serve the dual role of providing security to citizens on the one hand and quelling dissent and opposition on behalf of the regime on the other. Community policing may help citizens delink the political arm of the police from less politicized local officers. The community policing initiative we study was locally designed and funded by the Ugandan police. Our evaluation combines administrative crime data from the Uganda Police Force with surveys of thousands of Ugandan citizens, local leaders, and police officers. While the initiative we study succeeded in increasing the frequency of interactions between citizens and the police in these far-flung villages and improved citizens’ understanding of the criminal justice system, we find no evidence that it reduced crime, enhanced perceptions of safety, improved attitudes towards the police, or strengthened norms of cooperation with the police. These results are consistent with other chapters in this volume and point to the potential limitations of community policing in low-income countries.

Between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, citizen security in Medellín dramatically improved and police violence declined. But residents’ trust in police stagnated. We evaluate a police-led effort to build trust through town-hall-style police–community meetings. In 174 treated neighborhoods – but not in 173 control neighborhoods – the police held more than 500 such meetings over a period of nine months. We find that the meetings induced small positive changes in perceptions of the police, though they did not alter trust in police per se – or crime reporting behavior, much less crime itself. We interpret these findings as evidence that voluntary informal contact between residents and police officers is a weak but not irrelevant policy for reshaping police–community relations.

What is the effect of community policing in settings where the rule of law is weak and communities gripped by crime turn to vigilantism to deter and prevent crime? In this chapter, I test the effectiveness of the Liberia National Police’s model of community policing, which focuses not only on building citizens’ trust and cooperation but also on providing communities with an alternative to vigilantism via its Community Watch Forum initiative. Drawing on large-scale crime surveys and administrative data, I find that the program led to moderate improvements in perceptions of police intentions, norms of cooperation, and perceptions of police capacity. I also find that the program increased community contributions to local security groups, reduced support for mob violence, and reduced reports of actual mob violence incidents by 39 percent. Despite these improvements, the program had no significant effect on other forms of crime victimization, crime reporting, crime tips, or residents’ sense of security.

This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

This chapter explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter argues that building strong institutions and a productive economy in the aftermath of conflict is not enough and that rebuilding lost social capital and trust is of paramount importance. Intergroup trust matters deeply, as the same formal institutions can have divergent effects in different social structures and for different levels of social capital. Starting from the so-called contact hypothesis that fostering positive intergroup interaction builds trust, it is argued that reconciliation and the rebuilding of social trust are also part of the promising blend of propeace policies. A variety of empirical studies are discussed, ranging from reconciliation efforts in Rwanda and Sierra Leone to programs fostering intergroup contacts in Spain, Nigeria, India and Iraq. While we find that more intense group contacts deploy typically desirable effects, trying to achieve reconciliation by altering beliefs through media campaigns is a double-edged sword that involves a series of dangers. We conclude this chapter by stressing the key role of stepping up critical thinking.

This chapter addresses an underappreciated source of epistemic dysfunction in today’s media environment: true-but-unrepresentative information. Because media organizations are under tremendous competitive pressure to craft news that is in harmony with their audience’s preexisting beliefs, they have an incentive to accurately report on events and incidents that are selected, consciously or not, to support an impression that is exaggerated or ideologically convenient. Moreover, these organizations have to engage in this practice in order to survive in a hypercompetitive news environment.1