On the record: Obituary for Professor Mike Brogden – sociologist, social historian, policing scholar, troublemaker of sorts

Abstract

In 1991, Mike Brogden was a Visiting Professor at the then Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. Recently, in the process of archiving the material pertaining to the Institute, we came across a stack of printed teaching notes for a course he convened, titled the History of Criminal Justice. It was not a course for those with short attention spans and little interest in history. The course stretched over twenty-odd lectures and the file contains 122 pages of typed notes. The subject matter was sweeping in scope and the timeline expansive: sixteenth- to nineteenth-century England. The notes illustrated that Brogden had a remarkable ability to situate conversations on crime, criminal justice and policing in the context of social history. At heart he was a social historian or an historical sociologist.