Throughout history people have committed theft, fraud and murder. However, the frequency and severity of crimes are not static, but varies across time and space. The ways in which people respond to crime also change over time: penalties such as banishment, corporal punishment and capital punishment were frequently imposed in early modern Europe, but do not exist here anymore. Our thinking about crime and crime control changed over time as well. In addition to so-called hard crimes such as theft and homicide, various kinds of conduct were – in some times and periods – labeled as criminal (adultery, fornication and blasphemy). In crime control, state formation resulted in the emergence and expansion and professionalization of police forces and judicial systems, which development was accompanied by increasing interactions and interplays between supranational governments, private crime fighters, and informal forms of social control. Criminologists study fluid phenomena which vary across time and space. This makes exchange of knowledge and research cooperation between historians and criminologists particularly fruitful, or as Paul Knepper put it: ‘From what has been done so far, one thing is clear enough: the most interesting criminology arises at the point that history and criminology meet’ (Knepper, 2013, 2081).

In this introductory article we introduce the subject of our thematic issue on ‘macro criminology’, and illustrate it with a short historical overview and examples of ‘typical macro criminological’ research. Successively we address the recent decrease in crime in many Western countries (the ‘crime drop’), the increased tendency to punish more severely in the last decennia (the ‘punitive turn’), and historical developments in homicide (‘history of violence’). After that we address an important theoretical and philosophical problem with regard to macro criminology: the balance between micro and macro factors in explaining macro phenomena. Finally, the contributions of this thematic issue are introduced.