Since independence, Malaysia has gone through a major health and socio-economic transformation. This has transformed Malaysia from a mostly rural society with a tropical climate where most people lived in poverty with low health status into a largely urban society with a low unemployment rate - a high-middle-income country with matching improved health status. Socio-economic and health development has resulted from deliberate efforts to reach the people most in need. Both demographic and epidemiological transitions took place as part of this transformation. It was characterised by substantial declines in the incidence of infectious diseases and infant and maternal mortality and higher life expectancy. Improvements in health status were associated with improved education, improved environmental health, and enhanced nutrition. This improved health status was achieved at a relatively moderate level of national health expenditure, with most preventive and disease control services provided by the public sector. Like more affluent countries, Malaysia now faces the challenge of dealing with non-communicable diseases while continuing to manage periodic threats from infectious diseases.

This introduction deals with the historiography on women’s participation in crime in various regions in Europe in the early modern and modern period. It introduces the chapters in this volume and places them in the framework of three topics around which the debates about crime and gender have centered over the past decades: violence, prosecution and punishment, and representation. It furthermore pays specific attention to the importance of socio-economic and cultural contexts, arguing that contextualisation of women’s crime is an essential instrument for explaining why women committed crime, why their registered criminal patterns changed and how their crimes were represented by contemporaries