This research program aims to produce the most comprehensive study to date on the history of crime in China in the 18th and 19th centuries. Recognizing the absence of reliable and extensive data on a country that then accounted for approximately 30% of the world's population as a barrier to writing a global history of crime and acknowledging that the understanding of the social history of late imperial China also suffers from this gap in historiography, the program aims to address this shortfall by providing both empirical data and analytical work at the intersection of legal and social history. The research team, Franco-Taiwanese, includes historians, jurists, statisticians, and computer scientists. The research data will be drawn from four collections of local judicial archives, namely those of the Ba, Nanbu, Baodi, and Dan-Xin districts, which are the four most important collections preserved to this day: together, they comprise approximately 150,000 judicial cases covering the period from the late 17th century to the early years of the 20th century. Emphasis will be placed on analyzing the structure of crime in these four administrative units, the first two located in Sichuan province, the third in Zhili province, and the last in northern Taiwan. A selection of archives from the central administration compiled by the Ministry of Punishments will complement them. By combining the use of rich local archives and information drawn from central judicial archives, which cover a larger area for the same period, it will be possible to address the gaps and biases of each collection. Using a statistically representative sampling of the documentation, the team aims to provide a comprehensive picture of crime and offer the most accurate description possible of the Chinese criminal population at the time. It also will analyze the major trends in the evolution of crime over more than a century. This quantitative approach will be complemented by a series of qualitative studies that will focus on describing the social and institutional context, analyzing the possible gap between legal representations of crime and the population's perception of it, or shedding light on the portion of crime that was not reported to the authorities. The research program also aims to reconsider the paradigms underlying research on Chinese local archives from the late imperial era. These archives have mainly been used so far to study the resolution of civil conflicts. However, they contain numerous documents related to criminal justice, which have been largely neglected, despite providing crucial information on the evolution of the empire's social structure over time and on the relations between society and state authorities. At the same time, by using the handwritten text recognition (HTR) tools that the team has developed, it will aim to make text versions of a substantial number of these Chinese judicial documents accessible, thus promoting the dynamism of studies on these corpora beyond the research themes highlighted in the program.