In Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), a young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, travels to Transylvania to complete the purchase of a property near London by a local nobleman, Count Dracula. In the castle Harker finds a library full of English books: novels, history, law, the London directory and Bradshaw’s railway guide. The count speaks excellent English and wants to learn to pronounce it without an accent, so that nobody in London will notice he is a stranger. Harker soon discovers that he is a prisoner and that his host is something else. The count travels to England on a Russian ship, the Demeter, hidden among fifty boxes of earth from his homeland; the crew disappears on the way. In England he feeds on Lucy Westenra, who dies and becomes a vampire, and then on Mina, Harker’s wife. A group led by Professor Van Helsing destroys his boxes one by one and pursues him back to Transylvania, where they kill him at the gates of his castle.
// The theoryThe empire’s fear of being invaded
Postcolonial criminology starts from a historical fact: colonial empires created laws, police forces and categories of “dangerous” people to govern the peoples they ruled, and that view of the foreigner as a potential criminal did not disappear with the end of empire. Authors such as Biko Agozino have shown how criminology itself was born alongside that project. In literary studies, Stephen Arata applied a similar view to Dracula in 1990. Late Victorian Britain, he argued, was haunted by the idea of its own decline and by the fear that the peoples it had colonized could one day do the same to it. Dracula is that fear embodied: a foreigner from the margins of Europe who arrives in the heart of the empire, takes its women and reproduces by turning the English into his own kind.
Reverse colonization
Arata called this fantasy reverse colonization: the colonizer imagines himself colonized. What makes the count frightening in the novel is not only his violence, but his method, which mirrors the colonial one. He studies the English as an explorer studies a people he intends to dominate: their language, their laws, their transport, their property registers. He buys land, sets himself up in several places and gradually replaces the native population with his own. The novel turns the empire’s practices against itself. And it shows a reaction that postcolonial criminology knows well: the foreigner is perceived as a threat to the nation’s women, its blood and its identity, and that fear justifies any response.
// The subjectA predator who wants to pass unnoticed
None of this makes the count less of a villain. In the novel he is a predator in the most literal sense: he kills the crew of a ship, feeds on a young woman until she dies, hands a child over to the vampire women of his castle and treats people as food. What the postcolonial reading adds is attention to how the novel describes him. The count is repeatedly associated with traits that Victorian science attributed to “inferior” races and to born criminals: his physical features, his supposed degeneration, his link with animals. Mina Harker even cites Lombroso and Nordau to classify him as a “criminal type”. The novel uses the criminology of its time to make the foreigner monstrous.
Count Dracula
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// The crackReading the novel, not only the vampire
The postcolonial reading is, above all, a reading of the novel, not of the character. It does not explain why the count kills (he is a supernatural creature that needs blood), but why the story chose to tell that need in terms of invasion, contagion and racial threat. That is its strength and its limit. Its strength, because it shows how a cultural fear is built and how it can be projected onto real people: the fears of the 1890s about immigration from Eastern Europe are the same that later justified laws against “undesirable aliens”. Its limit, because it can turn every monster into an allegory and forget that, inside the story, the victims are real.
There is also a risk in the opposite direction. Reading Dracula as a mere symbol of xenophobia can make us forget that predators exist and that some of them are foreigners, as some are nationals. Postcolonial criminology does not deny crime; it denies that origin explains it. The count is dangerous because of what he does, not because of where he comes from.
When fear of crime becomes fear of the foreigner
Research consistently finds that immigration does not raise crime rates in the way public fear suggests, and that foreigners are often overrepresented in prisons for reasons that have to do with poverty, police attention and access to defense rather than with greater criminality. Juliet Stumpf called the growing merger of immigration law and criminal law “crimmigration”. Dracula helps to see where that merger comes from: a story in which the newcomer from the East is, by definition, a threat to the nation’s women and blood. The vampire is fiction. The fear the novel organizes is not.
Three key ideas
- Postcolonial criminology (Agozino) studies how empire built categories of dangerous people for the colonized and how that view of the foreigner as a criminal survives.
- Dracula buys land in England, studies its language and timetables and arrives in London to feed on its people and make them his own: Stephen Arata (1990) read the novel as a fantasy of “reverse colonisation”.
- The crack: the reading explains the novel more than the character, and it should not hide that the count is a predator. Postcolonial criminology does not deny crime; it denies that origin explains it.
Sources · further reading
- Arata, S. D. (1990). “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”. Victorian Studies, 33(4), 621-645.
- Agozino, B. (2003). Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason. Pluto Press.
- Stumpf, J. (2006). “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power”. American University Law Review, 56(2), 367-419.
- Stoker, B. (1897). Dracula. Archibald Constable and Company.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Conde Drácula?
Conde Drácula is a villain from Dracula, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. In his library he had the English railway guide, a list of lawyers and maps of London.
Why does Count Dracula become a villain?
Count Dracula and postcolonial criminology: Bram Stoker’s vampire buys an estate in England, learns English from books and travels to London on a ship loaded with boxes of earth. Literary critics read him as a “reverse colonisation”, and postcolonial criminology explains why the fear of the foreigner who arrives from the East turns so easily into fear of crime.
Which criminological theory explains Conde Drácula?
Conde Drácula's case is analysed through Postcolonial criminology. Postcolonial criminology studies how colonialism manufactured categories of crime and criminal for colonized peoples, and how that legacy lives on in the way the foreigner is seen. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897) is the story of an Eastern European aristocrat who buys a property in England, studies its language and customs so as to pass unnoticed and arrives in London to feed on its inhabitants and turn them into his own. In 1990 the critic Stephen Arata read it as a fantasy of “reverse colonisation”: an empire’s anxiety at the idea of being invaded by those it considered inferior. The count is a predator, but the novel is also a document of how fear of the foreigner is built.
