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Scholarship

Scholarship

Secondary Scholarship

Works worth pulling directly for deeper follow-up.

Social history of bookmaking

Carl Chinn, Better Betting with a Decent Feller: Bookmakers, Betting and the British Working Class, 1750–1990 (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991; reissued 2004)

Chinn was a third-generation Birmingham bookmaker writing as a social historian. Thesis: until 1961, street bookmakers were illegal, working-class, and popularly trusted; the cultural stigma on the bookie was a middle-class moralism imposed from above. The "decent feller" in the title is a direct quote from Birmingham punters describing their street bookies. Essential for any argument about why the British bookmaker is the particular cultural figure he is.

Mike Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society 1790–1914 (Frank Cass, 2000)

Won the NASSH book award in 2000. Argues that bookmakers were a significant vector for respectable middle-class men slumming into the sporting underworld, and that the "disreputable middle class" has been written out of Victorian history. See also Huggins' article "The first generation of street bookmakers in Victorian England: Demonic fiends or 'decent fellers'" and his later Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century (2018).

American numbers / policy

Matthew Vaz, Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling (U Chicago, 2020)

The essential modern history of the numbers and policy games in African American communities in New York, Chicago, and other cities. Argues these games were one of the largest economic engines in Black urban neighborhoods c.1920–70; when state lotteries were introduced from the late 1960s, it was a deliberate policy move to replace Black-run informal economies with state-run ones. Bookies in Black US cities are not just characters, they are proto-public-finance.

Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (1990)

The 19c American gambling culture that Runyon inherited.

Brazilian jogo do bicho

Amy Chazkel, Laws of Chance: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life (Duke, 2011)

The key English-language scholarship on bicheiros as agents in Rio's urban public sphere. Documents the relationship between Carnival, samba schools, and jogo do bicho financing.

Cultural / global histories

David G. Schwartz, Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling (2006)

The standard global overview.

Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003)

The best cultural history of the American ambivalence about chance — the Puritan / speculator / gambler split.

Rebecca Cassidy, Horse People (2007) and Vicious Games: Capitalism and Gambling (2020)

Anthropologist; Vicious Games is especially good on the post-2005 online/mobile betting shift and its relationship to financial-industry logic.

Early modern context

Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy (1968)

Standard scholarly treatment of Jonson, Marston, and Middleton as portraitists of a newly-commercial London whose characteristic figures are gamester, usurer, pander, and broker. The prehistory of the English bookie, a century before the word existed.

Reference works