This collection of chapters is about analyzing what is distinctly European about the nature of white-collar and corporate crimes in Europe. The chapters in the book put forward European perspectives on white-collar and corporate crimes, exploring the dynamics and tensions related to white-collar crimes that exist within and between the nation-states of Europe, and with the institutions of the European region. By speaking to the common theme of what is ‘European’ about the realities of white-collar crimes in Europe, the chapters encourage and engage in cross-European dialogue and collaboration as they seek to put forward key provocations about how we can better understand and examine the intricacies of associated offending and its control.

While having been coined in North American criminology, the origins of the concepts of white-collar and corporate crime lie in European criminology, in the work of Willem Bonger (1905; see also Hebberecht, 2015). These concepts are themselves contested and ambiguous, and this collection reflects the diversity of framings that exist in the academic literature, though more often than not the chapters foreground the duplicitous behaviours of business and political ‘elites’, including individuals and organizations, who often operate at the transnational level and in some way abuse their occupational and organizational positions while presenting an ostensibly legitimate exterior to society more widely. And, even without academic definition and conceptualization, in modern history, white-collar crime is a European ‘invention’, intrinsically linked to the introduction of the modern corporation, such as the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company (Huisman et al, 2015).

But what is meant by ‘Europe’, or ‘European’? As a specified geographical region, is Europe in itself an appropriate unit of analysis for white-collar and corporate crime research? Borders change over time of course, but the continent of Europe represents a culturally rich and diverse set of nation-states that present a fertile ground for comparative empirical investigation and theory building over time. Often associated with Europe are the institutions of the European Union (EU) (that is, the European Parliament, the European Council, the European Commission and so on) and its conventions, directives, legal frameworks and policies that permeate from the supranational level down to individual member states. But is the EU an appropriate unit of analysis? Is this political and economic union representative of European perspectives?