The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States

Renowned historical sociologist Charles Tilly wrote many years ago that "banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum." This volume pursues the idea by revealing how lawbreakers and lawmakers have related to one another on the shadowy terrains of power over wide stretches of time and space. Illicit activities and forces have been more important in state building and state maintenance than conventional histories have acknowledged. Covering vast chronological and global terrain, this book traces the contested and often overlapping boundaries between these practices in such very different polities as the pre-modern city-states of Europe, the modern nation-states of France and Japan, the imperial power of Britain in India and North America, Africa''s and Southeast Asia''s postcolonial states, and the emerging postmodern regional entity of the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, the contemporary explosion of transnational crime raises the question of whether or not the relationship of illicit to licit practices may be mutating once more, leading to new political forms beyond the nation-state.

Renowned historical sociologist Charles Tilly wrote many years ago that “banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum.” This volume pursues the idea by revealing how lawbreakers and lawmakers have related to one another on the shadowy terrains of power over wide stretches of time and space. Illicit activities and forces have been more important in state building and state maintenance than conventional histories have acknowledged. Covering vast chronological and global terrain, this book traces the contested and often overlapping boundaries between these practices in such very different polities as the pre-modern city-states of Europe, the modern nation-states of France and Japan, the imperial power of Britain in India and North America, Africa’s and Southeast Asia’s postcolonial states, and the emerging postmodern regional entity of the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, the contemporary explosion of transnational crime raises the question of whether or not the relationship of illicit to licit practices may be mutating once more, leading to new political forms beyond the nation-state.

List of Figures

Introduction: Crime and Power in History
Renate Bridenthal

Chapter 1. Dirty Politics or “Harmonie?”  Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg
Mary Lindemann

Chapter 2. A Crisis of Charter and Right: Piracy and Colonial Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Rhode Island
Douglas R. Burgess, Jr.

Chapter 3. The First War on Drugs: Tobacco Trafficking, Criminality, and the Fiscal State in Eighteenth-Century France
Michael Kwass

Chapter 4. Befitting Bedfellows:  Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan
Eiko Maruko Siniawer

Chapter 5. Mobilizing Convict Bodies: Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Early Nineteenth Century
Anand Yang

Chapter 6. The Underside of Overseas Chinese Society in Southeast Asia
Carl A. Trocki

Chapter 7. A Historical Perspective on State Engagement in Informal Trade on the Uganda-Congolese Border
Kristof Titeca

Chapter 8. The Narcobourgeoisie and State Making in Colombia: More Coercion, Less Democratic Governance
Nazih Richani

Chapter 9. Russia’s Gangster Capitalism: Portent for Contemporary States?
Patricia Rawlinson

Chapter 10. Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government: The Example of the Mediterranean
Beatrice Hibou

Contributor Notes