The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States 9781782380399

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1. Dirty Politics or “Harmonie?” Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg
2. A Crisis of Charter and Right: Piracy and Colonial Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Rhode Island
3. The First War on Drugs: Tobacco Trafficking, Criminality, and the Fiscal State in Eighteenth-Century France
4. Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan
5. Mobilizing Convict Bodies: Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Early Nineteenth Century
6. The Underside of Overseas Chinese Society in Southeast Asia
7. A Historical Perspective on State Engagement in Informal Trade on the Uganda-Congo Border
8. The Narcobourgeoisie and State Making in Colombia: More Coercion, Less Democratic Governance
9. Russia’s Gangster Capitalism: Portent for Contemporary States?
10. Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government: The Example of the Mediterranean
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States

The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States

O

Edited by Renate Bridenthal

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013, 2017 Renate Bridenthal First paperback edition published in 2017

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The hidden history of crime, corruption, and states / edited by Renate Bridenthal.      pages cm.    Includes bibliographical references.    ISBN 978-1-78238-038-2 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78533-518-1 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-039-9 (ebook)   1.  Crime—Political aspects—History.   2.  Crime—Economic aspects--History. 3.  Political corruption—History.   4.  Political crime-—History.   I.  Bridenthal, Renate.    HV6025.H53 2013    364.10973--dc23 2013005548 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78238-038-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-518-1 paperback ISBN 978-1-78238-039-9 ebook

In memory of Charles Tilly, whose vision and encouragement inspired this book.

Contents

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Introduction Renate Bridenthal

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

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

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

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4. Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan Eiko Maruko Siniawer 5. Mobilizing Convict Bodies: Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Early Nineteenth Century Anand Yang 6. The Underside of Overseas Chinese Society in Southeast Asia Carl A. Trocki

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123 149

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

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

196

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viii Contents

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

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

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Notes on Contributors

263

Index 267

Introduction

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Renate Bridenthal Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. —Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book IV, Chapter 4. What is the robbing of a bank to the founding of a bank? —Bertolt Brecht, Three Penny Opera Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you King. —Bob Dylan

DEFINING THE PROBLEM A specter is haunting history. The ghostly presence of economic crime as political power has been all but absent in history writing, but not in history itself. Like dark matter, its synergy has been palpable if not always visible. Yet in our time, more and more emerges from the shadows, exposed in newspapers and tried in courts, and compels us to consider the history of the illicit political economy and its effects in past and present. 1

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Here we venture to do so by specific examples. Three concepts—crime, corruption, and states—all hard to define and historically variable, are examined by ten authors writing about different places in different epochs. Our claim that there is a hidden history in the history of states and state making refers to the fact that most established narratives do not analyze how lawmakers and lawbreakers have been intrinsically connected, indeed dialectically involved in shaping each other.1 From Augustine’s observation in the fourth century that kingdoms and robber bands were essentially the same, to Charles Tilly’s insight in our own time that “banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum,” we have been aware of the similarity of these forces.2 Yet historians have tended to write more respectable stories about the formal development of states and the overt challenges to them, such as revolutions. They have not acknowledged economic crime, which so easily and amorally changes sides, as having a bearing on significant historical transformations. Too often described as a marginal phenomenon, or a shadow that accompanies important political events, it becomes nearly weightless ephemera or material for novelists. A closer look reveals a more frightening duality in which opposite sides of law interact, indeed at times mutually support each other. When corruption appears to stabilize states, when smuggling builds national economies, when the criminalization of cultural traditions serves imperial exploitation, when the illegal activities of diasporas support their states of origin, when states resort to breaches of their own laws in order to maintain or transform themselves, then we see how ambiguous the relationship between the state and criminal enterprises can be and how they mutually constitute each other. Current reported events have brought this knowledge more forcefully to our attention. These days, there are almost daily headlines about corruption in governments, international trafficking of goods and people, and financial trickery. Piracy, once romanticized as historical adventure, has returned dramatically in the Indian Ocean. Drug traffickers supply both sides of civil wars as well as their customers. Purveyors of sex workers and of other kinds of laborers bring people from poor countries to serve illegally in richer ones. “Creative accounting” by financial institutions has bilked hundreds of thousands of people of their pensions, savings, and homes. Today’s huge changes in production, distribution, finance, and all the social relations involved with a global economy challenge our notion of state sovereignty. But since we are ourselves the product of our times, these themes now urgently demand historical analytical attention. Let us begin by reviewing some of the problems of definition. What is crime?

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The simplest answer is that it is an infraction of the law. This immediately becomes complex when law is viewed as a product of violent power struggles enforced by the victor in successful states. In the Weberian ideal, such states exercise a monopoly of coercion, defined as the enforcement of law. However, history shows that the result of power struggles is never final, that competition and challenges to power often continue, and that these may alter the balance of forces and even reverse them.3 Who is then the criminal? The displaced, perhaps disgraced leaders or the upstarts who replaced them? This question usually refers to politically organized groups seeking state power. Here, however, we bring in nonpolitical self-interested actors, flexibly operating between the frontiers of conventionally acknowledged antagonistic political forces and exercising a weight of their own in the outcome. Emile Durkheim saw this kind of economic crime as potentially creative, even indispensable to the normal evolution of morality and law, and as characteristic of the transitional periods of capitalism.4 Indeed, less than half a century later, sociologist Robert Merton found many features of the structural context of organized crime to be identical with that of legitimate business.5 More recently, following Samuel Huntington along these lines, legal scholar Mark Findlay has declared that crime is an agent of social change, a silent partner in modernization by surmounting laws that hamper expansion, functioning as a lubricant in societies whose power relations and property interests are in transition. What sets it apart is covert operations and reliance on private violence and intimidation.6 A more familiar argument to the contrary sees crime as positively harmful. In this view, breaches of laws undermine prosperity and draw human and material resources into unproductive activities. Thus, corruption distorts ostensibly rational market systems by making human interactions and the enforcement of contracts unpredictable. And today, transnational crime destabilizes states and global politics by arming nonstate combatants.7 Indeed, as the “Achilles heel” of capitalism, it threatens the international political and economic system itself.8 Even more relevant than the question of whether crime helps or hinders market economies is one that asks how meaningful the labels “crime” and “criminal” are. Anthropologists Jane and Peter Schneider, in an extensive review of the anthropology of crime and criminalization, highlight the ambiguity of both terms by distinguishing between criminalization, the ways that state authorities define criminal practices, and actual organized predatory activity which may involve “hypocritical, covert alliances” with political actors.9 Political scientists have identified a world of “specialist accountants, lawyers, financial advisers, bankers and chemists, as well as

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corrupt or compliant politicians, judges, government officials, law enforcement officers, members of the military, businessmen and even priests” that challenges conventional notions of a clear boundary between criminal and legal activities.10 One even goes so far as to state that “crime is the continuation of business by other means.”11 Corruption as a subcategory of crime may be even harder to define. The notion that it is an abuse of access to public power for private gain assumes that these realms are legally and morally separate and that public power is accountable to the governed population. However, it is exactly this distinction that a historical perspective questions. What corruption means may depend upon historically specific practices in the use and allocation of property. Rhetoric denouncing “corruption” may be a weapon of established wealth against “illegal” competition but be inverted when power relations change. Thus, the dynamism of seventeenth-century capitalism produced charges and countercharges of corruption until the establishment of nation-states created legal frameworks of public authority that were more clearly demarcated from kinship legacies of rule.12 Today, “corruption” is again politically viral when some banks and corporations, despite having breached legal frameworks, are nevertheless deemed “too big to fail” and their leaders are incorporated into government. Obviously, definitions vary in part by era. Social construction of crime sees it as “behavior defined by individuals with the power and authority to make laws” that reflect their own interests while also influencing others to accept their view.13 Thus, ruling elites label, reify, and punish as criminal those interactions that counter their interests. However, as historical capitalism developed from mercantile to industrial to postindustrial forms, such reification was undermined by actors inaugurating change. For example, smugglers portended free trade in the mercantilist period, and arguably today corporations evade “modernist” national taxes in a postmodern global economy.14 In other words, the social construction of crime has a flexible relationship with the legal definition of crime. Where these are seriously out of synch, a major change in state-society relations may be underway. This suggests that there may never have been separate legal and illegal economies as such, but rather a single complex web, hierarchically structured in terms of values, access, rewards, and experience.15 Thus today, laundered money derived from illegal activities integrates into formal economies by investing in them.16 In the recent global financial crisis, drug money, as the most available liquid capital, may even have saved the major investment banks from collapse.17 Some fear that the growing power of politically unaccountable illicit actors, especially as assisted by information technology, may be edging out state institutions even to the point of a

Introduction

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kind of neomedievalism, that is, a nearly totally privatized form of social organization.18 These questions about political economy raise the even more complex historical question of the relationship of state and civil society and the meaning, origin, and reification of those terms. It is impossible here to review the enormous literature on the subject without vast oversimplification. Yet one must keep in mind that both notions are abstract concepts developed in modern thought most notably by Hegel, Marx, and Weber. For Hegel, civil society was a creation of the modern world, a sphere of individual freedom between the family and the state, with the latter providing the norms and laws that protect individual property and the market. Civil society presupposes the state, which holds it together by enforcement of law. Marx inverted this theory, arguing that the state presupposed civil society and the market. He saw through the vaunted “freedom” of civil society to the naked exploitation of labor by capital; for him, civil society was above all the arena of class struggle. The notion that the state was a neutral guardian of law was, for Marx, a profound illusion. For Max Weber, force was the essential element in both the foundation and maintenance of states, whose domination of society rested on their monopolization of the legitimate use of coercion within a given territory. His ideal type of a modern state took the form of a disinterested professional bureaucracy, whose staff does not own the material means that it administers, in order to enforce rational rules.19 All three theorists would have objected to the reification of the abstractions with which they sought to grasp the complexity of human organization, although we epigones have tended to fall into that trap. There are no material boundaries between the ideal “structures” of state and society; as people move fluidly between them, often acting inconsistently especially where rules are concerned. A “new criminology” of the 1980s linked to Marxist theory argued that people in all social classes, responding to contradictions of their historical conditions, respond rationally by moving in and out of different realms, some legal and some not.20 Eschewing Marxian dialectics, Foucault analyzed the mutual porosity of civil society and the state by dissecting the discourses that define the practices and forms of power. In the birth of criminology, the prison system, and the modern state, he saw a “microphysics of power” that is never fixed but is continuously forging new strategies. For Foucault, both civil society and the state constantly undergo change, both of them constituted by the interface of power, knowledge, and discursive practices, which he called “governmentality.” Changes in the law and the definition of crime work through interacting historical contingencies, discovered through “genealogy” rather than through dialectics.21

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Literature analyzing the modern state fills libraries. Traditionally the modern state is assumed to have originated in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the long European wars of religion with the Treaty of 1648, in which the major European countries agreed to respect the principle of territorial integrity, ceding to states sovereignty in both domestic and foreign affairs. This model has been extended to non-European countries, notably in the postcolonial period where it applies unevenly, given the arbitrary nature of the territorial boundaries of postcolonial states that were first imposed by imperialist powers. In addition, today’s transnational movements of people, money, and commodities, as well as the ever-growing power of giant corporations whose wealth dwarfs even that of some states, has called into question the survival of state sovereignty in its historical form. What some have called a “post-Weberian” state is an open system struggling, sometimes violently, against nonstate actors like criminals, terrorists, or NGOs, in a flow of power that can move in either direction.22 States are not formed only once, but are always in process, and the line between what is legal and what is not is constantly changing.23 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff have argued that norm and transgression, politics and crime endlessly redefine each other both within and beyond national polities, in a dialectic of law and disorder. Market fundamentalism, they claim, has created “zones of ambiguity” that are also frontiers in the struggle over sovereignty. Citing Tilly, they observe that in many postcolonial countries, violent crime even counterfeits government in providing fee-for-service security and social order, itself providing the “simulacra of law.”24 Marx already recognized the existence of competing factions within the capitalist class and discussed various forms of accumulation. These could be applied to illegal activities as well. Thus, extractive activity that he labeled “primitive” would fit the predations of piracy. Illegal trade, like smuggling, fits into accumulation through commerce. Illegal manufacturing is productive accumulation based on the exploitation of illegal labor. The political question then becomes: at what point can a group enriched by illegal profits challenge and replace the ruling group enriched by profits deemed legal by the laws it itself enforces? To put it more bluntly: at what point do historically defined criminals become new rulers and change the laws accordingly? And if state making is a continuous process of struggle, what negotiations take place between lawmakers and lawbreakers short of or before an outright reversal of power? A clue to how this might occur is given by Saskia Sassen in her book Territory, Authority, Rights, in which she analyzes components in the formation of the early modern national state that became “assembled” into the formal mechanisms that legitimate some claims and render others illegitimate, as

Introduction

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when usury becomes interest or common lands become privatized.25 Such “assemblages” may later become unbundled, even with complicity of the state itself, thus gradually changing the nature of what is criminalized. If some aspects of economic activity are removed from public regulation, illegal overextension may intrude and its practitioners may gain the power that comes with wealth. States themselves currently assist the formation of new global “assemblages” of trade and finance in order to keep their national economies competitive, thereby opening many portals to illegal transactions, which paradoxically undermine those very states’ legitimacy. Sassen notes that the national state is no longer a container of social life and calls attention to state complicity in its own withdrawal from full accountability to formal democracy.26 Her de-reification of the ideal Weberian state can explain the current incremental transfer of authority to the private sector, even including aspects of the military through subcontracting. If a “tipping point” is reached, state sovereignty itself becomes partially “disassembled,” without being totally dismantled, as some observers of globalization have predicted.27 Indeed, to enforce new laws on recalcitrant parts of civil society, the state executive is likely to strengthen its repressive apparatus.28 In the extreme case where crime has become a continuation of the state by other means, a “parapolitics” or shadow government may even become functionally central to global governance, as exemplified by the above example of laundered money being used to bail out from the world financial crisis.29 Today, a hotly debated question has become whether public authority is eroding to the point of disempowerment in the new climate of privatization and the opportunities that it provides for illicit practices. Charles Tilly, to whom this book is dedicated, foresaw that as a danger. He posited that “world-spanning capital markets are gaining autonomy with respect to firms and states” while emerging new networks, including those of mafias, drug traders, and clandestine currency dealers, may well contribute to undermining state authority.30 How such a transformation may be already occurring has been traced in detail by two German sociologists, Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf. They argue that the integration of national economies into global production and markets drives out older state norms of labor laws and that cheaper global labor forces more people into informal work and the shadow world of criminality. Global deregulation of markets has involved respectable big banks in financial transactions for drugs, sex, oil, etc. as it has local notaries, lawyers, financial services, travel bureaus, hotels, jewelers, and casinos. Money laundering—the layering of illegal with legal money—is the formalization of informal money and, because it recognizes no boundary rules, threatens the sovereignty of the national state over its currency.31 Susan Strange includes the power of transnational crime in the

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world economy when she concludes that the state is in full retreat.32 And Manuel Castells has stated flatly: “The state is not only being bypassed from outside by organized crime. It is disintegrating from within. . . . The question is not whether our societies will be able to eliminate the criminal networks, but rather, whether criminal networks will not end up controlling a substantial share of our economy, of our institutions, and of our everyday life.”33 Carolyn Nordstrom concurs, seeing on the horizon shadow networks becoming emergent powers. Still hoping to prevent this, she urges dropping our illusions about the relationship between state, individual, and authority and advocates instead more research on how illegal economies configure global economic and political practices. “Research into the shadows, is, in the final analysis, research into power.”34 Others have argued that, to the contrary, state power remains strong and in some ways is strengthened by the new challenges to its sovereignty. Indeed, the invisibility of the boundary between crime and the state may itself be a source of power, as it allows regimes to mask their reliance on the very practices and organizations that could, paradoxically, also threaten their claims to legitimacy.35 Marxist Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt claims that economic criminals and elites share the ideology of capital accumulation and tend to integrate in a variant of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of trasformismo. This is the notion that elites stay in power by admitting adversarial groups into existing structures of domination for the purpose of maintaining these.36 A Foucauldian twist is given by Jean-François Bayart, who warns against defining the state in terms of narrow institutions that might appear to be weakening, rather than in the complexity of power relations inherent in “governmentality.” Agreeing with Tilly, Bayart states, “The transnational hybridization of the state and crime . . . seems to be of a systematic order and constitutes one of the cogs in the interlocking machinery of state and world capitalism.” Dirty money, he claims, serves the consolidation of public power and, in most Western democracies, finances the mechanisms of political representation. Furthermore, by ostensibly fighting crime, states are strengthened by heightening their powers of surveillance and repression in their current official “war” on the increasingly global scale of economic crime.37 Theories abound, more than can be reviewed here, and anthropologists, sociologists, and economists have done valuable empirical work on illegal practices at the intersection of civil society and the state. Yet political historians largely remain focused on the formal structures and institutions of states, and have regarded the definition, incidence, and impact of crime as marginal or anecdotal phenomena. Alfred McCoy, who exposed the CIA’s

Introduction

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politics of heroin, has noted that “historians have encircled the state with a sacral barrier that bars cognizance of its profane margins—systemic violence, institutional corruption, extra-legal state security, illegal social controls and, most importantly, syndicated vice.”38 The reasons are understandable. For one thing, much of written history has served national purpose. Ernst Renan famously noted: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for the principle of nationality.”39 But aside from the ideological, there are also methodological reasons having to do with sources. Certainly illicit practices leave fewer trails than legal ones. Yet, despite themselves, they do leave some. The authors in this volume have found enough evidence to track criminal agents and actions so as to make plausible claims about their political effects. Government documents like court records reveal inner conflicts that expose corruption or challenge interpretations of law; reports of police and foreign spies give evidence of illegal economic transactions like smuggling, counterfeiting, and financial chicanery; in modern times, investigative news reporters uncover shady practices; anthropologists and other participant-observers like whistleblowers bring first-hand information. Like all historical knowledge, that of criminal political economy is rarely complete; it must be verified and contextualized, but it is not lacking. This gray zone challenges existing historiography. It is the subject of the authors in this volume, each of whom deals with a different polity in time and space. Organized chronologically, this sample of ten essays offers glimpses into the global development of modern states and political economy and their powerful shadows of crime and corruption. Mary Lindemann’s study of early modern Amsterdam and Hamburg immediately questions our contemporary definition of corruption. Preceding the revolutionary disentanglement of private and public power, elites ruled more or less as a matter of course. Gift giving was a traditional form of social intercourse, not necessarily seen as bribery. Patronage, not necessarily viewed as nepotism, could facilitate social mobility. Agreements about shared political access could assure stability and prevent factionalism. Yet some concept of corruption existed if individual rulers exceeded the limits of acceptable behavior. In her study of the self-governing commercial cities of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Hamburg, Lindemann explores the exact make-up of governing bodies and their powers in order to determine how and why charges of corruption emerged. Her comparison of the two cities and their different forms of governance shows that such charges could have been either used to force personnel changes while leaving a system intact or else aimed to radically reform the very structures

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of government that enabled corruption. As both Amsterdam and Hamburg were important trading and banking centers that were also creditors to princes and countries, the question of who held power legitimately could lead to serious civil strife. The turbulent seventeenth century saw other transgressions of established practices, some of which presaged later revolutions. Thus, the mercantilist policies of empires like England, France, and Spain put their colonies at a disadvantage, which they overcame by smuggling and piracy.40 Fernand Braudel argued that in general pirate activity signaled newcomer powers seeking control over commerce on the edges of mainland empires in crisis or decline, the Mughal and Chinese as well as the European ones.41 In this volume, Douglas Burgess shows how pirate plunder, a simple form of capital accumulation, became important to Rhode Island’s economic development, which in turn contributed to the colony’s political transformation and a very nearly open breach with the Crown a century before the American Revolution.42 Lively legal arguments crossing back and forth over the Atlantic indicated that the American colonies had developed a system of laws specifically regarding admiralty jurisdiction—the law of all things related to the sea—suited to their economic needs and contradictory to the interpretation of king and Parliament. Rhode Island in particular had developed a culture of piracy virtually from its inception, and its growing success so irritated the English Board of Trade that it threatened to deprive the colony of its charter. Such debates bequeathed a uniquely American legal culture to the revolutionaries of 1776.43 Illicit trade also played a part in the heart of the European empires, whose governance could not fully control the seas and ports of the mushrooming global trade. Smuggling could become a political act of resistance and rebellion in the metropolitan core as well. Michael Kwass shows how in seventeenth-century France popular discontent with royal control over the consumption of commodities foretold a deepening antagonism that was to culminate, as in the American colonies, in revolution nearly a century later. The popularity of American tobacco made it a good target for state monopoly and consumer taxes, which led as well to a thriving underground economy. This drug trafficking in nicotine supported bourgeois investors as well as peasant traffickers and middlemen. A draconian penal code met with widespread resistance that included violence not very different from the moral economy of food riots of the time. Thus, by criminalizing smuggling, the state provoked a challenge to its very existence. Eventually, large crowds destroyed customs houses in the first acts of the French Revolution, which established the new legal regime of a matured bourgeoisie.44

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The American and French revolutions established new nation-states with democratic features that could expand to greater inclusiveness over time. Whole populations more actively participated in the growing world market and took an interest in their state’s claims to aggrandizement. In France, revolution soon became empire in competition especially with the British Empire, and in that contest England used criminal law to provide much-needed convict labor in its colonies. Anand Yang shows how the penal regime that England imposed on India in the nineteenth century was rationalized as bringing a superior morality, also evinced by England ending its involvement in the slave trade, although not by giving up trafficking opium into China. Yet the colonial state supplanted the loss of slave labor by the practice of convict transportation, which provided labor in the penal colonies to which Indian “criminals” were banished. Yang shows how penal discipline was calibrated to transform a population of fettered convicts into docile and productive workers, a labor force constructed for empire. Divided into ranks of attributed or attained morality, some got positions of trust and responsibility that engaged them in the penal system itself. As Singapore became the principal penal colony in Southeast Asia, its further growth as a colonial settlement depended on convict labor to build the town. Indeed, Yang concludes that criminalized and convicted colonials established much of the empire’s infrastructure. His essay demonstrates the role of culture in the development of capitalist political economy.45 Colonial and indigenous states were not the only contenders for political power. Carl Trocki shows how alternative sociopolitical constructs sometimes competed and sometimes collaborated with such established authorities, thereby surviving in the criminal underworld, as in the case of the Chinese Triads or secret societies. Initially cooperative organizations of workers who left mainland China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, these diasporic egalitarian brotherhoods became transformed into secretive local criminal gangs that eventually evolved into global criminal enterprises. Closely tied to China’s mainland economy, workers, merchants, and mariners collaborated with these secret Triads to avoid state taxes and regulation. However, here too collusion with European imperial power allowed some secret societies to gain official status, leaving others marginalized into pure outlawry, dealing in drugs, prostitution, and gambling and enforcing labor discipline. With the rise of Asian nationalism in the early twentieth century, Triads served the anticommunist Guomindang in China and the French and British in colonial Asia. Enriched by the opium and heroin trades and engaged in the global anticommunist wars, they came to flourish as corporate capitalist concerns closely related to governments. They demonstrate

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how illicit activities may offer a path of upward mobility from worker to entrepreneur that is less accessible in the formal economy.46 Similarly, in the modernizing state of Japan, the mafia-like yakuza worked closely with officials to ensure a relatively smooth transition to capitalism. Eiko Maruko Siniawer describes this cooperation in the use of violence to suppress labor and leftist activism from early in the twentieth century. She shows how yakuza could build on a long, contradictory history of both predatory practices and the support of local communities, even to the point of being themselves elected to public office in the interwar period. Politicians, industrialists, military men, and yakuza bosses involved in the construction industry formed networks to combat labor unions and to protect national customs against foreign ideas like democracy and/or socialism. The resurgence of socialist and communist parties and labor unions in post–World War II Japan led the state to revive its use of yakuza violence to suppress them. Profits from black markets, gambling, prostitution, and racketeering allowed the emergence of large syndicates, whose financial interests lubricated their relationship with the ruling conservative groups. Ultimately, popular reaction against political violence replaced thuggery with corruption, but maintained the relationship between yakuza and the state. Siniawer concludes that both operate in a fluid realm of capitalist political economy in which distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy become blurry.47 What has evolved is the role and form of crime in the capital accumulation of the industrial mode of production, as distinct from that of commerce or simple predation. A similar scenario plays in some states of the Western Hemisphere. Here Nazih Richani describes the role of drug traffickers in consolidating the state of Colombia. Naming them a “narcobourgeoisie,” he shows how the political economy of the cocaine industry made it historically symbiotic with state making. Focusing on the recent history of drug trafficking, Richani tracks the evolution of the marijuana trade into the coca trade and its sinister connection with the state through laws facilitating money laundering. The notorious Colombian cartels infiltrated official politics, even running for election, and they founded the paramilitary forces whose death squads fought Marxist guerillas in the impoverished countryside. Their influence in both major political parties enhanced police and military repression and resulted in elections that ushered in changes in land laws legalizing the cartels’ previous violent usurpations, thus enabling the use of land for money laundering, speculation, and contracts for multinational corporations. Richani concludes that the historical violence of criminal groups in Colombia helped to construct the corrupt and repressive nation-state of the present and its ties to the global economy.48

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The African continent has experienced similar postcolonial tensions and deformations in state building. Here arbitrary colonial borders that intersect ethnic groups have proven hard to maintain. Kristof Titeca shows how, in Uganda, the state always had an ambiguous relationship toward smuggling in its border regions, where cross-border traders have come to wield power sufficient to dictate terms to government officials. Indeed, the widely bypassed formal economy and the growing informal sector together may now constitute an integrated whole.49 On a daily practical level, local social norms do not criminalize smuggling; rather in such contested areas, state and nonstate actors negotiate official regulations in a fluctuating dynamic process in which public authority can wax and wane. On the one hand, rebel groups may be empowered in this way. On the other hand, the government relies on the same illicit traders to maintain a functioning economy.50 More suddenly and dramatically than any of the historical examples given so far, Russia since 1989 has built a new kind of state, transitioning with dizzying speed from socialism to capitalism. Despite its rapidity it nevertheless mimics the slower processes of market building and state formation normally associated with a distant past.51 Patricia Rawlinson shows how criminals blazed the path to post-Soviet Russia’s incarnation as a “mafia state.” Once again, definition becomes critical. The Bolsheviks’ revolutionizing of property relations in 1917 brought wrenching shifts in what was considered legal or illegal, leading its opponents to consider the new state itself and its enforcements as “criminal.” The mammoth Soviet experiment to modernize quickly under socialist auspices created scarcities and inefficiencies that often led to corrupt networks of barter, which were expanded and strengthened by the legal vacuum opened by the 1990 reforms. The fast track to a market economy known as “shock therapy” created a criminogenic environment in which organized crime easily became confounded with private enterprise, soon dubbed “gangster capitalism.” Despite recent anticorruption legislation the problem remains serious, the new state’s privatization policies having embedded formerly criminalized oligarchs in its bureaucracy. However, Rawlinson concludes that for all its unique historical development, this outcome is not confined to Russia but may be emblematic for the current global symbiosis of business and politics. With Beatrice Hibou’s final essay in this volume, we leave the realm of single polities for the transnational Mediterranean region. She challenges the notion that deregulated markets and the spread of illegal transactions that they enable have rendered states impotent, asserting instead that in the new order, state partnerships with private entities actually enhance political domination. In the European Union, fear of economic crime, migration, and terrorism all emanating from the East and South has led to a

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mythological opposition between its own law-abiding institutions and a stigmatized “Other.” In fact, large informal economies characterize all shores of the Mediterranean. Through four examples—migrant labor, money laundering, fake commodities, and smuggling—she shows how states collude in criminal activities while officially opposing them. In the area of production, migrant workers on temporary contracts are easily rendered illegal and may be expelled, which makes them a regional low-wage reserve of labor. Thus, through criminalization, judiciaries of the European Union collude with employers while simultaneously expanding their states’ powers of surveillance and control over immigration. Furthermore, European states officially fight the manufacture of fake goods, but turn a blind eye to the very same complaining companies that covertly make such goods for a secondary market. In the area of commerce, smuggling still implicates states in that they have privatized much of port security, which allows selective inspection of imports. Finally in the area of finance, control over money laundering targets small migrant cash transfers on political grounds while neglecting large illegal transactions. Hibou concludes that contemporary states hypocritically collude in crime in order to maintain themselves and the capitalist system. Of course, these essays do not exhaust the enormous literature on crime, past and present, but they do point to the need for a historical analysis of its political effects, especially regarding state formation and maintenance. The historic nation-state is a relatively recent form of governance, and, constantly evolving, its future is uncertain. Therefore, it becomes of critical importance to us today to understand the meaning of increasingly noticeable transnational crime for state power and for democratic governance. This volume offers examples of the evolution of capitalist political economy through its mercantilist, imperialist, industrialist, postcolonial, and transnational phases and the role that illicit practices played and continue to play in changing the rules of the game, which is to say the laws, throughout. We have seen that under the regulatory system of mercantilism, piracy and smuggling helped to build nation-states, their predations a form of primitive accumulation that helped to create new classes aspiring to power. Under nationalist imperialism, new rules forced captive peoples into unfree labor for their maximum exploitation. Under industrialism, privatized violence reduced working-class opposition to capital accumulation. The contemporary neoliberal deregulated market has widened opportunities for transnational crime, with alarming implications for civil society and representative political institutions. In sum, violence and deceit have been consistently coherent with transitions in historical capitalism. Yet while it may appear that the more things change, the more they stay the same—crime

Introduction

15

persists—nevertheless the forms of these illicit activities have changed over time, adapting to different modes of production and interacting with different forms of governance. Indeed, the historical trajectory looks bleak. One might be tempted to agree with Richard Vann’s self-protective advice: “ . . . it is at least possible that there might be subjects about which it would be ethically preferable for historians to rein in their curiosity or suspend the application of at least some of the rules of historical method.”52 But this volume sees historians’ ethics rather in confronting the full dimension of the past, because “the cost of suppressing information comes high.  .  .  . what you don’t know is especially hurtful, for it denies you the opportunity to deal with reality. It restricts choices by decreasing information.”53 An historical perspective on the impact of illicit practices on the development of the political entities may hold lessons about our future. I hope that this volume will inspire still more transparency in the study of history and thereby widen our choices for an ethical future. NOTES Many thanks for the acute critical readings by and suggestions from Bonnie Anderson, Jean Anyon, Nanette Funk, Martha Gimenez, Joan Greenbaum, Atina Grossmann, Amy Hackett, Marion Kaplan, Douglas Morris, Mary Nolan, Krista O’Donnell, John Pittman, Nancy Reagin, Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider, Julia Sneeringer, Irwin Wall, and the anonymous readers of Berghahn Books whose suggestions helped to shape this Introduction. 1. Josiah McC. Heyman and Alan Smart, “States and Illegal Practices: An Overview,” in Josiah McC. Heyman, ed., States and Illegal Practices (Oxford, 1999), 1–24, note the symbiotic connection between state law and illegality and see the state-society relationship as processual, rather than static. This excellent introduction to the volume of essays mainly by anthropologists proposes a broad historical pattern from 1450 to the present, in which states are constantly in formation and decline with illicit practices playing an ambiguous but an important part. However, the contributions refer mainly to the twentieth century in contrast to those presented here, which offer a historical trajectory from the seventeenth century on. 2. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), 170. 3. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, eds., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 7. 4. Emile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method (London, 1982), 101–2. 5. Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1968), 134, 136.

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6. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT, 1968); Mark Findlay, The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context (Cambridge and New York, 1999), viii, 2–12, 127. 7. Robert Harris, Political Corruption: In and Beyond the Nation State (London and New York, 2003), 57, 166. 8. Raymond W. Baker, Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System (Hoboken, NJ, 2005) 9. Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, “The Anthropology of Crime and Criminalization,” Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008): 351–75. 10. John McFarlane, “Transnational Crime, Corruption, and Crony Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Asia-Pacific Perspective,” Transnational Organized Crime 4, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 1–30. 11. Phil Williams, “Transnational Organized Crime and the State,” in The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, ed. Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker (Cambridge and New York, 2002), 164. 12. Jeremy Adelman, “Commerce and Corruption in the Late Spanish and Portuguese Empires,” in Corrupt Histories, ed. Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY, 2004), 428–60. Also Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 160–66. 13. Stuart Henry, “Social Construction of Crime,” 21st Century Criminology: A Reference Handbook. 2009. http://www.omnilogos.com/2011/06/28/social-constructionof-crime/ 14. Alan L. Karras, Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (New York, 2010), ch. 1 and 3, in which he points out that strictly enforced mercantile regulations led to their evasion and eventual replacement by the kind of freer trade practiced before by smugglers. 15. Philip Harding and Richard Jenkins, The Myth of the Hidden Economy (Philadelphia, 1989), 179. 16. John Robb, “Nation-states, Market-states, and Virtual-states,” Global Crime 7, no. 3–4 (Aug.–Nov. 2006), 351–64. 17. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, cited evidence from officials in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States, in Rajeev Syal, The Observer, 13 December 2009. http://www. guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved 18. Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (New York, 2005); John Lea, Crime and Modernity: Continuities in Left Realist Criminology (London, 2002), 127. Parag Khanna, “The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism,” Foreign Policy, 15 April 2009. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2009/04/15/the_next_big_thing_neomedievalism?sms_ss=email&at_ xt=4d7d3269a5697786 %2C0 . 19. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood; trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1991), 250–51; Karl Marx, “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (London, 1963); Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max

Introduction

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

17

Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1958), 77–128. Alan A. Block and William J. Chambliss, Organizing Crime (New York, 1981), 6–7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977); Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, 1991); Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (London, 1991), 76–100. Joel S. Migdal and Klaus Schlichte, “Rethinking the State,” in The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination, ed. Klaus Schlichte (Aldershot, 2005), 14. Ibid. Also, Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 42–48; Yoram Barzel, A Theory of the State: Economic Rights, Legal Rights, and the Scope of the State (Cambridge, 2002), 235–37; William J. Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski, and Ronald C. Kramer, eds., State Crime in the Global Age (Portland, OR, 2010), 24; David Nugent, “State and Shadow State in Northern Peru circa 1900: Illegal Political Networks and the Problem of State Boundaries” and Alan Smart, “Predatory Rule and Illegal Economic Practices,” in Heyman, States and Illegal Practices, make the same point as do the more recent contributions in Jean-Louis Briquet and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, eds., Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics (New York, 2010). Jean and John L. Comaroff, eds., Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago, 2006), 5, 11, 13, 34. The notion of a dialectic between the formal and informal economies was earlier proposed by Philip Harding and Richard Jenkins, The Myth of the Hidden Economy (Philadelphia, 1989), 175. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 3. Ibid., 269. Ibid., chapter 4. Ibid., 168–85. Eric Wilson, “Deconstructing the Shadows,” in Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson (London and New York, 2009), 29–30. Charles Tilly, “Welcome to the Seventeenth Century,” in The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective, ed. Paul DiMaggio (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 205, 209. Also, Tilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge, 2005). Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf, Globalisieriung der Unsicherheit: Arbeit im Schatten, schmutziges Geld und informelle Politik (Münster, 2002), ch. 8. Baker, Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, 25. R. T. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 250. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 8.

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33. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, vol. 3, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Malden, MA, 1998), 203, 354. 34. Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century (Berkeley, CA, 2004), 233–35. 35. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-making in Modern China (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 9. Karras, Smuggling, 67, makes a similar case for the early Atlantic powers, arguing that by both writing laws and tariffs yet allowing their evasion, the ruling bourgeoisie remained in power. 36. Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt, The Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics (Lanham, MD, 2006), 137. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, 1971), 58–59. 37. Jean-François Bayart, Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge, 2007), 70–72, 76. He makes these arguments also in The State in Africa and The Criminalization of the State in Africa. 38. Alfred W. McCoy, “Covert Netherworld: Clandestine Services and Criminal Syndicates in Shaping the Philippine State,” in Wilson, Government of the Shadows, 234. 39. Lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, 11 March 1882. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ Oeuvres Completes (Paris,1947–61), vol. 1, 887–907. Translation in Modern Political Doctrines, ed. A. Zimmern (London, 1939), 186–205. 40. Karras, Smuggling, ch. 2, sees piracy as part of imperial statecraft, but distinguishes it from smuggling in that piracy involved violence whereas smuggling rarely did. 41. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, 1972–1973), vol. 2, 865–91. There is some debate about the priority of commercial or military function of piracy. Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and the Law on the Seas, 1450–1850,” in Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York, 2001), 25–55, argues that piracy played a part in nation building through its part in warfare among new powers seeking control over the seas. A counterargument, that piracy is caused rather by distortions in supply and demand of the market, is made by David Starkey, “Pirates and Markets” in Bandits at Sea, 107–21, and by Alan A. Block and William J. Chambliss, Organizing Crime (Amsterdam, 1981), 226–27. Thomas W. Gallant, “Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism, and State-Formation: Transnational Crime from a Historical World-Systems Perspective,” in Heyman, States and Illegal Practices, 25–61, offers many examples for his conclusion that the ambiguous activities of bandits and pirates were directly related both to the development of a capitalist world system and to the formation of modern states. Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1994) sees historical changes in rulers’ use of piracy, both military and commercial, but argues that the development of national states ultimately banned such nonstate violence as potentially harmful to international relations.

Introduction

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42. Eliga Gould, “Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? The Legal Geography of the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1660–1825,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu, 2007), 116, concludes that the great democratic revolutions had their origins in piracy and in the legal wrangling around it. 43. As in this case, Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002), 6, notes that in colonial settings legal actors tended to craft legal strategies involving appeals to state law long before the colony made a claim for sovereignty. Nor did the shadow economy end with the American War of Independence. The title of Peter Andreas’ Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (New York, 2013) speaks for itself. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2007) shows how fake money met the need for credit and capital in the new nation and on p. 11 claims, “At its core, capitalism was little more than a confidence game.” For the role of crime in later American history see Michael Woodiwiss, Organized Crime and American Power (Toronto, 2003). The classic study of the link between recent American foreign policy and the drug trade is Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago, 2003). 44. For widespread evasion of taxes by smuggling in this period see Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (New York, 2001). For the Atlantic world in this period, see Karras, Smuggling, ch. 4 and 5. 45. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 261–62, traces the evolution of a global legal regime through the force of culture, which she defines as a set of routines for organizing cultural differences into structures of international continuity such as those of empire. 46. The apolitical aspect of the Triads emerged clearly during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. In the countryside, they fought the Japanese, who themselves had recruited yakuza, but collaborated with them in racketeering in occupied cities. The Communist government of China banned Triads and drugs. Martin Booth, The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads (New York, 1999), 95. Hong Kong is the capital of modern-day Triads, some of whom have infiltrated South China itself with money laundering, gambling, drug trafficking, and prostitution. See Yiu Kong Chu, The Triads as Business (London, 2000) and Lo Shiu-Hing, “Cross-Border Organized Crime in Greater South China,” Transnational Organized Crime 5, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 176–94. 47. See also David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Berkeley, CA, 2003).Yakuza groups are still not illegal and operate front companies behind which they engage in drug running, prostitution, cybercrime, and stock market manipulation, according to Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (New York, 2009). 48. Recent confidential internal memos from Chiquita Brands International reveal that the company paid Colombian paramilitary and guerrilla groups as well as

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former president Álvaro Uribe. http://nsarchive.org. Colombia is certainly not the only South American state built at least in part by illicit activities. For that history in Argentina, see Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford, CA, 1999); for Peru, Alfonso Quiroz, Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbound Graft in Peru (Baltimore, 2008). Currently Mexico may be on the verge of becoming a narco-state, according to the head of its intelligence service who in 2008 claimed that gangs have infiltrated police, justice, and government bodies including the legislature. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7506581.stm. 49. The resulting hybridity of a legal regime is the central theme of Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures. 50. The theme is echoed by Klaus Schlichte, “Uganda—A State in Suspense,” in The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination, ed. Klaus Schlichte (Aldershot, 2005). He argues that the Ugandan president faces a dilemma of modernizing while including indigenous patronage networks and that he solves it through partial compliance with and partial denunciation of corruption. A more state-centric than local approach is taken by Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, trans. Stephen Ellis (Bloomington, IN, 1999) who argue that control over commerce rather than territory is a key demarcator of political power and that collaboration of state officials with smugglers has criminalized many states. JeanFrançois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (Cambridge, 2009) theorizes the emergence of hybrid states that integrate illicit and licit activities. See also William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO, 1998); Achille Mbembe, On Private Indirect Government (Dakar, 2000); and Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ, 2005). 51. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY, 2002), xii. Ironically, the new Russian mafia learned from foreign contemporaries. Volkov interviewed a banker who had started as a racketeer and had trained from videos of the American or Hong Kong mafia, 10. 52. Richard T. Vann, “Historians and Moral Evaluations,” History and Theory (December 2004): 14. 53. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994), 307.

SELECTED BIBLOGRAPHY Altvater, Elmar, and Birgit Mahnkopf. Globalisieriung der Unsicherheit: Arbeit im Schatten, schmutziges Geld und informelle Politik. Münster, 2002. Baker, Raymond W. Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. Hoboken, NJ, 2005.

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Bayart, Jean- François. Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization, trans. Andrew Brown. Cambridge, 2007.    . The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Cambridge, 2009. Bayart, Jean-François, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou, eds. The Criminalization of the State in Africa, trans. Stephen Ellis. Bloomington, IL, 1999. Benton, Lauren A. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400– 1900. Cambridge, 2002. Block, Alan A., and William J. Chambliss. Organizing Crime. New York, 1981. Briquet, Jean-Louis, and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, eds. Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics. New York, 2010. Chambliss, William J., Raymond Michalowski, and Ronald C. Kramer, eds. State Crime in the Global Age. Portland, OR, 2010. Findlay, Mark. The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context. Cambridge and New York, 1999. Gould, Eliga. “Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? The Legal Geography of the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1660–1825.” In Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen. Honolulu, 2007. Harding, Philip, and Richard Jenkins. The Myth of the Hidden Economy. Philadelphia, 1989. Harris, Robert. Political Corruption: In and Beyond the Nation State. London and New York, 2003. Heyman, Josiah McC., ed. States and Illegal Practices. Oxford, 1999. Karras, Alan L. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History. New York, 2010. Khanna, Parag. “The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism.” Foreign Policy, 15: April 15, 2009. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/04/15/the_next_big_thing_ neomedievalism?sms_ss=email&at_xt=4d7d3269a5697786 %2C0. Kreike, Emmanuel, and William Chester Jordan, eds. Corrupt Histories. Rochester, NY, 2004. Lea, John. Crime and Modernity: Continuities in Left Realist Criminology. London, 2002. McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. 2nd rev. ed. Chicago, 2003. McFarlane, John. “Transnational Crime, Corruption, and Crony Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Asia-Pacific Perspective.” Transnational Organized Crime 4, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 1–30. Naím, Moisés. Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy. New York, 2005. Naylor, R. T. Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance and the Underworld Economy. Ithaca, NY, 2002. Nordstrom, Carolyn. Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century. Berkeley, CA, 2004. Pennell, C. R. Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. New York, 2001. Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder, CO, 1998.

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Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblage. Princeton, NJ, 2006. Schendel, Willem van, and Itty Abraham, eds. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington, IN, 2005. Schulte-Bockholt, Alfredo. The Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics. Lanham, MD, 2006. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ, 1994. Tilly, Charles. Trust and Rule. Cambridge, 2005.    . “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge, 1985.    . “Welcome to the Seventeenth Century.” In The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective, ed. Paul DiMaggio. Princeton, NJ, 2001. Volkov, Vadim. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY, 2002. Wilson, Eric, ed., Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty. London and New York, 2009.

Chapter 1

Dirty Politics or “Harmonie”? Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg

O

Mary Lindemann

Corruption in early modern urban republics was complex, common, approved, and despised. It lay deeply embedded in the quotidian politicking of early modern governments, but was never simply accepted as “inevitable.” Moreover, despite the blurry boundaries that existed between licit and illicit behaviors, acceptable machinations and “crimes,” contemporaries remained well aware that some actions ran counter to the values and customs that sustained civic, political, and social life and rudely violated the political and moral codes these cities treasured, in rhetoric if not always in action. Thus, corruption could be the grease that lubricated the wheels of government or the monkey wrench in the works. Charges of corruption could express sincere outrage or be merely the club with which one thumped opponents. Unsnarling the Gordian knot that corruption was in the early modern world, trying to understand to what extent contemporaries perceived or did not perceive corruption, have proven fraught historical tasks.1 One factor that has obscured the presence of political corruption as a permanent, or at least prevalent, part of the political culture of early modern polities, rather than just a demonstration of their disease, has often been ignored: nineteenth-century analyses. Few academic historians today spend much time reading nineteenth-century historical works. While we often admire their archival acumen and their command of detail, most of us reject their broader historical 23

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or political lessons. Nonetheless, their perceptions continue to influence how we write history, and this influence has weighed especially heavily on our views of political corruption. Indeed, the mid- and late nineteenth century largely discovered “corruption” and endowed it with the qualities that have often determined our search for, and discussions of, its practice in earlier centuries. This inherited and commonly employed understanding of political corruption, however, has created difficulties when applied to early modern Europe.2 Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of virtually every stripe—from nationalist to socialist—united in deploring the “dirty politics” that, in their minds, characterized the oligarchies that ruled early modern city-states. From the 1860s onwards, for example, commentary proliferated on the rampant “corruption” among the regenten of Dutch cities. In journals of a “vaderlandsche” nature, such as the Nederlandsch Jaarboek or the Nederlandsche Spectator, in genealogy periodicals like De Navorscher, but also in regional scholarly publications such as the Bijdrage te Geschiedenis Groningen Werken van het Historisch Genootschap, numerous authors, including prominent liberal academics such as Robert Fruin, professor of Dutch national history at Leiden University, unearthed “corruption” almost everywhere in the annals of the Dutch republic. The doyen of Dutch/Flemish history, Pieter Geyl, chimed right in, describing oligarchies that pursued “politics completely devoid of any higher purpose.”3 Article after article appeared revealing “rampant” corruption, and publishing excerpts from manuscript sources to substantiate the virtual ubiquity of nepotism, office-jobbing, “oligarchic abuses,” “government intrigues,” and sheer preference—the “corruption”—that, for them, disfigured and deformed the Dutch old regime.4 Most attention focused on the contracts of correspondence (contracten van correspondentie) or “harmonie” concluded between members of the magistracy. Nineteenth-century historians almost universally regarded the contracten as thinly veiled forms of kuiperij (corruption). Recent historiography has taken a more differentiated approach and has tended to regard the contracten as perfect examples of arrangements that facilitated administration, short-circuited conflict, and prevented factionalism, while becoming over time accepted parts of the state apparatus. Julia Adams in her discussion of the “familial state” defines the contracten as compacts [that] formalized the distribution of city offices in written succession rules, laying out systems by which all eligible elite families would take turns getting mayoralties, VOC [Dutch East India Company] directorships, and other top corporate privileges. The contracts regulated the membership in and control over corporate bodies, which were the conditions for capital accumulation,



Dirty Politics or “Harmonie”?

25

political power, and family status. In the short run, the settlements were an inspired solution: they protected specific families’ stakes in an office and guaranteed that all regent families’ office genealogies would continue unbroken.5

Historian Luuc Kooijmans insisted that it was not individuals or families alone that profited but rather “society above all.” The “friendship” thus created “served to consolidate ties within the community.” Similarly, recent studies of patronage networks, such as that of Geert Janssens on Willem Frederick of Nassau, note that clientage practices were omnipresent and only those “that worked against ‘calm and harmony’ were unacceptable.”6 The governing situation in the voting (stemhebbende) cities of the Dutch Republic has, over the years, received the most scholarly attention. Yet other cities in northern Europe—Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, for example—attracted similar interest, and their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians produced critiques of corruption that paralleled those existing in far greater abundance for Dutch cities. The mid-nineteenth-century chronicler Johann Gustav Gallois, for instance, spoke of the “scant morality” in Hamburg’s ruling circles. The socialist historian Heinrich Laufenberg, writing in 1911, regarded Hamburg’s entire administrative framework as dominated by “blatant corruption” whose “greatest cancer was nepotism.” He identified a whole series of “evil affairs in the municipal administration” arising from, but also advancing and benefitting, the political dominance of the merchant groups that he titled “plutocratic.”7 Yet the question of what corruption meant in early modern Europe remains a thorny one. Sharon Kettering’s observation that “the term [political corruption] is difficult to define for the premodern period because it is essentially a modern concept” pinpoints the problem as does Rudolf Dekker’s observation that corruption is a “culturally bonded phenomenon.” Accordingly, no ideal type existed until the nineteenth-century conceived one, although the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century had already begun to use corruption as an effective weapon against old regime governments.8 Others, however, suggest that some sense of a public or official morality indeed developed in the early modern world. Linda Levy Peck, in her work on Stuart England, concludes that an awareness of corruption, and prosecution of it, did exist. As venality in government “flared” from the end of the sixteenth century, it “prompt[ed] increasingly strident calls for the return to traditional practices and the enforcement of more stringent rules of behavior among ‘the great.’” Nonetheless, attempts to combat corruption were periodic, not constant, and evoked by specific circumstances that sometimes, but not invariably, corresponded to perceived (or real) increases in unacceptable practices.

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Corruption cannot, therefore, be dismissed as “simply a tool of ‘outs’ versus ‘ins.’”9 Early modern people possessed some concept of corruption, or at least understood that some actions broke the cake of custom and exceeded the acceptable limits of behavior.10 Corrupt practices—or perceptions of such corruption—could even trigger civil violence as it did repeatedly in seventeenth-century Hamburg and in the eighteenth-century Dutch cities.11 Of course, the line dividing acceptable from unacceptable behaviors shifted, often with perplexingly rapidity. If these displacements bewilder historians, they also often caught contemporaries out. Natalie Zemon Davis nicely depicts the quandary: “Gifts were everywhere in the movement of French politics, justice, and appointment . . . and they raised important questions about how to tell a good gift from a bad one and about the nature of political reciprocity.” “Where did bribery begin?” had no simple answer.12 The intermingling of the private and the public realms in early modern times likewise has bedeviled attempts to create a working, or even heuristically valuable, definition of corruption. Likewise virtually impossible to discern is the line dividing patronage/clientage relations of an unobjectionable nature from corrupt and improper forms of preferment.13 Modern definitions of corruption postulating that it involves the improper intrusion of the private into the public falter before the universal overlap of public and private in early modern government and society. In this context, Robert Harding observes that “in early modern states the present notion of public office did not exist.” Nor were governments frequently labeled “corrupt” (either by contemporaries or later historians) necessarily inefficient. Corruption in fact often served to involve more people in administrative and political life as well as to share out the benefits of office. Thus, Kettering in her study of clientelism in seventeenth-century France argues that defining corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain, that is, the misuse of public responsibility and trust for personal interest,” simply does not work for the early modern world.14 Few early modern people regarded the use of public office to foster family or lineage goals as inherently and inevitably corrupt or, for that matter, wrong.15 One certainly does not have to hunt long to locate the positive valuations “family-based” governments retained even in a nineteenth-century world ready to excoriate the corruption of ancien régime polities. During the 1848 upheavals, members of the old oligarchy in Hamburg bowed to the call for constitutional reforms, yet they continued to celebrate the intimate coordination of private and public, and of family and state, interests. While admitting the necessity of some changes, the aged Bürgermeister Johann Heinrich Bartels praised the older arrangements and firmly believed that



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“the familial system, on which our constitution was founded and under which the state has prospered, must be carefully preserved.”16 His point of view may have being falling out of fashion then, but fifty, a hundred, or a hundred and fifty years earlier, few would have disputed the legitimacy and morality of a government based on “family ties.” Admittedly, worries abounded about the too-great influence of one or another family or group of relations because such conjured into being that great bugbear of early modern political life: faction. Moreover, these nineteenth-century commentators, like many twentieth-century historians, tended to group together under the umbrella term “corruption” a variety of practices “like bribery, extortion, nepotism, string-pulling, [and] squeeze” while disregarding the fact that in early modern Europe “these practices were legitimate or else their moral status was confused.”17 The political historian of early modern Europe must thus negotiate a difficult terrain, one littered with obstacles thrown up by the perceptions of an intervening past and pitted with the entrenchments laid down by twentieth-century sociologists and political scientists. If it is naive to accept that corruption never actually “existed” in the early modern world and that practices later defined as “corrupt” were simply the products of “other times, other customs,” it is for that very reason essential that we probe those differences.18 While no single historical approach can solve this complex of problems, a meticulous attention to governing structures, particular circumstances, and individual personalities offers a way to determine when and why contemporaries deployed charges of corruption and where they found the discourse of corruption meaningful. In what follows I explore in a comparative framework how dimensions of political corruption differed, or were similar, in the Free Imperial City of Hamburg and in Dutch cities, mostly Amsterdam.19 First, I argue that political corruption was embedded in each city’s unique political structure; indeed, that seemingly corrupt practices were structural features of such governments. Second, early modern perceptions of corruption remained highly individualized. Conflict arose in debates over particular instances and everyday occurrences. Charges of corruption, for instance, virtually always centered on individual malfeasance.20 It was the misbehavior of a certain regent or Senator or the financial fiddles of this or that burgemeester that generated charges. These people had names, connections, and friends, and were immediately recognizable to contemporaries in the fullness of their biographies. While, of course, charges leveled against individuals often concealed broader objectives, concrete instances and peculiar moments remain the most effective points of historical intervention.21 Political life in Amsterdam and Hamburg turned

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on such individual episodes; everyday politicking, negotiation, compromise, and contentiousness were never really disengaged from personalities and personal animosities, and these thus largely determined the tenor of urban political life. Corruption was situational and the variables determining whether contemporaries judged a particular action corrupt were numerous and included family connections, rank, abilities of the individual, success or failure, and shifting political situations and alliances, to enumerate some of the most important and obvious. In short, “corruption” lurked in multiple possibilities. The examples I explore here in no way exhaust the possibilities, but merely illustrate the interaction of several factors.

STRUCTURES Early modern Amsterdam and Hamburg had much in common: both cities considered themselves republics, both were self-governing, and both derived their prosperity from commerce. Yet they also differed in significant ways. Amsterdam grew much larger, having some 200,000 inhabitants by 1650. At the same time, only about 50,000–55,000 resided in Hamburg. Religiously, too, they diverged.22 While all Europe remarked (either positively or negatively) on Amsterdam’s religious toleration, Hamburg was the orthodox (Lutheran) “Zion of the North.” The chronology of their economic prosperity and, for that matter, its character, also varied. Amsterdam reached its economic zenith in the mid-seventeenth century; Hamburg became greatest after the mid-eighteenth century. Both cities lived from trade and especially transshipping; both functioned as entrepôts. Just as striking, however, was their importance as financial and banking centers, where merchant/bankers grew rich on the money trade and often lent enormous sums to princes, countries, and entrepreneurs. Amsterdam played a major role in the development of a colonial and trading empire. Hamburg, although its ships and trading routes extended over the globe (at least by the eighteenth century), had no overt colonial ambitions, at least not in a territorial sense. Critically, each city possessed a very different relationship to the larger political entities that encased it or to which it was linked. Amsterdam stood as the most powerful of the voting cities of the Dutch republic and was also suspended in a web of often tense relationships with the stadhouders and the larger republic. Hamburg was a free imperial city with direct political ties only to the Holy Roman Empire. Hamburg’s political elite probably remained more open to newcomers, although neither city possessed a legally defined patriciate (as did, for example, Venice and Frankfurt). Finally, an interlocking structure of councils governed each. The exact make-up, the powers allocated to them, and the



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political clout of each differed significantly, as did access to them. Thus, too, did moments of corruption in Hamburg diverge from those in Amsterdam. The highest governing body in Amsterdam was the thirty-six-member vroedschap. Membership in the vroedschap was for life, and most members held other positions such as burgemeester, sat in one of the many administrative colleges (colleges van regeering), or sat on the courts (banken van justitie). Persons already in office selected new members for all councils (men known collectively as the regeerders van Amsterdam). The regenten families helped their own up the ladder, guiding their feet on the rungs, extending them a helping hand when they slipped, or, for that matter, letting them drop if they proved difficult or inept, just as they hindered the ascent of outsiders. Rules theoretically prevented the building of familial blocks by restricting the numbers of relatives who could sit simultaneously in any given council, but there remained plenty of room for preferential treatment. Joachim van Rendorp listed the ways in which a young regent like himself benefitted from family connections and friends: Due to their influence I became a magistrate, a Meesterknapp of Holland, a Director of [the] Surinam [Company]. [I also received] my commission in the Dutch Rekenkamer and became burgemeester. Then, [I entered] the Gecommitteerde Raden and the Admiralty. I was indebted [for all this] on the arrangements that existed in the government of our city.23 [Emphasis in the original]

Power players in this high-stakes political game were the members of the vroedschap and, especially, the four extremely influential burgemeesters. While the vroedschap had once enjoyed some independence from the burgemeesters, by the seventeenth century what autonomy it possessed had withered; now it basically rubber-stamped proposals the burgemeesters submitted. The latter possessed the final say in virtually all matters except justice. Perhaps most important, all the major offices in the city and the directorships (bewindhebbers) of the Dutch East and West India Companies were in their gift. Indeed, the burgemeesterschap became “almost indistinguishable from the directorship of the East India Company” and the burgemeesters, therefore, basically controlled the Amsterdam kamer. During his quarter-year in office, each presiding burgemeester exercised an exclusive right to name “all offices of lesser weight”; these nevertheless frequently enjoyed “great incomes,” such as the postmeesterschappen (postmasterships). Thus burgemeesters advantageously deployed their patronage rights far down the social and economic ladders. These forms of influence, as well as the ability to control elections to the vroedschap and burgemeesterschap, produced incidents that later generations viewed as corrupt and that, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, often bred conflict and dissent within regenten circles, despite the existence of contracten.24

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Certainly, the burgemeesters’ ability to open or occlude access to the higher circles of governing and to distribute offices formed the foundation of their great power. By the mid-seventeenth century, the results of elections had become foregone conclusions and the process itself, in one insider’s words, de groote cuyp—the great sham. If contemporaries deplored certain political machinations, it was the nineteenth century that pressed them into the now-familiar mold of corruption. In 1897, Gerhard Willem Kernkamp produced a comprehensive edition of one the most important political memoirs of the seventeenth century, Hans Bontemantel’s De Regeeringe van Amsterdam. In his introduction, Kernkamp admitted that it was not really Bontemantel himself who painted a picture of thorough-going, even “planned,” corruption in Amsterdam’s government, but rather: “I created it through my readings of what is found scattered throughout his [Bontemantel’s] writings. . . . He wrote about the corruption of his fellow regenten as if it was the most natural thing in the world [and] that it was an essential part of government.”25 Hamburg’s government structure approximated but also varied from that of Amsterdam. Governance in Hamburg also lay in the hands of a series of interlocking councils, but primarily with the City Council (Senat), the Citizens’ Assembly (Bürgerschaft), and a series of parish-based collegial bodies. Members of these bodies comprised a governing elite comparable to the regeerders van Amsterdam but whose functions differed in significant ways. The Hamburg Senat, for instance, unlike the vroedschap, functioned as the Upper Court (Obergericht).26 The relationships among these bodies, and especially between the Senat and Bürgerschaft, were extremely strained from the mid-sixteenth through the beginning of the eighteenth century (and perhaps even longer). Only the promulgation of a new constitution in 1712 (the Principal Recess) resolved these conflicts. As in Amsterdam, provisions restricted, at least theoretically, the simultaneous office holding of close relatives and married kin.27 Typically, the selection of members of the Senat combined election and chance, although here, too, there certainly remained considerable room for manipulation. The nominating members swore before God they had put forward only the “most competent” candidates and had, moreover, received “no gift, favor, or consideration.” Furthermore, they were guided by “no friendship or [personal] ties .  .  . nor [did they represent] improper and unseemly group [interests] . . . nor for this purpose had [they] made any sort of pact, either orally or in writing.” The last clause theoretically prevented the formation of agreements similar to the contracten van correspondentie.28 After 1712, the Senat consisted of four Bürgermeister and twenty-four senators (or Ratsherren). Election to both posts was, as in Amsterdam, through



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co-option. The Senat possessed wide-ranging powers and controlled foreign policy, justice, and other parts of urban administration including religion and education. Despite the Senat’s strength, the Bürgerschaft had to approve the Senat’s decisions. As the Bürgerschaft usually met only twice a year (and had to be convened by the Senat), permanent councils consulted on most matters and only final decisions were submitted to the Bürgerschaft as a whole for ratification.29 The Bürgermeisters had once possessed some of the remarkable prerogatives and privileges the Amsterdam burgemeesters enjoyed. But, over time, the Bürgerschaft had successfully whittled down these rights. While at the end of the seventeenth century the Bürgermeisters still legally controlled the distribution of some offices, and could unofficially manipulate appointment to others, they also had to abide by arrangements struck in 1684 that provided for the sale or lease of a wide range of communal posts, including various clerks, foremen on building projects, and almoners at the poor house, to name just some.30 Likewise they lacked the great political patronage plum of naming bewindhebbers. While it was certainly possible, and perhaps even common, for them to advance relatives or friends, the provisions for sale of offices reduced favoritism; only a handful of outright sinecures, and no such lucrative ones as that of Amsterdam postmasters, existed. Notably, and despite superficial similarities, the relationship between vroedschap and burgemeesters in Amsterdam differed significantly from that existing between Bürgerschaft and Senat in Hamburg. No body truly comparable to the Bürgerschaft existed in Amsterdam. While in Amsterdam, an especially strong burgemeester could play his connections and be repeatedly reelected, he did not hold that office for life (as did a Hamburg Bürgermeister). Indeed, the regenten used the contracten to protect their positions and those of their families while not in office by arranging for later reselection. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, corruption formed a frequent intra-regenten political matter involving the distribution of powers and privilege among the elites and regulating their conduct; in Hamburg, corruption charges played out between Senat and Bürgerschaft and involved issues of the city’s political structure, its constitution, and the rights of political participation. Thus any model of, or approach to, corruption in early modern cities must take as its moment of historical intervention the structural interstices where corruption, or charges of corruption, nested. As Douglas R. Burgess in this volume shows how “piracy became an essential component of Rhode Island’s commercial, social, and governmental framework,” so, too, did corruption became virtually a structural element of government in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Hamburg.

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AMSTERDAM: ELITE IN-FIGHTING Nineteenth-century critics of the contracten, like Jacob de Witte van Citters who wrote voluminously on the topic, used the phrase as a euphemism for kuiperij (corruption).31 Despite his clear disapproval of the contracten as they developed over time, even Van Citters identified praiseworthy motivations in their predecessors (voorlopers) praiseworthy motivations. For example, a 1631 agreement from Middelburg shows how the regenten tapped their way toward more elaborate contracten, perhaps, as Van Citters comments, “also here with no sense of doing anything wrong.”32 Stability was the stated goal of the contracten, yet it is striking that despite the existence of written or unwritten contracten, the history of political life in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries revealed shifts—often quite drastic ones— within ruling cliques. Even the mightiest burgemeesters in Amsterdam, such as the brothers Cornelis and Andries Bickers or Andries and Cornelis Graef, could lose their hold and be banished to honorific but relatively powerless positions, despite existing contracten, especially when, as in the case of the Bickers, they had aroused the wrath of the stadhouder.33 In Amsterdam, charges of corruption facilitated maneuvering within ruling cliques rather than, as in seventeenth-century Hamburg, between the Bürgerschaft and the Senat as both strove for power and attempted to alter or clarify the constitutional structure of authority. Despite the lack of any evidence of written contracten among the Amsterdam regenten before 1752, explicit or implicit agreements clearly existed. In the 1560s, charges of nepotism and corruption in the distribution of vroedschap positions often arose among those already close to the well-cushioned seats of power. The leaders of a 1564 protest complained of the “great abuses that occur in the government of this city” and isolated five major offenders, noting the “consanguinity and affinity” among the thirty-six members of the vroedschap that allowed them to distribute offices as they willed. The major offender here was one Hendrick Dircksz, “the great Monarch” who acted “like a Kaiser within the city.”34 Such complaints about the corrupt practices of one or another circle (kring)— they mentioned ten families—often targeted a single Machiavellian figure as the wellspring of abuses. Isolating individuals as responsible thus stressed particular misconducts rather than structural flaws. The point of such accusations was not to alter the dynamics of governing or to reconfigure relations between its component parts, whereas in Hamburg that was exactly what charges of corruption in the seventeenth century intended. In Amsterdam, even when such charges resulted in the ouster of one man or group from power, the basic structure retained its stability, just as the contracten intended. Thus, when malcontents of the 1560s became the new



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rulers in 1578 with the shift to Protestantism (the Alteratie), the new men acted much like those who had just been shoved out of power or relegated to a perhaps honorific albeit considerably less powerful office to await another reversal of fortune.35 Such changes (wetverzetting) occurred not infrequently in Amsterdam and determined the tenor of political life, demonstrating that the existence of contracten never prevented political shifts. That political life went on much as normal, even under new men, was not mere hypocrisy; it demonstrated how political modifications could be effected by charges of corruption without actually undermining the structures of government. Of course, new circumstances could generate different meanings of corruption. In the mid- to late-eighteenth-century climate of perceived economic decline and political emasculation, corruption became the rallying cry for the Patriots who sought a major reform of government in the Dutch Republic. In an attenuated form, one can find somewhat similar demands among “radicals” in Hamburg in the 1790s.36 Historians of Amsterdam’s political life have frequently turned to the observations of Hans Bontemantel for an inside look at how politics “really worked” in Amsterdam. As in other Dutch cities, as well as in Hamburg, the minutes of council meetings are maddeningly opaque, often recording decisions, but rarely, if ever, revealing behind-the-scenes debates. This turbidity makes political life in such cities sometimes seem dull or unnaturally irenic, when the opposite is actually true. Revealing, here, are the deliberations that took place on the proposed expansion of Amsterdam’s city limits in the early seventeenth century. By 1600, Amsterdam was bursting at the seams and land speculators had built extensively, albeit illegally, outside the city’s boundaries. A commission was convened to consider options. One of the commissioners was Cornelis Pietersz Hooft who protested vociferously about regenten who manipulated their office too obviously for their own gain and acted too much like monarchs.37 In the protracted and contentious debates that followed, Hooft spoke against the avarice of many colleagues who sought to recast the terms of the expansion to maximize the profits they expected from land speculation. Hooft, like his contemporaries, viewed corruption in terms of such personal malfeasance. He accused the burgemeester and Stadsfabrikmeester Frans Hendricksz Oetgens of pulling strings to arrange the selection of a pliable treasury official: “One also recognizes that his own benefit is here involved and that he means to create a great profit for himself out of this business.”38 Predictably, nineteenth-century commentators valorized Hooft as a man who “opposed the evil schemes” of self-interested regenten. For them Hooft was “that type of regent who treasured the common good above his own” even while, of course, holding the “honest conviction” that “‘the

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richest, most honorable, and most notable persons’ were the best qualified to govern city and state.”39 This moralism of hindsight has its flaws, even if we are willing to accept, as accept we must, that some men proved more honest and ethical than others. Hooft’s remonstration certainly can neither be relegated to the realm of empty rhetoric nor be seen as an expression of pique at losing out on a lucrative opportunity. Yet apotheosizing Hooft as a folk hero does not quite work either. Principled his objection might have been, but it was also a seventeenth-century protest, one focused on individual wrongdoing. It did not attack the system per se, from which he also benefitted; he had little desire to reform its deeper structure. C. P. Hooft was, after all, “a declared supporter of the aristocratic-republican form of governing” and believed categorically that “the aristocratic regime is for us the most necessary and the safest [one].”40 (It should perhaps be noted here that, in the Dutch urban content, virtually no contradiction lay in the term “aristocratic-republican,” by which was generally meant an urban self-government of regenten elites who sought to preserve their independence from the influence of the stadhouder.41) The dimensions of the intraelite infighting that crystallized around a similar discourse of corruption appear even more obviously seven decades later in a struggle that engaged another Hooft: Hendrik Hooft. Hendrik Hooft, along with his colleague, Cornelis van Vlooswijk, vigorously opposed the draft of a “Unity Concept” (Concept tot Eenigheit) brought before the burgemeesters in May 1676. It contained fifteen “points of agreement” calculated to solidify the hold of the current regeerders on power. Fundamental were conditions setting “for all time” the number of burgemeesters at no more than twelve and controlling the circulation of burgemeester places among a limited number of candidates. Hooft and Vlooswijk objected vehemently to the content of this particular “Unity Concept,” but also expressed dislike of “all other contracten by which the regenten are able to bind their supporters more closely to them in order to advance their own objectives.” They further argued that such agreements “not only offer no benefits but in fact create occasions for more troubles and greater disaffection” throughout the polity and especially within the ruling elite. Behind a seemingly disinterested condemnation of “dirty politics,” however, lay a deep political divide. The four burgemeesters who proposed the “Unity Concept”—Cornelis van Outshoorn, Jan Munter, Joan Huydecoper, and Gillis Valckenier—were political adversaries of Hooft and Vlooswijk. Jonathan Israel has pointed out that the “rivalry between Vlackenier and Hooft deprived the city of much of its capacity to make its weight felt” in its ongoing conflict with Willem III. Thus the HooftVlooswijk resistance to this “Unity Concept” and the corruption they identified in it by no means struck at the underpinnings of regenten government in



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Amsterdam. Rather, they feared that this “Unity Concept” could be used to ostracize them and their clients from power or at least to reduce their influence considerably. Like the opposition voiced by Cornelis Pietersz Hooft, that of Hendrik Hooft and Vlooswijk did not seek to shift the structural basis of Amsterdam’s government or to expand in any significant way the catchment area of its participants. Little could better substantiate this conclusion than the fact that, by early January 1677, the two quarreling groups reconciled their differences in a new accord (although not, apparently, a formal written contract) in which both Hooft and Vlooswijk participated, to regulate the future elections of burgemeesters.42

HAMBURG: CORRUPTION AND CIVIL STRIFE Hamburg’s turbulent history during the course of the seventeenth century underscores no less the importance of situating corruption in the context of local political constellations. While many factors played a role in the conflicts that repeatedly roiled the city, corruption, and especially that which focused on individuals and individual moments, formed a major motif and an expedient discourse. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clashes between the two major governing bodies, the Senat and the Bürgerschaft, formed the alpha and omega of political life. (Obviously, neither the Senat nor the Bürgerschaft, or for that matter the vroedschap and the burgemeesters in Amsterdam, were monolithic in their opinions.) The relationship between these two bodies differed architectonically from that existing between vroedschap and burgemeesters. Whereas cooperation—or collusion—generally characterized relationships between the vroedschap and burgemeesters (and the contracten necessarily included both groups), in seventeenth-century Hamburg the Senat and Bürgerschaft repeatedly butted heads. The Bürgerschaft, in particular, charged the Senat with “corrupt practices” and used those charges in attempts to rework the entire balance of constitutional power in Hamburg, even though the Bürgers and their leaders (as well as the Senat) repeatedly emphasized their inherent conservatism in seeking to restore “venerable traditions.” What these traditions were, however, was open to interpretation.43 Single incidents repeatedly crystallized the fronts and set the constitutional pot boiling. Corruption appeared in various settings: in finances, in the exercise of justice, and in the distribution of preferments and offices. Perceived improper or especially highhanded practices produced prime moments for the articulation of dissent, such as in the conflict that arose in the late sixteenth century over the Senat’s right of cooption (Selbstergänzungsrecht). Technically cooption was not an “abuse,” but in this heated

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environment the Senat’s opponents branded it corrupt, arguing the point that “the Senat does not possess a power alien to that of the Bürgerschaft, but rather is entrusted with its governing powers by the Bürgerschaft.” The Bürgerschaft particularly identified how “general the suspicion is, that lineage and kin, gifts, favors, and presents are more useful in obtaining a seat in the Senat than is ability.”44 The Bürgerschaft labeled the family ties that played an all-important role in the Senat’s selection (Ratswahl) of 1663 as “corrupt” and impaneled a special commission to investigate. The resulting Recess regulated elections and determined the degrees of consanguinity or marriage affiliations permitted among members of the Senat. Yet the very same problems arose again (and again) to agitate political life for the rest of the century and end, literally, in bloodshed. 45 This discourse of corruption ran like a red thread through the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Reproaches of the Bürgerschaft against the Senat because of corruption and nepotism” triggered most civil unrest in these decades.46 If the exciting instances were particularized, at stake was the shape of the constitution and the very basis of government. Recesses and compromises came and went, but rarely settled anything for long (although the Principal Recess of 1712 proved more stable). Several attempts were made, for example, to prevent senators from taking gifts or, rather, bribes. In 1603, senators first received honoraria and swore to give up “all other emoluments, gifts, and considerations.” Apparently, however, this solution failed to satisfy the financial need—or greed—of senators who continued to pocket “tokens.”47 Similarly the members of another major collegial body in Hamburg, the Aldermen (Oberalten), the organ that represented the parishes and mediated between Senat and Bürgerschaft, also received a stipend, but that, too, did not prevent them from using municipal funds for their own benefit. In 1714, for example, one alderman embezzled 20,000 Marks from hospital moneys entrusted to him.48 What first seem here isolated cases of men behaving badly in office, however, really involve broader structural issues; a sense of prevailing immorality in the exercise of office, whether that of individuals or of entire governing bodies such as the Senat, drove constitutional tussles. The clearest and most important examples surrounded struggles over the administration of justice and the distribution of offices by the Senat; these stoked persistent rancor. The Imperial Commission, which arrived in Hamburg in 1708 seeking to end the worst of civil strife, stressed just these points, and a better regulation of justice headed the list of its desiderata. In its 1708 Gravamina, the Bürgerschaft had complained that “in modo procedeni there is much to be corrected; improvements are absolutely essential. A consultation is very rare, and one never finds a written relatio . . . indeed not even ratione decidendi are recorded.”



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Redress of grievances could only be sought with the very same senators who had committed procedural flaws.49 Legal brouhahas in these decades, then, almost routinely brewed up into battles over constitutional forms, provoking major crises and, eventually, political reforms. The “Wygand Affair” was only the most sensational of these and one that aired in the very public arena of print.50 In 1690, the lawyer August Wygand, once the darling of the Senat, purchased the office of bailiff (Gerichtsvogt), a position that seemingly moved him into the opposing camp of the Bürgerschaft. A few years later, the Senat accused him of embezzlement.51 Before anyone actually had audited his books, the Senat reacted vigorously, probably unconstitutionally, and, according to the Bürgerschaft, in a “partisan” (parteiisch) manner; it had Wygand arrested and removed from office. The procedure provoked outrage about the way in which the Senat obtained evidence and investigated an admittedly serious and possibly even accurate charge. Throughout the summer and fall of 1694, the Bürgerschaft mined this sequence of “highly unusual events” for material to use against the highhanded, “corrupt” behavior of the Senat. Wygand was eventually banished and went to Denmark where he connected with other Hamburg political refugees. Under the protection of the Danish king, he waged a war of words against the “tyrannous” policies of the Senat, eventually transforming a personal battle into a full-blown program for deep reforms in Hamburg’s government.52 Wygand’s jeremiads inflamed existing constitutional strife and revived concerns about the improper exercise of justice. Corruption formed the pivot in the Wygand incident as in many other cases during these turbulent decades. It was a charge the Senat and its opponents both used effectively as a political tool. The Senat had charged Wygand with one form of corruption—embezzlement—and Wygand countercharged with a weightier condemnation of the greater “corrupt” actions of an oligarchic, self-serving Senat. Wygand’s accusations were hardly original. In the 1570 Unionrezeß, members of the Bürgerschaft protested the arrogance and corruption (Bestechlichkeit) of the Senat; in 1641, it accused the Senat of diverting vast sums from the Treasury without the Bürgerschaft’s knowledge or permission; in 1663, it criticized the Senat’s nepotism in filling offices. This list by no means exhausts the catalog of outrages the Bürgerschaft had accumulated. Added to these grievances were a series of monetary scandals arising from municipal construction projects. These several corruptions thus stirred the embers of constitutional strife over the allocation of power and authority in government. The rhetorical sparring in the Wygand case illustrates the centrality but also the utility of charges of corruption in larger political battles. Wygand (wisely) launched his vehement published attacks from exile. The Senat

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quickly responded in print and also ordered Wygand’s pamphlets burned on the executioner’s block.53 Both sides played the corruption card, but each in different way. The Senat portrayed Wygand as a crook and a virtual traitor whose venomous publications sought to obscure his own corrupt practices by smearing the Senat. Wygand cast the case against him into the realm of systemic political malfeasance by arguing that the authority of the Senat was illicit and had been acquired only through methodical, coordinated corruption. The Senat carefully refused to play his game, presenting the whole affair as a criminum falsi (corruption in office) and deploying ad hominem attacks to blacken Wygand’s character. He was a clever opportunist and had married the widowed daughter of the previous bailiff albeit “against her father’s wishes.” When his father-in-law died, he borrowed money at interest to purchase the bailiff position and then misdirected the money given in trust to him. He speculated in all sorts of “projects,” using illicit profits to repay his creditors but also “to support his luxurious lifestyle . . . to buy and lay out gardens [and to bet] in high-stakes gambling with cards and dice.” The Senat marked him as corrupt in two ways: as an embezzler but also as a social climber with questionable morals. “Against his oath and duty,” he invested legal fees (Gerichtsgelder) for private gain. In particular, he embezzled a sum of 41,829 Marks, 12 Schillings from the bank to enrich himself in a shady business with a “sly Jew” named Mayer Marx and got away with it until their schemes became publicly notorious.54 The Senat dismissed Wygand’s more expansive countercharges as “false and fabricated” or “at the most irrelevant.” His “inflammatory remarks,” his “Discentereyen,” his charges of the miscarriage of justice, and his characterization of the Senat as an illegally functioning authority were merely the attempts of a thief, a demagogue, and (perhaps) a traitor to deflect attention from the real issue: his own criminality.55 Wygand held a different hand and played it skillfully. He wove a story of his own road-to-Damascus conversion. He admitted that he had originally supported the Senat during the civic troubles of earlier decades, believing the Senat to be the lawfully established highest authority in the polity and that the Bürgerschaft had unlawfully engaged in revolt against it. The civic upheaval he referred to was the Jastram-Snitger revolt.56 Cord Jastram and Hieronymous Snitger were two leaders of the Bürgerschaft against the Senat; eventually they called upon the assistance of Denmark. They were executed as traitors in 1686. Throughout the nineteenth and even twentieth century the Jastram-Snitger “disorder” (Wirren) remained a point of debate between conservative and more progressive or liberal forces in Hamburg: were the two demagogues and traitors or early democrats?57



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Wygand’s original acceptance of what he regarded as the legitimate authority in Hamburg began to wane, he wrote, with the execution of Jastram and Snitger. He “discovered” that the Senat had deliberately worked to turn the vast majority of Hamburgers, including many of Jastram and Snitger’s one-time supporters, against these two “early champions of civic freedom” (“Vorfechter der Bürgerlichen Freyheit”). Among other charges, the Senat spread the rumor that Jastram and Snitger intended to deliver Hamburg into the hands of an old foe: Denmark.58 After studying the statutes on which Hamburg’s government was based, Wygand concluded that “sovereignty [the highest authority in the polity] lies with the Bürgerschaft and that Senat members . . . were nothing more than the deputies of the Bürgerschaft, [empowered by the Bürgerschaft] to administer certain tasks including justice.” This correct distribution of political power in Hamburg, however, had been deliberately corrupted by the Senat “through all sorts of clever tricks” that had leeched away the Bürgerschaft’s power and robbed it of the respect rightly due it. According to Wygand, Jastram and Snitger (and all the others who had opposed the Senat) sought only to restore the proper working of government. It was its aberrant form that had condemned Wygand. Wygand, thus, not only defended himself against “these totally false” charges but flipped them around; the Senat, not he, was the embezzler, the fraud, the cheat. Because the Senat lacked all restraint on its power, it committed crimes with impunity. He charged that, for instance, since the founding of the Hamburg Bank some “24 1/2 Tonne” of its income had been pilfered and had ended up in “private purses.” It was, he hinted darkly, not too difficult to figure out who bore the real responsibility for the miserable financial state of the city and the virtual bankruptcy of the Treasury.59 The battle once joined continued through the end of the century, culminating in Wygand’s anonymous publication of a 1699 “Manifesto.” In this publication, he laid out a program of reform for Hamburg’s government principally gauged to correct abuses and halt corrupt practices but that also asserted an older radical argument that “in Hamburg there exists only one [political] class, that of the Bürgerschaft.” This position effectively placed sovereignty in the hands of the Bürgerschaft alone; the Senat served merely as the first servant of the state.60 Wygand argued that without the restoration of the Bürgerschaft’s power, “there would never be an end to corruption in Hamburg.”61 The solution finally achieved in 1712 placed sovereignty indivisibly in both Bürgerschaft and Senat, an outcome that most historians have seen as pretty much betokening the final triumph of the Senat. To many contemporaries, it signified the final defeat of a party of “true liberty.”62

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CONCLUSION Amsterdam and Hamburg were not typical early modern cities; they were commercial pacemakers critical to the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century European economy. Politically, too, they stood out, alongside the Swiss cantons and the Venetian Serenissima, as exemplars of self-governing citystates and republics. Thus constitutional conflicts within them had Europewide implications. Despite their size and importance, a small group of men guided their political fortunes and made crucial political decisions. In each city, everyone expected people to benefit from holding political office and even to distribute favors to family and friends. Alone such profit taking—in both the literal and metaphorical senses—therefore hardly constituted corruption or, to be more historically accurate, rarely actuated charges of nepotism, bribery, extortion, and manipulation. Yet, as this brief survey shows, certain political circumstances could radically rotate perceptions of what were acceptable or unacceptable behaviors. The deployment of such charges depended, therefore, on a series of elements, and the uses of corruption in a political sense likewise varied with the structures of each city, with individual circumstances, and with shifting political events, themselves sometimes influenced by external situations. Corruption, therefore, defies easy categorization. It can be, as we have seen in the case of seventeenth-century Hamburg, the expression of deep grievances and a tool in constitutional strife leading to a reordering of government or, at the same time elsewhere, as in Amsterdam, a discourse in political in-fighting within a regenten elite that never sought to shift political arrangements at base but rather to redistribute political plums. A close study of Amsterdam and Hamburg does not necessarily produce the material for a global model to understand corruption in the early modern world, or even in early modern “republics” more generally. But, if it does, it proposes a flexible framework that commands an approach rather than sets conclusions or offers predictability. It is furthermore a method predicated on a meticulous probing of peculiar circumstances, local practices, unique structures, and even personalities for as long as government remained (mostly) dependent on decisions made in individual cases and on individual events. In situations where the discrete existence of “private” and “public” goods and needs remained inchoate at best, and politicking remained highly individualized, modern definitions of corruption, forcefully shaped as they are by nineteenth-century historiography, can only lead us astray and cause us to miss or misinterpret their true historical value. Likewise, these two cases link politics to economic self-interest, sometimes directly, but more often indirectly and obliquely. The contracten van



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correspondentie divvied out positions in Amsterdam’s government among a relatively small group and that distribution brought significant economic benefits with it. Moreover, the machinations of regenten who sought to profit from the expansion of the city’s area illustrate how men with political clout manipulated momentary situations to their clear economic advantage. In Hamburg, too, the economic profits connected to high civic office, such as Senator or Bürgermeister, were striking. To what extent, however, we can correlate these perquisites of office with greater political programs or ideologies, or tie them tightly to groups holding similar economic ambitions, is less evident. There were, for example, frequent clashes between the Hamburg Senate and the city’s Chamber of Commerce on matters of economic policy. Better than in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, however, Hamburg’s turbulent situation in the late seventeenth century brings to light a politico-economic split between social groups (a somewhat similar schism developed in mid-eighteenth-century Amsterdam). Opposition to the “corruption” of the Senate came principally, but by no means exclusively, from members of the Bürgerschaft who increasingly felt isolated from real political power. One might usefully cast this conflict as between the great merchants, on the one hand, and artisans or lesser traders, on the other. Some nineteenth-century historians viewed these upheavals as also representing a conflict between “democracy” and “oligarchy” and usually expressed a clear preference for the latter. Yet, again, it is hard to pinpoint the precise economic goals at stake. In each case, however, the issue of fiscal probity loomed large in urban politics. Nothing raised political hackles more rapidly than the related charges of fiscal corruption, administrative incompetence, or diversion of municipal funds. Still, these disagreements were essentially political in nature and provoked, as we have seen, essentially political battles in which jockeying for economic goods remained a background issue; never absent but also rarely to the fore. NOTES This chapter is a slightly rewritten version of the contribution by the same name that appeared in the Journal of Social History 45, 3 (Spring 2012): 582–604. In addition, some minor mistakes in bibliography and notes have been silently corrected. I would like to thank Renate Bridenthal and Michael Miller for their careful reading of earlier drafts and their suggestions for improvements. 1. See the various esssays in Niels Grüne and Simona Slaniĉka, eds. Korruption: Historische Annäherungen an eine Grundfigur politischer Kommunikation (Göttingen, 2010), especially Grüne, “‘Und sie wissen nicht, was es ist’: Ansätze und Blickpunkte historischer Korruptionsforschung,” 11–34.

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2. I am hardly the first to suggest this. In his study of the regenten in Gouda, for example, J[acob] J[ohannes] De Jong points out that the practice of allowing “substitutes” to fill positions in government “has earned these governors a bad name in the historiography” especially among “historians from the previous [nineteenth] century.” Met goed fatsoen: de elite in een Hollandse stad, Gouda 1700– 1780 (The Hague, 1985), 37. Rudolf Dekker also dates the “modern concept” of corruption as having been born in the nineteenth century. “Corruptie en ambtelijke ethiek in historisch perspectif,” in De Gids: nieuwe vaderlandsche letteroefeningen 194 (1984): 117. The historical study of political corruption is currently the subject of a cooperative research project at the University of Bielefeld and was the focus of a 2008 conference: “Political Corruption in Historical Perspective,” 20–22 February 2008. 3. A list of numerous articles on the subject of corruption and nepotism can be found in: Robert Fruin et. al., eds., Repertorium der verhandelingen en bijdragen, betrefende de geschiedenis des vaderlands, in mengelwerken en tijdschriften tot op 1860 verschenen (Leiden, 1863); Supplement .  .  . (Leiden, 1872); Tweede supplement, .  .  . (Leiden, 1884); and Derde supplement, . . . (Leiden, 1893). Pieter Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam (3 vols, 2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1948–1949), 2: 316–17. 4. Some exemplary titles include: Jacob de Witte van Citters, “Hoe onze voorvaders aan een ambt kwamen,” De Nederlandsche Spectator (30 April 1864): 138–41; Jacob de Witte van Citters, “Een hoofdstuk uit de geschiedenis van het nepotismus,” De Nederlandsche Spectator (17 October 1863): 331–35; A. C. de Graaf, “Verkoop van ambten, 1747,” De Navorscher (1869): 545; F. G. Slotbouwer, “Oligarische misbruiken in het Friesche staatsbestuur,” Nijhoff Bijdragen (=Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde) 3rd series, 1 (1882): 67; and “Regeerings-intrigues,” Algemeen Nederlandsch familieblad: orgaan van de Vereeniging Het Nederlandsch Familie-Archief (1883–1884), nos. 30, 32. On such practices within the church, see Van Citters, “In de kerk zooals in den staat werd eertijds gekuipt,” De Nederlandsche Spectator (1864): 242 and Jan Izaak van Doorninck, “Een kerkelijk contract van correspondentie,” Verslag der handelingen van de . . . vergadering der Vereeniging tot Beoefening van Overijsselsch Regt en Geschiedenis (1886): 37. The most extensive work on the contracten, continuing extensive excerpts from documents, is: Van Citters, Contracten van correspondentie en andere bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van het ambstbejag in de Republiek der Vereenigde Nederlanden (The Hague, 1873). On the actions of the stadhouder Willem III in this regard, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), 837. 5. Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 146. Adams mentions the development of contracts of correspondence in Amsterdam from 1752, Enkhuizen from 1730, Gouda from 1748, Hoorn from the 1720s, and in Leiden from 1702–1721 and 1741. But contracts existed before the eighteenth century in unwritten as well as written forms, see above n3 and n4. 6. Luuc Kooijmans, Onder regenten: de elite in een Hollandse stad, Hoorn, 1700–1780 (Amsterdam, 1985), 14. For an excellent discussion of how contracts worked



7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

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out in practice and in particular instances, see Maarten Prak, Gezeten burgers: de elite in een Hollandse stad Leiden 1700–1780 (The Hague, 1985), 58–106. On clientage/patronage and its corruption, see Geert H. Janssen, Princely Power in the Dutch Republic: Patronage and William Frederick of Nassau (1613–1664) (Manchester, 2008), quote 174; Robert Harding, “Corruption and the Moral Boundaries of Patronage,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 47–64; Sharon Kettering, “Gift-giving and Patronage in Early Modern France,” French History 2 (1988): 131–51; and, on the specifically Dutch situation, Irma Thoen, Strategic Affection? Gift Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Amsterdam, 2007), which, however, does not primarily focus on political gifting. Johann Gustav Gallois, Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg (Hamburg, 1866), 155–56; Heinrich Laufenberg, Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Hamburg, Altona und Umgebung (2 vols, Hamburg, 1911–1931), 1: 57; Johann Gustav Gallois, Hamburg und sein Proletariat im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Eine wirtschaftliche Vorstudie zur Geschichte der modernen Arbeiterbewegung im niederelbischen Städtegebiet (Hamburg, 1910), 25, 30. Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York, 1986), 192; Dekker, “Corruptie,” 116. Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London, 1993), 5, 211. In an examination of the topic for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Florence, Jean-Claude Waquet observes the problems with the “innocence theory” in respect to early modern societies and political systems. He insists that “[t]he hackneyed idea that the ancien régime was an innocent society in which happy officials were engaged in corrupt acts which were not actually corrupt because no law considered them as criminal seems to me excessively optimistic, indeed far from reality. It does not take into account the fact that moral rules concerning integrity had been established very early on.” Waquet, Corruption: Ethics and Power in Florence, 1600–1770, trans. Linda McCall (University Park, PA, 1992), 12. Sharon Kettering argues that an operative idea of corruption existed in seventeenth-century France. After all, some officials were tried for corruption, even executed, while others who did the same things, were not. Patrons, Brokers, and Clients, 193. More specifically on “gifting” and its problems, Kettering, “Gift-giving,” and Thoen, Strategic Affection? Nico Randeraad and Dirk Jan Wolfram observe, for example, that “[c]omplaints about the all-pervasive nepotism and corruption greatly contributed to the crisis of the Republic in the last decades of the eighteenth century,” although that was apparently not the case in the previous century. “Constraints on Clientism: The Dutch Path to Modern Politics, 1848–1917,” in Clientism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. Simona Piattoni (Cambridge, 2001), 101. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI, 2000), 85, 88. Florike Egmond has explored corruption in the legal system of the early modern Netherlands on the basis of individual cases in “Recht en krom: corruptie,

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ongelijkheid en rechtsbescherming in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden,” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 116 (2001): 1–33. 13. The literature on these subjects is vast. See, for instance, Grüne and Slaniĉka, Korruption; Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients; Janssen, Princely Power; Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators, and Coalitions (Oxford, 1974); Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge, 1984); Harding, “Corruption,”; Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001); and Antoni Maczak, ed., with the assistance of Elisabeth Müller-Luckner, Klientelsysteme im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1988). Heiko Droste, “Patronage in der frühen Neuzeit: Institutionen und Kulturform,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 30 (2003): 555–90, reviews much of the literature on patronage produced in the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting the need for renewed investigations of patronage from a cultural historical perspective. He notes: “In early modern times patronage was a broadly accepted medium for [achieving] social mobility, in which self-interest did not have to be concealed. Rather it could be formulated as a legitimate presentation of social change. This occurred in a language, or rhetoric, foreign to present-day readers,” 589. 14. Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients, 192. Harding, “Corruption,” 47. Several scholars working on cities in the Netherlands have argued—convincingly—that urban oligarchic governments remained quite efficient until about the 1780s. See Prak, Gezeten burgers; Kooijmans, Onder regenten; and De Jong, Met goed fatsoen. Similarly, venality was not corruption when it was the system: William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Office in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1996). Even what we regard as corrupt and reprehensible practices, such as the “sale” of Hessian soldiers to the British for use against the American rebels, looks different when situated in the state of Hesse where the “profits” from the trade underwrote programs of reform and improvement; see Charles Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785 (Cambridge, 1987). 15. Perhaps scholars should also be more rigorous in questioning the clarity of a clean and sharp separation between public and private in the modern world. 16. Johann Heinrich Bartels, Sendschreiben an meine vielgeliebten Mitbürger von J.H. Bartels, Dr., als Privatmann, und mit Stolz setzt er hinzu: als Bürger Hamburgs (Hamburg, 1849), 8–9. On his political position, Gisela Rückleben, “Rat und Bürgerschaft in Hamburg 1595–1686: Innere Bindungen und Gegensätze” (dissertation, Marburg/Lahn, 1969) 20–21. 17. Harding, “Corruption,” 47. 18. Dekker refers to corruption as a “culturally dependent phenomenon” that, therefore, “not only differed from place to place but also time to time.” “Corruptie,” 116. 19. The number of comparative studies is still not large, although things are by no means as bleak as when Peter Burke noted in 1988 that he “expected



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comparative history to attract more interest and to develop more quickly than it in fact did in the 1970s and 1980s.” Venice and Amsterdam, xiii. There certainly has been some work, notably, for example, in intellectual history, comparing Dutch and German republicanisms: Martin van Gelderen, “Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580–1650” and Hans Erich Bödeker, “Debating the respublica mixta: German and Dutch Political Discourses around 1700,” both in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2002), 195–217, 219–46. Erik Lindberg has recently published a study of Hamburg’s political economy in which the analysis turns on a comparison with Lübeck, “The Rise of Hamburg as a Global Marketplace in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 641–62. 20. Gisela Rückleben observes that “there was no need at all for [well-defined] theoretical oppositions . . . rather quotidian events were quite enough to generate mistrust and tension and to poison the atmosphere between magistrates and citizens.” “Rat und Bürgerschaft,” 59. 21. Johan E. Elias stresses the “major role” played by “personal feuds and animosities.” Geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsche regentenpatriciaat (The Hague, 1923), 46. Even a superficial reading of the pamphlets generated in the political strife of the late seventeenth century in Hamburg reveals the importance of personal incidents and antagonisms. See the so-called Lochau Collection, in StAHBg, Bibliothek, “Acta Hamburgensia,” omnibus volumes 201–21. The handwritten commentary on the pamphlets penned by Senator Lochau underscores this fact. 22. My discussion of corruption and government in Amsterdam and Hamburg here takes religion and religious dissension into consideration only very briefly. Religion was, of course, integral to, and frequently also at the base of, many conflicts. See Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge, 1985) and Rudolf B. Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam (5 vols, Amsterdam, 1965–1978). 23. Quoted in George Willem Vreede, “Familie-regeringen in de republiek der Vereenigde Nederlanden,” Geschied- en Letterkundige Herinneringen (Gorinchem, 1836), 2:30. 24. On the burgemeester, see Hans Bontemantel, De Regeeringe van Amsterdam, soo in ‘t civiel als crimineel en militaire (1653–1672), ed. G. W. Kernkamp (2 vols, The Hague, 1897), 101, 133–34, 152–53. More generally on the organization of government in Amsterdam: Hajo Brugmans, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, vol. 2, 80jarige oorlog 1544/1621; vol. 3, Bloeitijd 1621/1697; vol. 4, Afgaand getij 1697/1795, ed. Izaak J. Brugmans (6 vols, 2nd. rev. ed., Utrecht, 1972–1973); Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, Marijke Carasso-Kok, Willem Frijhoff, and Boudwijn Bakker, eds., vol. 2,1, Centrum van de wereld, 1578–1650; Marijke Carasso-Kok, Willem Frijhoff, and Maarten Prak, eds., vol. 2,2, Zelfbewuste Stadstaat, 1650–1813 (Amsterdam:,

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25. 26.

27.

2 8. 29.

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2004–2005). Still useful is Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam, in zyne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, voorregten, koophandel, gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe (4 vols, Amsterdam, 1760). Bontemantel, Regeeringe van Amsterdam, xxxi. The quote comes from Kernkamp’s introduction. The two major governing councils in Hamburg were the Bürgerschaft and the Senat. The Senat was made up of four Bürgermeister and twenty-four senators or Ratsherren. Of the four Bürgermeisters, three had to be trained in law and, of the twenty-four senators, eleven were to be lawyers. The rest were almost invariably merchants. Sometimes the Senat was also referred to as the Rat, which is the term used in many other German cities to designate the city council, although the Hamburg Senat also included syndics and secretaries in addition to Ratsherren. The Reformation revived and greatly increased the powers and visibility of ancient parish organs, spawning three new collegial bodies composed of 144 subdeacons (the One Hundred Forty-Four), 48 deacons (the Forty-Eight), and 12 aldermen (three senior deacons from each parish, known as the Oberalten) representing the four metropolitan parishes. After the addition of a fifth parish in 1685, the first two became, respectively, the One Hundred Eighty and the Sixty. The number of aldermen rose to fifteen. Friedrich Georg Buek, Die hamburgischen Oberalten, ihre bürgerliche Wirksamkeit und ihre Familien (Hamburg, 1840); Nicholas A. Westphalen, Hamburgs Verfassung und Verwaltung in ihrer allmähligen Entwicklung bis auf die neueste Zeit (2 vols, Hamburg, 1846), 1:216–19; Rainer Postel, “Reformation und bürgerliche Mitsprache in Hamburg,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 65 (1979): 1–20. The provisions of the Wahlrezeß of 1663 (which had often been ignored during the later seventeenth century) were cited as the norm for determining selection of senators as well as setting limits on the familial relationships allowed for members of the Senat. Concerning familial relationships, for instance, Arts. 12–14 prohibited fathers and sons, two brothers, fathers- and sons-in-law, and the like from sitting simultaneously. Westphalen, Hamburgs Verfassung und Verwaltung, 1:51. Quoted in Westphalen, Hamburgs Verfassung und Verwaltung, 1:41–42. On the organization of Hamburg’s government, see the short descriptions in Whaley, Religious Toleration, 13–22 and Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–1830 (New York, 1990), 17–22. By far the best and most comprehensive guide to all aspects of Hamburg’s government is Johann Klefeker, Sammlung der Hamburgischen Gesetze und Verfassung in Bürger- und Kirchlichen, auch Cammer- Handlungs- und übrigen Policey-Angelegenheiten und Geschäften samt historischen Einleitungen (12 vols, Hamburg, 1765–1774). Hamburgs Verfassung und Verwaltung, 1:14–15; Friedrich Voigt, Beiträge zur hamburgischen Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 1, Bericht von 1644 mit Vorschlägen für die städtischen Verwaltung, insbesondere durch Ersparen an den Besoldungen der Beamten und Angestellten and vol. 2, Der Verkauf, später das Verpachten städtischer Dienststellen in Hamburg, 1684–1810 (Hamburg, 1910–1911, 1918). A list of purchasable or leasable offices



31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

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is found in Jonas Ludwig von Heß, Hamburg, topographisch, politisch und historish beschrieben (2nd. ed., 3 vols, Hamburg, 1810–1811), 3:431–32. Adams, Familial State; Luuc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam, 1997); Robert Fruin, “De Correspondentien van regenten in de Republiek,” in Robert Fruin’s verspreide geschriften: met aanteekeningen, toevoegsels en verbeteringen uit des schrijvers nalatenschap, ed. Petrus Johannes Blok, Pieter Lodewijk Muller, and Samuel Muller (10 vols, The Hague, 1900 [1899]–1905), 9:186. Van Citters, “Hoe onze voorvaders aan een ambt kwamen.” Himself a scion of an old regenten family, Elias acknowledged that the contracten “gave strength and unity to urban politics,” but realized that they also contained “the germ of later corruption.” Geschiedenis, 27. Israel, Dutch Republic, 607; Johan E. Elias, De Vroedschap van Amsterdam, 1578– 1795 (2 vols, Harlem, 1903, 1905), 136 describes how within the space of two years the powerful Bickers brothers were rendered impotent by shifting them into honorific offices where they had little political clout. Elias, Geschiedenis, 9–12. Elias observes that “no less than the mostly unchanged old patriciate in the other cities of Holland, the fresh-baked patricians in the Amstel city honored the ‘aristocratic’ tradition.” Ibid., 25–27. Israel, Dutch Republic, 1098–121; Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New York, 1977); Wayne te Brake, Regents and Rebels: The Revolutionary World of an Eighteenth-Century Dutch City (Oxford, 1989); Niek C. F. van Sas, “The Patriot Revolution: New Perspectives,” in The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 91–122; Cornelis H. E. de Wit, De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie in Nederland 1780–1813: kritische onderzoek van een historisch beeld en herwaarding van een periode (Heerlen, 1965); Cornelis H. E. de Wit, De Nederlandse revolutie van de achttiende eeuw: oligarchie en proletariat (Oirsbeek, 1974). Elias, Geschiedenis, 25. “Deliberatie op de verder vergrotinge ende fortificatie van dese Stadt. Anno 1612 in Aprili gevallen,” quoted in Nicolaas de Roever, “Tweeërlei regenten,” Oud-Holland 7 (1889): 69. Elias, Geschiedenis, 25; de Roever, “Twee regenten.” Elias, Geschiedenis, 55, 55n4 (C. P. Hooft quote). This description is also too simple because “republicanism” in the Dutch context did not only signify opposition to the stadhouder. Still, there was a strong antimonarchical edge to Dutch republicanism. Thus, aristocratic government could be easily viewed as republican in this situation and, indeed, many of the contracten attempted to close regenten ranks against the interference of the stadhouder in urban affairs. Wyger R. E. Velema, “‘That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy’: Anti-monarchism in Early Modern Dutch Political Thought,” in van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, 1:9–26. See also Jonathan Israel, “Monarchy, Orangism, and Republicanism in the Later Dutch Gold Age,” Second Golden

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Age Lecture, Amsterdams Centruum voor de Studie van de Gouden Eeuw, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 11 March 2004; Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, “The Limits of Present-Day Historiography of Republicanism,” De achttiende eeuw 37 (2005): 75–89; and Clé Lesger, “Merchants in Charge: The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550–1700,” in The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret C. Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt, and Catherine Secretan (New York, 2008), 99–122. Hamburg’s republicans were equally nervous about monarchical threats, but these were generally external (such as the attempts the Danish kings repeatedly made to exercise sovereignty over the city). The Holy Roman Emperor and, for that matter, the elector/king of Prussia were usually viewed as Hamburg’s protectors against Danish pretensions. Yet, during the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century, the Bürgerschaft often fought vigorously against the intervention of imperial commissions, seeing in them and the men who were their members the supporters of a “tyrannical” Senat. 42. Robert Fruin, “Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Burgemeesterschap van Amsterdam tijdens de Republiek,” in Blok et. al., Verspreide geschriften, 4:320–25; Israel, Dutch Republic, 821. Fruin notes that “the party chiefs” found ways, “also in the absence of formal contacts, through which concord (eendracht) could be re-established.” “Bijdrage,” 4:325. 43. Hans-Dieter Loose, ed., Hamburg: Geschichte der Stadt und ihre Bewohner, vol. 1, Von den Anfängen bis zur Reichsgründung (Hamburg, 1982), 123–25; Heinz Stoob, “Rat und Bürgerschaft in Hamburg am Ausgang des Mittelalters,” in Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde in der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Wilfried Ehbrecht (Cologne and Vienna, 1980), 357–68. Westphalen, Hamburgs Verfassung und Verwaltung, 2:1–2, 16; Klefeker, Sammlung, 2:448–58. The two standard works on constitutional conflict in Hamburg are: Gisela Rückleben, “Rat und Bürgerschaft,” and Hermann Rückleben, Die Niederwerfung der hamburgischen Ratsgewalt: Kirchliche Bewegung und bürgerliche Unruhen im ausgehende 17. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1970). Gisela Rückleben observes that in a “collision” between Senat and Bürgerschaft in 1619, both sides rested their demands on “venerable traditions” (“Rat und Bürgerschaft,” 62). Important for a broader understanding of constitutional issues and conflicts in Hamburg is the foundational work of Otto Brunner, Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte (2nd ed., Göttingen, 1968). 44. Geert Seelig, Die geschichtliche Entwicklung der hamburgischen Bürgerschaft und die hamburgischen Notabeln (Hamburg, 1900), 63. 45. StAHbg, Erbgessene Bürgerschaft, Nr. 1, vol. 3, 1029, quoted in Loose, Hamburg, 271. 46. Gerd Augner, Die kaiserliche Kommission der Jahre 1708–1712: Hamburgs Beziehung zu Kaiser and Reich zu Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1984), 9. 47. Martin Reißmann, Die hamburgische Kaufmannschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts in sozialgeschichtlicher Sicht (Hamburg, 1975), 360–61; Joachim Whaley, “Symbolism for the Survivors: The Disposal of the Dead in Hamburg in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London, 1981), 80–105.



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48. Buek, Oberalten, 196. 49. Quoted in Augner, Kaiserliche Kommission, 102–3. 50. See Rückleben, Niederwerfung, 247–54, for a concise discussion of the Wygand case. The best and fullest treatment is Manfred Asendorf, “Der Fall Wygand oder: Von der Bürgerrechtsbewegung zur Demokratie, Ein Beitrag über Hamburger Verhältnisse des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 18 (1989): 379–414. Asendorf mined not only the many publications that appeared at the time (see list below) but also Wygand’s unpublished writings (in StAHbg, Senat Cl. VII Lit Pg4). The affair provoked a flurry of charges and countercharges in the pamphlet press, see these in the Lochau Collection, StAHBg, Bibliothek, “Acta Hamburgensia,” especially Dero Königl. Majest. zu Dännemarck Norwegen Gestalten Raths August Wygands Vortrab Der nach und nach von Ihm zu Vertehigung seiner Ehre und Unschuld heraus zugebenden Schrifften, . . . (Altona, 1696) in omnibus volume 7:13; and further 7:16; 7:24–26; 7:28–30; 7:40; 7:46– 48; 7:50; 7:53; 8:38–39; 8:41–42; 8:45–47; 9:25–28; 11:55; 15:30. 51. Urtheil in Sachen Fisc. In Crim Anklagern contra Lic. Aug. Wygand Angeklagten, from 10 May 1695, Lit. E in Species Facti; Oder Kurtzer Begriff/ Des höchst straffbahren Betriebs/ under dr schwehren Verbrechen/ Des ehemaligen Gerichts-Voigts August Wygands, . . . (Hamburg, 1699). 52. In “Der Fall Wygand,” Asendorf traces the roots of a democratic movement to the late seventeenth century and casts Wygand as Bürgerrechtler avant la lettre. While I do not find this interpretation completely convincing, there is no doubt that Wygand was, or became, a committed opponent of the Senat’s “antidemocratic” tendencies, at least as he viewed them. 53. E.E. Rahts der Stadt Hamburg Warnungs-Edict, Wieder den von August Wygandt Durch öffentliches Druck spargirten Verlogenen und Ehrlosen Vortrab (Hamburg, 1697). This appeared in response to the publication of Wygand’s Vortrab. 54. Species facti, 3–5, 12. 55. Ibid., 11, 31–33. 56. Wygand, Vortrab, 1. 57. This is an exceedingly brief and simplified rendering of the complicated Jastram-Snitger upheaval in the 1680s that had broad constitutional, imperial, and international implications for Hamburg and northern Europe. It formed a major moment in the long-term struggle of the Senat and Bürgerschaft for sovereignty in Hamburg. See Hans-Dieter Loose, “Die Jastram-Snitger Wirren in der zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 53 (1967): 1–20; Heinrich Erdmann, Hamburg vor 200 Jahren oder die Jastram-Snitger’schen Wirren: (1674–1686) (Hamburg, 1886); Christian Friedrich Wurm, “Der europäische Hintergrund der Snitger-Jastram’schen Wirren in Hamburg 1686: Aus archivalischen Quellen,” Hamburgisches Akademisches und Real-Gymnasium: Verzeichniss der Vorlesungen (Hamburg, 1855), 1–42. For the expression of a later, typical anti-Snitger position (this one in verse), see Hieronymous Schnittger’s letztes Thun und Treiben. Unpartheiisch dargestellt von einem hochbejahrten hamburger Bürger (Hamburg, 1836).

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58. Wygand, Vortrab, 6–8. Asendorf presents this conversion as a “Saul/Paul” moment, when Wygand “saw the light.” That may well be true, but it is also true that this was a convenient argument for Wygand to make in the 1690s in his own behalf. “Der Fall Wygand.” 59. Wygand, Vortrab, 14. 60. Die so wohl in gemeinen kayserliche, als ihren absonderlichen Statuten- und Recessenmäßigen Rechten unümstößlich gegründete Hamburgische Bürgerliche Freyheit: Oder Gründliches Manifest und Darthuung, Daß I. In Hamburg nicht mehr als ein eintziger Stand, nemlich der versammlet Erbgesessenen Hambugis. Bürgerschafft, anzutreffen . . . / Von einem Der Erbgesessenen Bürgerschaft Aufrichtig zugethanen Stadt-Kinde (n.p., 1699). 61. Kurtzer Entwurff unde Vorstellung der Mittel woduch Hamburg nechst Gott wieder zu ehmaligen, ja noch besserem Floor und Aufnahme, als es jemahlen gehabt zubringen (1696) quoted in Asendorf, “Der Fall Wygand,” 400–401. 62. How final this defeat was is open to some debate. Certainly many late-eighteenth-century observers agreed that the execution of Jastram and Snitger and the 1712 constitutional reform sounded the death knell for Hamburg’s “republican character.” Jonas Ludwig von Heß, Topographisch-politisch-historische Beschreibung von Hamburg (Hamburg, 1796), 3:280. Still, and in many ways, the Bürgerschaft was not as quietly supine as this and later estimations seemed to assume.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Julia. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY, 2005. Asendorf, Manfred. “Der Fall Wygand oder: Von der Bürgerrechtsbewegung zur Demokratie, Ein Beitrag über Hamburger Verhältnisse des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 18 (1989): 379–414. Augner, Gerd. Die kaiserliche Kommission der Jahre 1708–1712: Hamburgs Beziehung zu Kaiser und Reich zu Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Hamburg, 1984. Boissevain, Jeremy. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators, and Coalitions. Oxford, 1974. Bontemantel, Hans. De Regeeringe van Amsterdam, soo in ‘t civiel als crimineel en militaire (1653–1672), ed. G. W. Kernkamp. 2 vols. The Hague, 1897. Brake, Wayne te. Regents and Rebels: The Revolutionary World of an Eighteenth-Century Dutch City. Oxford, 1989. Brugmans, Hajo. Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, ed. Isaak J. Brugmans. 6 vols. 2nd rev. ed. Utrecht, 1972–1973. Brunner, Otto. Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte. 2nd ed. Göttingen, 1968. Buek, Friedrich Georg. Die hamburgischen Oberalten, ihre bürgerliche Wirksamkeit und ihre Familien. Hamburg, 1840. Carasso-Kok, Marijke, Willem Frijhoff, and Boudwijn Bakker, eds. Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, vol. 2, 1: Centrum van de wereld, 1578–1650. Amsterdam, 2004.



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Carasso-Kok, Marijke, Willem Frijhoff, and Maarten Prak, eds. Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, vol. 2, 2: Zelfbewuste stadstaat, 1650–1813. Amsterdam, 2005. Citters, Jacob de Witte van. Contracten van correspondentie en andere bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van het ambstbejag in de Republiek der Vereenigde Nederlanden. The Hague, 1873. Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison, WI, 2000. Dekker, Rudolf. “Corruptie en ambtelijk ethiek in historisch perspectif.” De Gids: nieuwe vaderlandsche letteroefeningen 194 (1984): 116–21. Doyle, William. Venality: The Sale of Office in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford, 1996. Droste, Heiko. “Patronage in der frühen Neuzeit: Institutionen und Kulturform.” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 30 (2003): 555–90. Egmond, Florike. “Recht en krom: corruptie, ongelijkheid en rechtsbescherming in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden.” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 116 (2001): 1–33. Ehbrecht, Wilfried, ed. Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde in der werdenden Neuzeit. Cologne and Vienna, 1980. Eisenstedt, Shmuel Noah, and Luis Roniger. Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society. Cambridge, 1984. Elias, Johan. Geschiedenis van het Amsterdamsche regentenpatriciaat. The Hague, 1923.    . De vroedschap van Amsterdam, 1578–1795. 2 vols. Harlem, 1903–1905. Repr. Amsterdam, 1963. Erdmann, Heinrich. Hamburg vor 200 Jahren oder die Jastram-Snitger’schen Wirren: (1674–1686). Hamburg, 1886. Evenhuis, Rudolf B. Ook dat was Amsterdam. 5 vols. Amsterdam, 1965–78. Fruin, Robert. Robert Fruin’s verspreide geschriften: met aantekeingen, toevoegsels en verbeteringen uit des schrijvers nalatenschap. 10 vols. The Hague, 1899–1905. Fruin, Robert et al., eds. Repertorium der verhandelingen en bijdragen, betreffende de geschiedenis des vaderlands, in mengelwerken en tijdschriften tot op 1860 verschenen. Leiden, 1863. Supplement. Leiden, 1872. Tweede supplement. Leiden, 1884. Derde supplement. Leiden, 1893. Gallois, Johann Gustav. Geschichte der Stadt Hamburg. Hamburg, 1866. Geyl, Pieter. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam. 3 vols. 2nd ed. Amsterdam, 1948–1949. Gelderen, Martin van, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 2002. Grüne, Niels, and Simona Slaniĉka, eds. Korruption: Historische Annäherungen an eine Grundfigur politischer Kommunikation. Göttingen, 2010. Hans-Dieter Loose, ed. Hamburg: Geschichte der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner, vol. 1, Von den Anfängen bis zur Reichsgründung. Hamburg, 1982. Harding, Robert. “Corruption and the Moral Boundaries of Patronage.” In Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, 47–64. Princeton, NJ, 1981. Heß, Joans Ludwig von. Hamburg, topographisch, politisch und historisch beschrieben. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Hamburg, 1810–1811.

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Ingrao, Charles. The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785. Cambridge, 1987. Israel, Jonathan I. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford, 1995. Jacob, Margaret C., and Wijnand Mijnhardt, eds. The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY, 1992. Jacob, Margaret C., Catherine Secretan, and Wijnand Mijnhard, eds. The SelfPerception of Early Modern Capitalists. New York, 2008. Janssen, Geert H. Princely Power in the Dutch Republic: Patronage and William Frederick of Nassau (1613–1664). Manchester, 2008. Jong, Jacob Johannes de. Met goed fatsoen: de elite in een Hollandse stad, Gouda 1700– 1780. The Hague, 1985. Kettering, Sharon. “Gift-giving and Patronage in Early Modern France.” French History 2 (1988): 131–51.    . Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France. New York, 1986. Klefeker, Johann. Sammlung der Hamburgischen Gesetze und Verfassung in Bürger- und Kirchlichen, auch Cammer- Handlungs- und übrigen Policey-Angelegenheiten und Geschäften samt historischen Einleitungen. 12 vols. Hamburg, 1765–1774. Kooijmans, Luuc. Onder regenten: De elite in een Hollandse stad, Hoorn, 1700–1780. Amsterdam, 1985.    . Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de seventiende en achttiende eeuw. Amsterdam, 1997. Laufenberg, Heinrich. Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Hamburg, Altona und Umgebung. 2 vols. Hamburg, 1911–1931.    . Hamburg und sein Proletariat im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Eine wirtschaftliche Vorstudie zur Geschichte der modernen Arbeiterbewegung im niederelbischen Städtegebiet. Hamburg, 1910. Lindberg, Erik. “The Rise of Hamburg as a Global Marketplace in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 641–62. Lindemann, Mary. Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–1830. New York, 1990. Loose, Hans-Dieter, ed. Hamburg: Geschichte der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner, vol. 1, Von den Anfängen bis zur Reichsgründung. Hamburg, 1982.    . “Die Jastram-Snitger Wirren in der zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung.” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 53 (1967): 1–20. Maczak, Antoni, ed., with assistance of Elisabeth-Müller-Luckner. Klientelsysteme im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich, 1988. Mijnhardt, Wijnand. “The Limits of Present-Day Historiography of Republicanism.” De achttiende eeuw 37 (2005): 75–89. Peck, Linda Levy. Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. London, 1993. Postel, Rainer. “Reformation und bürgerliche Mitsprache in Hamburg.” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 65 (1979): 1–20. Prak, Maarten. Gezeten burgers: de elite in een Hollandse stad Leiden 1700–1780. The Hague, 1985.



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Randeraad, Nico, and Dirk Jan Wolfram. “Constraints on Clientism: The Dutch Path to Modern Politics, 1848–1917.” In Clientism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. Simona Piattoni, 101–21. Cambridge, 2001. Reißmann, Martin. Die hamburgische Kaufmannschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts in sozialgeschichtlicher Sicht. Hamburg, 1975. Rückleben, Gisela. “Rat und Brgerschaft in Hamburg, 1595–1686: Innere Bindungen und Gegensätze.” Dissertation, Marburg/Lahn, 1969. Rückleben, Hermann. Die Niederwerfung der hamburgischen Ratsgewalt: Kirchliche Bewegung und bürgerliche Unruhen im ausgehende 17. Jahrhundert. Hamburg, 1970. Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813. New York, 1977. Seelig, Geert. Die geschichtliche Entwicklung der hamburgischen Bürgerschaft und die hamburgischen Notabeln. Hamburg, 1900. Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage. Cambridge, 2001. Thoen, Irma. Strategic Affection? Gift Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Holland. Amsterdam, 2007. Voigt, Friedrich. Beiträge zur hamburgischen Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 1, Bericht von 1644 mit Vorschlägen für die städtischen Verwaltung, insbesondere durch Ersparen an den Besoldungen der Beamten und Angestellten; vol. 2, Der Verkauf, später das Verpachten städtischer Dienststellen in Hamburg, 1684–1810. Hamburg, 1910–1911, 1918. Wagenaar, Jan. Amsterdam, in zyne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, voorregten, koophandel, gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe. 4 vols. Amsterdam, 1760. Waquet, Jean-Claude. Corruption: Ethics and Power in Florence, 1600–1770, trans. Linda McCall. University Park, PA, 1992 [1984]. Westphalen, Nicolas A. Hamburgs Verfassung und Verwaltung in ihrer allmähligen Entwicklung bis zuf die neueste Zeit. 2 vols. Hamburg, 1846. Whaley, Joachim. Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819. Cambridge, 1985. Whaley, Joachim, ed. Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death. London, 1981. Wit, Cornelis H. E. de. De Nederlandse revolutie van de achttiende eeuw: oligarchie en proletariat. Oirsbeek, 1974.    . De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie in Nederland, 1780–1813: kritische onderzoek van een historisch beeld en herwaarding van een periode. Heerlen, 1965. Wurm, Christian Friedrich. “Der europäische Hintergrund der Snitger-Jastram’schen Wirren in Hamburg 1686: Aus archivalischen Quellen.” In Hamburgisches Akademisches und Real-Gymnasium: Verzeichniss der Vorlesungen, 1–42. Hamburg, 1855.

Chapter 2

A Crisis of Charter and Right Piracy and Colonial Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Rhode Island

O

Douglas R. Burgess, Jr.

In the last decade of the seventeenth century, a crisis arose that threatened to rend the delicate thread of relations between England and her American colonies. Nearly a century before the American Revolution, it raised many of the same issues of sovereignty and right, and the players involved adopted startlingly similar language. Thus an English administrator described the colonies as nests of “vice and lawlessness,” and an American colonial governor warned his fellow colonists not to fall within the bonds of slavery. By 1700, an open breach had appeared between Crown and colonies, and some observers predicted incipient rebellion. Yet the rebellion did not come, and today almost no notice is paid to the extraordinary events leading to the failed Resumption Bill of 1702. The bill, which would have revoked the colony’s charters in much the same manner as James II’s Dominion of New England, survives today in the dry records of failed imperial initiatives. Only a handful of historians, notably I. K. Steele,1 have examined it, and most adopt his conclusion: the Resumption Bill rose and fell on internecine political disputes within the Board of Trade. This article will suggest, on the contrary, that the attempt to revoke the charters represents something far more critical: a recognition by the Crown that its American colonies had developed a system of laws startlingly different, and contradictory, to those communicated by the king, his ministers, and Parliament. More specifically, the colonies had appropriated admiralty 54



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jurisdiction—the law of all things related to the sea—and used this prerogative to adopt a definition of piracy that was both eminently suited to their own commercial purposes and anathema to those of the Crown. Why was this so important? The answer lies in the importance of the law. Criminal laws are a unique window into the mind of the state: what acts and behaviors it seeks to protect, to proscribe, and to punish. As Charles Tilly wrote, crimes against the state are often the best way to understand the state itself.2 This is especially true when that law is communicated not merely within a state, but to its satellites. In theory, colonial law was an exact replication of its English precedent. In reality, as Jack Greene and others have identified,3 it was an adaptation, often conforming more to local circumstances and political realities. Thus when we speak of “English colonial law” we are actually speaking of two legal structures: the law as communicated, and the law as adapted. By moving beyond the dichotomy between English and American law, this chapter will explore how the widening fissure on piracy in the colonies came to define legal relationships in the Atlantic World. Acting to protect trade practices they had come to regard as essential to their survival, Rhode Island and other colonies began to erect a legal firewall around piracy and other forms of “illegal” commerce. Flouting the Navigation Acts was thus not only seen as a necessity, but a positive act of asserting both economic and, ultimately, legal distinctiveness from the English Crown. The result was a paradox: even as the Atlantic colonies appropriated unto themselves the very legal structures that appeared to bring them closer in alignment with England—specifically, admiralty courts and jurisdiction—they transformed these structures and applied them in ways that were greatly at variance with the Crown’s intentions. This application in turn had profound effects on English colonial policy. It was this exchange, more than the simple fact of piracy itself, that brought the legal relationship between England and her Atlantic colonies to a crisis at end of the seventeenth century. We will examine how this crisis came about by focusing on the charter issues raised by piracy for one colony, Rhode Island. We shall begin by considering the nature of vice-admiralty jurisdiction in the colonies, before looking at the nature of Rhode Island’s charter and how the tradition of admiralty jurisdiction developed there. Then we shall turn to examine the concurrent rise of pirate sponsorship in the colony, which was closely aligned with the legal structures of admiralty jurisdiction through the granting of privateering commissions and the formation of prize courts. Third, we will consider the efforts of the Board of Trade to implement its own legal structures on the colony, and the long period of resistance that developed

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therefrom. This sets the stage for a consideration of the crisis surrounding the Resumption Bill, and its consequences for colonies and Crown.

ADMIRALTY JURISDICTION IN RHODE ISLAND Until nearly the end of the seventeenth century, admiralty jurisdiction in the colonies followed the legal principle of qui tacit consentire: silence gives consent.4 The Crown had no legal mechanism to extend admiralty law to the colonies; consequently, colonies appropriated it for themselves and interpreted it sui generis. First we must briefly outline of what such jurisdiction consists. In England, admiralty courts after the Restoration were reduced in scope to matters relating exclusively to the high seas: theft at sea, mutiny, maritime contracts, and (in some cases) piracy.5 With admiralty jurisdiction in decline, it is not surprising that the impetus to erect special admiralty courts in the colonies did not emerge until the need became acute. Jurisdiction for such cases that would normally fall within the courts’ purview was granted tacitly to colonial governors by commissioning them as vice-admirals under the Broad Seal of the Admiralty.6 But the exact nature of that commission was not clear. At no time did Parliament or the king’s ministers invest governors with the right to adjudicate captures and award prizes, grant privateering commissions, or adjudicate piracy cases.7 Such powers, however, might be implied. The commission granted to Lord Willoughby, governor of Barbados, in 1667 is indicative. Willoughby was given jurisdiction over all maritime matters “done or to be done . . . upon the sea or public rivers, etc., and also in the other causes and matters all and singular which any manner whatsoever touch or in any way concern . . . or ought to belong unto the maritime jurisdiction of our aforesaid Lord, the King.”8 It is hardly surprising that colonial governors jealously guarded their vice-admiralty prerogatives, especially in the case of piracy. The power to grant privateering commissions, convene prize courts, and adjudicate piracy cases was the power to define piracy under the law. In colonies that derived the majority of their livelihood from the sea, this was no small matter. Few colonies were more adamant in asserting their admiralty rights than Rhode Island. Part of this was due to its status as a charter colony, and part due to its exceptionally close relationship with maritime commerce. A charter was both legal bondage and legal severance: a contract that tied the residents of a territory to English law, yet granted them the freedom to constitute their own government. Rhode Island convened its assembly and chose its governors for most of its colonial history, the only exceptions



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occurring when the Crown revoked its charter or superseded it, as it did during the reign of James II.9 Because of their privileged legal status, charter colonies were viewed with deep suspicion by the others and regularly blamed as being lawless nests of vice, dissent, and crime. William Beeston of Jamaica railed against the “private colonies” in a letter to the Board of Trade in 1696, accusing them of being places where “privateers and Red Sea pirates [are] entertained . . . while the King’s own colonies dwindle to nothing.”10 Nor was this attitude confined to other colonists. In 1684 the Privy Council expressly singled out charter colonies as responsible for the growth of Atlantic piracy, while praising royal colonies like Virginia for their efforts to counter the menace.11 As their own correspondence illustrates, “private” colonies like Rhode Island fervently guarded their charters and relished their independence.12 Massachusetts and Rhode Island had been founded on dissent, and independent thought marked both their popular attitudes and legal structures from the outset. Governor Sanford remarked in 1680 that Rhode Islanders wished only to “enjoy their liberty in their opinions . . . provided that the pretense of liberty extend not to licentiousness.”13 Nearly twenty years later, when those liberties seemed threatened by an outraged Board of Trade, Sanford’s successor Samuel Cranston warned the assembly not to allow their children to “fall into bondage . . . a word to the wise is sufficient.”14 Among Rhode Island’s most flagrant assertions of its chartered independence was in the pretense of admiralty jurisdiction. It was neither the first nor the only colony to appropriate jurisdiction. Rhode Island, however, being a colony that relied almost exclusively on maritime commerce, had far more frequent resort to such jurisdiction than, for example, North Carolina.15 Almost from its inception, the colony regularly convened admiralty courts for prize cases and empowered its governors to grant privateering commissions.16 The language in Rhode Island’s charter that purported to grant admiralty jurisdiction was a single, often-quoted line. The governor and assembly were empowered by the Crown to enact all laws “not contrary and repugnant unto, but, as near as may be, agreeable to the laws of this our realm of England . . . and to appoint, order and direct, erect and settle such places and courts of jurisdiction for the hearings and determining of all actions, case matters and things happening within the said colony and plantation.”17 This was a thin reed. While the language gives the courts power to hear “all” cases, it clearly limits their purview to “things happening within the said colony.” Only the most liberal of readings could construe that such a provision includes maritime matters occurring beyond the high-water mark, which was where admiralty jurisdiction traditionally began.

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Admiralty jurisdiction involved much more than privateering. Admiralty courts were empowered to hear cases ranging from breach of contract to theft to wreckage rights.18 Since few colonies bothered to create separate courts for matters that often overlapped traditional common law jurisdiction (as many admiralty cases did), Rhode Island followed the usual pattern of adding admiralty cases to the regular docket of the common law courts, while vesting particular power in the governor to act as a judge or arbiter of such cases, in his role as vice-admiral of the colony.19 Until 1696 this assumption of power went largely without dispute; the Crown likely regarded it as a necessary evil. Even as late as 1690 Rhode Island was forced to defend itself from French attack without the benefit of the royal navy, employing a fleet of privateers commissioned by Governor Clarke under the Great Seal of the Admiralty. Hence, while the assumption of admiralty jurisdiction in Rhode Island might not have been well grounded de jure, it had considerable force de facto. That abuses of such jurisdiction did occur, that a culture of piracy did emerge, is without question. But before we can fully comprehend the Crown’s response in the late 1690s, we must first consider how such a culture developed.

PIRACY AND RHODE ISLAND GOVERNANCE, 1653–1696 Rhode Island governors had already begun issuing privateering commissions under admiralty jurisdiction well before the colony received its charter in 1663. Ten years earlier, Governor William Dyer had issued a commission to two local mariners to harass Dutch trade. The privateers returned some months later, whereat a prize commission was duly convened and the government received £56.20 A few months later, a second voyage was undertaken by William Dyer himself.21 The first pirates to sail from Rhode Island were local men, usually of the middle or even upper mercantile classes. Most were ex-merchant captains who had earlier earned their living on trading voyages.22 In an era when privateering commissions were still legal, they made the transition from one form of commercial enterprise to another with easy grace. One example is instructive. In 1683, three years after Governor Sanford maintained that there were no pirates in Rhode Island waters, a native Rhode Islander named Thomas Paine returned to Newport laden with captured Madagascar booty and demanded condemnation of his prize. Paine’s case came at an inopportune time for the colony, as it coincided with the arrival of the first royal deputy collector of customs, Thomas Thatcher. When Paine produced a commission from Governor Lynch of



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Jamaica, Thatcher declared it “a more forged than fair and true commission.”23 He also noted that even the governor’s titles were not correctly listed. Thatcher then appealed to Governor Coddrington for a writ justifying seizure of Paine and his ship. The governor, however, “was of another opinion, and declared the ship a free bottom by virtue of the same.”24 That was as far as the matter went. Two years later the records reveal that Paine sat on a grand jury.25 Coddrington’s obstructionism, which included refusing to give Thatcher a copy of Paine’s commission, touched off a serious political scandal. In spring of 1684 the colonial assembly received a warning letter from Board of Trade William Blathwayt demanding that it suppress all privateering and piracy. The assembly duly passed “an act for the restraining and preventing of privateers and pirates” that read, in part, “All such cases shall be inquired, tried, heard, determined and judged within this colony in such like form as if such offense had been committed in or upon land.”26 While apparently complying with the Crown’s request, this act also served to reinforce the common law courts’ jurisdiction over piracy cases—ensuring that every such case would be heard by a jury of the pirate’s peers. Not only did the act of 1684 vastly aggrandize the power of Rhode Island courts to assert admiralty jurisdiction, it limited the definition of piracy to such an extent as to effectively negate the intent of the Lords of Trade. Piracy was defined as a species of treason, and pirates limited to those who “contrary to his Majesty’s Proclamations . . . have and do continually go off from this colony unto foreign princes’ services.” Thus the act dealt only with those who took commissions from England’s enemies, and promised that these traitors “shall suffer pains of death, without benefit of clergy.”27 A law can be criticized for being excessively broad or excessively narrow; in this case, the Rhode Island assembly succeeded in crafting a piracy law so profoundly narrow that it not only exonerated all Rhode Island pirates, but redefined piracy itself. The fact that there were no such traitorous pirates in Rhode Island was confirmed by the legal records of the next decade: not a single case of piracy came up for trial. Hence the assembly, while seeming to defer to the Lords of Trade, had created an antipiracy act whose only actual purpose was to further aggregate admiralty powers to the colony. The act also has an additional importance, albeit a negative one: it would be the only such antipiracy act passed by the colonial assembly until 1723.28 The watershed for Rhode Island piracy came in 1693. Prior to that time, few of the pirates commissioned by Rhode Island governors achieved any great success. While their names occasionally appeared in local registers as having returned from Madagascar, neither the names nor the sums involved

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are worthy of much note. That changed radically after one local mariner, Thomas Tew, returned from one of the most spectacular pirate voyages of all time. Tew was a native Rhode Islander, son of a Jamestown merchant. He began his career as a privateer, bearing a commission to raid French ports on the west coast of Africa. Separated from his convoy by a storm, Tew and his willing shipmates abandoned this profitless and dangerous venture and set off instead to terrorize Arab shipping in the Indian Ocean. Coming upon a convoy of ships belonging to the Great Mughal, Tew engaged the ships in a brief battle and emerged victorious.29 Tew’s return to Newport transformed local perceptions of piracy. Edward Randolph reported that Tew brought no less than £100,000 of Red Sea plunder to Rhode Island.30 A rush of potential seamen hurried to enlist for Tew’s next voyage, drawn from the highest reaches of the merchant class down to lowly deckhands and even personal servants. “Servants from most places in the country running from their masters, sons from their parents and had their children & relations going against their wills,”31 all appeared on the wharves, each proclaiming their skills. There was an equally vital transformation in the political sphere, especially in the granting of commissions. The pirate offered Governor Easton five hundred pounds to purchase a second commission, allegedly promising the governor that he would go “where perhaps the commission might never be heard of.” Easton refused. Tew pressed his case to Deputy Governor Green, who granted it at once. Green also took care of one of Tew’s friends, John Bankes, who likewise departed on a pirating voyage. Since most privateering commissions came not from Easton but from Green, the speculation arose that the governor was allowing his deputy to act in his stead. This action would later cause a great scandal for Easton, who in 1698 was forced to issue a ringing denial of pirate brokering, while at the same time condemning his erstwhile deputy: “I, John Easton . . . do declare that whereas John Greene was deputy governor in the said year [1694] did give forth a commission to John Bankes, privateer, one who was come into Newport with one Capt’n Thomas Tew, a privateer. This may certify that I would not give any commissions to said Bankes, nor any other, to go out on such designs as they went upon.”32 While Edward Randolph had long complained that Rhode Island was a “nest of pirates,” the case of Thomas Tew brought much unwelcome attention to the colony. As early as September 1693, the Lords of Trade wrote severely to Governor Easton that “we hear that there has been of late much violation of the Laws of Trade and Navigation. The King expects that you will enforce obedience to these acts and give all needful assistance to the officers of Customs therein.”33



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The colonial government retrenched its control over other aspects of admiralty jurisdiction. Acting under the act for suppression of pirates discussed above, the assembly extended the jurisdiction of the courts to cover “the condemning of prizes and other seafaring actions as occasion shall require.”34 This was in direct contradiction to the Lords’ express instructions that governors “had no power to grant commissions or condemn prizes.”35 Yet while piracy cases were nonexistent in the colony, prize courts were convened regularly: in 1694 for Captain Hoar, in 1695 for the Wanton brothers, in 1696 Captain Loverell and others.36 The prize courts would continue to condemn dubious seizures throughout the next twenty years. The commercial aspects of this arrangement were indicative of the central role piracy rapidly attained in colonial society. Since the first Navigation Acts passed under the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century, Rhode Island and the other Atlantic colonies were expressly prohibited from trading with “foreign” vessels, importing non-English goods, and using non-English specie. The arrival of Tew’s vessel, its hold filled with Indian gold and treasures, was an early example of a phenomenon that would soon become common: pirate vessels convening ad-hoc auctions on the pier, introducing new and unheard-of luxuries into colonies. Gradually, as the “Red Sea trade” became more regular, arrivals like Tew’s became less of a marvel and more an essential component of colonial commerce.

THE CATACLYSM OF 1696: FROM TACIT RESISTANCE TO OPEN REBELLION By 1696 the town of Newport, Rhode Island, had emerged as one of the foremost pirate ports of the Atlantic World.37 This circumstance affected nearly every aspect of colonial life—commercial, social, and legal. Much as in New York under Governor Benjamin Fletcher, a wealthy merchant class closely allied to the governor and assembly (and often filling positions in both) financed pirate voyages and secured commissions for favored captains.38 Piracy can also be credited in part with the rise of Newport as the commercial center of the colony; a fact remarked upon bitterly by residents of Providence as early as the 1660s.39 This growth was linked to the entrenchment of admiralty jurisdiction in the colony. The right to grant privateering commissions and convene prize courts was not only a vital part of admiralty jurisdiction but central to Rhode Island commerce. Piracy, under the guise of privateering, became enmeshed within both commercial and legal practice. Hence, any attempt by the Crown to curb piracy was tantamount to an attack on the colony’s

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admiralty jurisdiction—in other words, its legal right to define a pirate from a privateer. The English state’s antipiracy policy would inevitably encounter severe resistance in Rhode Island as a perceived threat to its sacrosanct rights under the charter. The events of 1696 precipitated just such a collision, and set the parameters of an ongoing struggle between Crown and colony that would culminate with the Resumption Bill five years later. The Act for Preventing Frauds, and Regulating Abuses in the Plantation Trade40 defined the courts as royal and not local, yet still empowered colonial governors to select jurors under the statute of 28 Henry VIII. It was a dismal failure. In 1697, responding to complaints from Randolph, as well as Justice Hedges’s opinion that under the current act “the Admiralty Courts in the Colonies have no right to try and punish pirates except under a local law,”41 the board amended the act to wrest the power to select “judges, advocates, registers and marshals in the vice-admiralty courts” and placed it instead with the Crown. Henceforth, governors would be required to swear a new oath to observe the Navigation Acts, and accept the presence of Crown-appointed vice-admiralty judges in their colonies.42 Rhode Island was targeted especially. Edward Randolph had singled out the colony as a “receptacle of pirates”43 and other rogues. In February 1697 the Board of Trade composed a stinging letter to the colony, charging them for the first time with pirate patronage: “His Majesty has also received complaints that the entertainment given to pirates . . . has occasioned many ill minded persons, seamen and others to desert their habitations and apply themselves to such wicked and destructive courses to the great weakening and dispeopling of the colonies . . . and to the great dishonor of the English nation.44 The charges are revealing. The colony is not only accused of entertaining pirates, but of encouraging a sort of mass migration and resettlement, presumably in the so-called pirate colonies in Madagascar. Hence not only is English law weakened by the cosseting of pirates, but the English nation is “dispeopled,” drained of its essential vitality. The colony’s recalcitrance prompted more aggressive action on the part of the Crown. In 1698, acting in response to charges of corruption not merely in New England but also in New York, it appointed a prominent Whig aristocrat, Richard Coote, Lord Bellomont, to assume governorship of New York. His prerogative also included the express task of convening a vice-admiralty court in Rhode Island, under his own seal as vice-admiral of Massachusetts and New York.45 Bellomont went one step further, pledging to visit the colony himself and condemning it, prior to his trip, as a “nest of pirates.”46 Bellomont named Peleg Sanford as chief justice and Nathaniel



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Coddrington as register, both charged with engaging in the vigorous prosecution of local pirates.47 The moment when resistance to Crown interference in Rhode Island moved from tacit to open occurred in January 1698, when Sanford presented his commission to the present governor, Walter Clarke. This marks a watershed in colonial relations. The governor first denied the commission, then prevaricated, telling Sanford that he could not approve him without consulting the assembly. Appearing before that body, he warned them that to recognize Sanford’s commission was to surrender their charter rights and privileges and that “we had better like men spend the one half of our Estates to maintain our privileges” sooner than be “brought into bondage and slavery.”48 Governor Clarke was so incensed by the whole state of affairs that he resigned his office rather than swear the oath of allegiance pressed on him by the amended Navigation Acts. His successor, Governor Samuel Cranston, swore it obligingly and promptly forgot it thereafter.49 Neither Sanford nor Coddrington ever received their commission. The vice-admiralty courts remained as they had been, composed of juries and presided over by the governor. Acting ex officio, Sanford and Coddrington nevertheless attempted to fulfill the commission granted them by Bellomont, reporting to him in August 1699 that they had secured several pirates in a local jail that were awaiting trial.50 No record of such a trial exists, and one of the prisoners (incredibly enough, the same Thomas Paine that surfaced earlier in these accounts) was cited as walking free in the streets of Newport one month later. In the same month that Bellomont received his limited vice-admiralty commission, the king in Council delivered a sharp rebuke to the colony: “Not withstanding the laws for the prevention of frauds in the plantation trade, it is evident that great abuses have been and continue to be practiced . . . from the remissness of governors past and present who ought to take care that those who gave bond [i.e., privateers] shall be prosecuted in case of non-conformance.”51 The letter closed with a veiled threat to revoke the colony’s charter, the first such threat since 1688. These rumblings took definite shape in December 1697, when the Board of Trade issued a formal request for a copy of all laws currently in effect in Rhode Island.52 It would take over a year for the colony to comply, only to be curtly informed that the copy was totally incomprehensible.53 A new, concise copy was demanded. None was forthcoming; months later William Popple lamented to Blathwayt that he had seen nothing but “a blind copy of their laws,”54 while colonial secretary Addington groused that the alleged laws were “full of incoherence and nonsense jumbled together and confused. The

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Government themselves cannot tell when they have the whole: how then can the people be supposed to know what is Law amongst them?”55 In October the customs collector Jahleel Brenton, a close friend of Edward Randolph, recommended to the Board of Trade that an investigation be made into the granting of privateer commissions in Rhode Island. For evidence, he included the deposition of former governor John Easton, who accused his own deputy, Green, of issuing such commissions against his will.56 The fact that Easton had refused a commission to Thomas Tew was made much of, with Easton claiming Tew even offered him a bribe of £500. Easton did not explain, however, why he took no action against Green, least of all removing him from office. Brenton concluded by suggesting that the practice of granting dubious commissions was still going strong. Two months later the Board of Trade came to the same conclusion: “We are not only assured that they have no right to give these commissions but we have reason to believe that they have done so knowingly and for unlawful purposes.”57 It was this legal climate that tested the ability of the Crown to enforce its prerogatives at the end of the century, to impose, as Hall and Steele would describe it, “a policy of strict, centralized control.”58 Already, by 1698, severe strains in the legal relationship between the two had appeared. It was Rhode Island’s open flouting of Crown policy, along with that of many other Atlantic colonies, that initiated the breach that would eventually result in the Resumption Bill of 1702.

EXECUTIVE OVERREACH: RHODE ISLAND, RESISTANCE, AND THE RESUMPTION BILL Before examining the influence of colonies like Rhode Island on the drive to revoke colonial charters, we must first consider the traditional view. It is unabashedly Anglo-centrist: a legislative trajectory commencing with the reports from Edward Randolph in 1695, progressing through the Navigation Acts of 1696, and culminating with the Resumption Bill in 1702. There is elegance to this narrative, for when viewed from a strictly documentary perspective the argument for an evolution towards “strict, centralized control”59 seems undeniable. We can find many of the reforms first advocated by Randolph taking definite shape in subsequent legislation, leading to the attempted adoption of his most sweeping proposal: the revocation of the charters. It is tempting, then, for historians to allow the neatness of this formula to obscure other critical elements, not the least of which being the attitudes of the colonies themselves.



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Yet the importance of events in England should not be underestimated. Even before Randolph’s damning report, English merchants clamored against the perfidy of the colonies, claiming that vital revenue was lost to smuggling and piracy. Bristol and Liverpool, both centers of colonial trade, issued protests to Parliament. In 1694 the Customs House declared a loss of £50,000 from illegal trade.60 Nor should Edward Randolph’s role be undervalued. An avowed Tory with a deep aversion to colonial charters (and, indeed, most colonists),61 he proposed as early as 1695 the abolition of both corporate and proprietary colonies and the revocation of all colonial charters. Not only would the Crown assume direct control, it would also redraw the Atlantic map: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland would be combined, as would Connecticut and New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, North Carolina and Virginia, and—rather oddly—South Carolina and the Bahamas (presumably because they shared a sugar crop). Colonial assemblies would be disbanded, and royal governors would be appointed for each.62 Randolph’s proposal was far too radical for 1695, and presupposed an English state that did not yet exist. The failure of the Dominion of New England, James II’s attempt to rule the colonies directly, was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the colonies still revered William III for returning their charters. Consequently, while the board commented that Randolph had “well considered the situation,” it balked at adopting any of his recommendations, least of all the most drastic. The colonies must be urged to conform to the law, not trampled by it.63 In the spring of 1700 Edward Randolph returned to London, having undertaken an exhaustive tour of the Atlantic colonies.64 His report to the Board of Trade is regarded the primary catalyst for the Resumption Bill. Citing only Governor Nicholson of Virginia and Lord Bellomont of New York as exceptions, Randolph castigated the remaining governors as venal and corrupt. It was labeled “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”65 The board’s response is commonly interpreted as a fit of overreaction. Having largely ignored or tabled Randolph’s repeated accusations against the colonies, the board suddenly and without apparent motive altered its course, and proposed something even more drastic. While Randolph had confined himself to specific instances and remedies, the board in March 1701 lumped both charter and proprietary colonies together, accused them roundly of flouting English law, harboring pirates, and encouraging illegal trade, and recommended to the king that “all of them [should be] put into the same state of dependency as those of your Majesty’s other plantations.”66 New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania,

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Maryland, Carolina, and the Bahamas would all thus be reinstated under royal control. What caused this abrupt change of policy? Historians have most often looked to causes within the Board of Trade itself. Similar causes are ascribed to for the Resumption Bill’s ultimate failure: that it fell into the weeds of parliamentary procedure, lacked the backing of both parties, and was regarded as unfair to the colonists by many prominent political figures.67 While all these reasons have merit, what is absent from this narrative is a recognition of the extraordinary exchange between England and the colonists themselves that impacted the debate on the charters throughout. When Randolph departed the colonies in 1699, the burden of correspondence was taken up by Lord Bellomont. It will be recalled that Bellomont was appointed governor of New York and given a wide latitude over the colonies of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, in a sweeping effort to reform the “irregularities” found there. In his first letter from New York, Bellomont wrote: “Mr. Randolph tells me that the Government of Rhode Island have seized some pirates and claim by their charge to erect a Court of Admiralty, no doubt in order to try and acquit them. Their encouragement of pirates and connivance with breach of the Acts of Trade will make them tender prosecutors.”68 Randolph’s and Bellomont’s letters had succeeded in rousing the Board of Trade. It began by demanding—again—a copy of Rhode Island’s laws. It also called upon the newly elected Governor Cranston to explain the commissions granted by his predecessors. Cranston replied: “Several informations have been forwarded to you that Rhode Island is a place where pirates are entertained. . . . These things have been misrepresented to you. We have never countenanced such proceedings.”69 As for his own commissions, which he had begun issuing almost at the moment of taking office, Cranston was equally dismissive. They were, he said, “defensive commissions” only.70 But by this time the board had been informed of Rhode Island’s long relationship with the Red Sea pirates, and William Popple wrote back scathingly, “Are these defensive commissions? You know better.”71 In its own report to the king, the board summed up the matter succinctly: “We are not only assured that they [Rhode Island] have no right to give these commissions but we have reason to believe that they have done so knowingly and for unlawful purposes.”72 The colony’s obfuscations on piracy were precipitating a deep rift in its relations with the Crown. In October 1698 the customs collector Jahleel Brenton posted a letter to the Board of Trade recommending an investigation into the privateering commissions granted by Greene and Clarke, as well as Clarke’s refusal to swear in Peleg Sanford or take the oath demanded of him by the Frauds Act. By February 1699 Brenton was in London, and



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made the case before the board in person. The board directed him to draw up a memo “of what he thought most proper with relation to enquiries to be made into the irregularities of the government of Rhode Island.”73 In the late summer of 1699, the Board of Trade ultimately resolved to get at the truth of Rhode Island’s illegal practice, and sent Lord Bellomont instructions to travel to the colony. There he would perform two central duties: appoint and install a vice-admiralty justice, and investigate (much as he had in New York) the charges of pirate brokering among the colonists and administrators. This investigation, I will suggest, had profound and as-yet-unexplored consequences for England’s relations with her American colonies.

THE INVESTIGATION When in September 1699 Lord Bellomont arrived in Rhode Island and presented his commission to Governor Cranston, it marked the first time that a sitting colonial governor was granted prerogative to directly question and investigate another. This investigation, which discloses a wealth of information on both piracy and colonial governance, has gone virtually unnoticed by historians. Bellomont began by questioning Governor Cranston, former governor Walter Clarke, former deputy governor John Green, former governor John Easton, and former governor (and nominal vice-admiralty judge) Peleg Sanford.74 The first issue was the assumption of admiralty powers by the present and former governors, and specifically the granting of privateering commissions. Bellomont’s exchange with John Green is instructive: Q: Did you grant commissions during the late war to any privateers?75 A: Yes, I granted commissions to the commanders of some vessels that belonged to this island. The commissions were only defensive. They might have done as much without them. Q: To whom did you grant such commissions? A: To William Mayes, John Bankes and Peter Lawrence severally. (All three men had turned pirate.)76

The next witness was ex-governor Clarke, who was surprisingly forthcoming on the matter of the admiralty courts. Yes, he admitted, he did convene such courts to condemn prizes, but only “until His Majesty’s pleasure should be signified” by the creation of a proper vice-admiralty court under a Crown-appointed judge. Yet in 1698 the Crown had done precisely that, presenting Peleg Sanford with a vice-admiralty commission that Clarke had refused to recognize. Clarke prevaricated, saying that Sanford “brought a

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commission and laid it upon the table, saying it was such a thing,”77 but that he had no direct instructions from His Majesty on the matter, and consequently presumed it a forgery. This, as his comments to the assembly make plain, was a falsehood. It is tempting for historians to look upon these many instances of illegal activity and conclude that there was no rule of law whatsoever. In this they would agree with an observer in Boston, who in 1697 commented that “there are such a bloody crew of privateers in Rhode Island that the Government cannot rule them.”78 But evidence suggests otherwise. What we find, in sum, is a colony that is actively engaged in the pirate trade, which it appears to regard as a legitimate form of commercial enterprise. This raises a crucial question: did the colonial governors knowingly flout the Crown in pursuing this policy? To some extent, they did. Despite their claim that they “had no instructions,” after 1696 the governors could not have been insensible to the Crown’s wishes. In refusing to relinquish the prerogative of admiralty jurisdiction, they knowingly disobeyed their sovereign—no small matter. The reasons for this disobedience can only be gleaned by the fragmentary records of the governors’ speeches before the assembly, when they repeatedly spoke of the threat of “bondage” should the colony surrender any of its perceived rights under the charter. This line of argument suggests that the harboring of pirates was not a venal matter, but a constitutional one. Further evidence surfaces in the attitudes of the men whom Bellomont questioned. While each is anxious to preserve his own reputation, there is almost no recognized sentiment that piracy is a moral or legal wrong. Markedly absent is the kind of stringent language one finds both from governors like Francis Nicholson and Bellomont himself, who speak of it as a “scourge,” a “plague,” etc.79 Nor were the Rhode Island administrators entirely unaware of this sort of language. They had heard it expressed repeatedly in communications from the Board of Trade, from other governors, and from the king in Council.80 If the colonies brought the Resumption Bill on themselves, as it appears they did, why did resumption not occur? Again, the importance of what one might call the transatlantic conversation cannot be undervalued. The spate of acts for frauds, abuses of power, antipiracy, and vice-admiralty jurisdiction had—as we have seen—almost no effect on the daily practices in colonies like Rhode Island.81 Nor did threatening letters, intrigues by men like Jahleel Brenton, or reports from Randolph and Bellomont. The perceived solution was to replace these ineffective acts with a far more draconian solution along the same lines: revoking the charters. But here the board went too far. Its perception of the pirate problem had become as warped, in its own way, as that of the colonists themselves. Stoked by a dozen different sources



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(including the bemused replies of the governors themselves), it had come to regard piracy as a cancer to the body politic that must be carved out before any effective administration could be enforced. Piracy, in this view, became symbolic of all the “irregularities” within the colony, a rubric covering such varied acts as commissions, smuggling, prize courts, customs clearances, bribery, and even improper jurisdiction.82 One cannot fault the colonists for harboring a different view. Piracy was enmeshed within the fabric of daily life, a central factor in society and commerce. While not precisely legal, it was certainly necessary, and as long as it was confined to the distant waters of the Red Sea it did no perceived harm to Englishmen. Had either party, the colonists or the Board of Trade, been capable of swapping perspectives, they might have understood that the reality between their competing views on piracy lay exactly halfway between them, on a mythical longitude of the Atlantic itself. On the fault line between these two equally distorted views may lie a crucial and overlooked reason for the failure of the Resumption Bill. The Board of Trade brought the bill before a Parliament that was nowhere near as incensed as themselves. While the Commons recognized the problem of piracy and its deleterious consequences for effective administration, its response lacked the hellfire zeal that constant communication with Bellomont, Randolph, and colonial governors like Cranston had instilled in the rampant board. Clearly measures would be needed, but resumption of the charters seemed needlessly draconian. The Resumption Bill was a testament to the critical importance of piracy in colonial governance, a problem whose roots lay more in the perceived threat to the English Empire qua empire than any several threats to its trade or allies. In that light, its failure might be interpreted as a triumph of the quasi-independent colonies over an overreaching Crown. But that would presume a level of animosity that did not exist. Ultimately, the rise and fall of the Resumption Bill lay in contrasting interpretations of piracy, and the inevitable conflagration when the two collided.

CONCLUSION The case of Rhode Island also illustrates the severe limitations under which the Crown operated during this era in its attempts to impose uniform law in the colonies. Fully cognizant of the open patronage of pirates in much of the Atlantic world, the Board of Trade found to its frustration that neither greater oversight nor increased legislation could address the problem. As long as the colonies harbored a differing view of the pirates, that view would

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prevail. While governors like Samuel Cranston were quick to acknowledge the Crown’s prerogative in their letters, their actions were quite different. Zealous defenders of colonial privilege, they regarded the increased oversight and attempts by the Crown to instate vice-admiralty courts as threats upon their fundamental charter rights. These men solved the conundrum by simultaneously protesting their innocence and promising compliance, while secretly instructing their own assemblies to preserve the colony from bondage. The only possible explanation for such conduct lies in the aforementioned legal ties between privateering commissions, admiralty jurisdiction, and the charter. We have seen how piracy and the law were intertwined in Rhode Island since its inception as a colony, and furthermore how the natural progression from privateering to piracy accompanied a similar transition in the nature of commissions from purely defensive to more open ended. This coincided with the growth of the so-called Red Sea trade, the opening of a new commercial enterprise that promised an influx of riches far in excess of coastal smuggling or any other form of illegal trade. By the turn of the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries, colonies still nominally bound by the Navigation Acts were in fact flush with illegal coin and goods captured on numerous piratical raids. Piracy not only became a fixture of colonial commerce but often the only source for goods that patrons from Boston to Charleston regularly took for granted. It made great fortunes, and forged political and commercial alliances that would survive among families until the Revolution.83 By 1700 there was no colony in the English Atlantic World that did not derive some share of its income from the pirate trade. As the rewards for piracy grew, so too did the legal mechanisms erected to protect it. Just as it had in New York and elsewhere, piracy became an essential component of Rhode Island’s commercial, social, and governmental framework.84 As such, it was inextricably interwoven with issues of sovereignty, independence, and legal rights. While the ultimate breach from England would not occur for another three quarters of a century, the revolutionaries of 1776 inherited a crucial legacy from the pirates and the governors who sponsored them: a distinct and uniquely American legal culture, and a distinct Atlantic community that would eventually become the United States of America. NOTES First published in the Journal of Social History 45, 3 (Spring 2012). 1. Ian K. Steele, The Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford, 1968). See also Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740 (New York, 1986); Steele, “The Board of Trade, the Quakers, and Resumption of



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Colonial Charters, 1699–1702,” William & Mary Quarterly 23, 4 (1966): 596–619; Steele, “Governors or Generals?: A Note on Martial Law and the Revolution of 1689 in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, 2 (1989): 304–14. 2. See generally, Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1975). 3. Jack Greene’s concept of an “imperial constitution” had great impact on the framing of this article, and the author would draw the reader’s attention to Jack Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, NC, 1994), and Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, GA, 1986). 4. See, generally, Crump, Admiralty Jurisdiction; Stephen Botein, Early American Law and Society (New York, 1983); Charles Andrews, Vice-Admiralty Courts in the Colonies (Washington, DC, 1936). 5. Conflict with the common law courts, especially under a sympathetic Parliament during the Interregnum, resulted in a loss of many of the admiralty’s former prerogatives, including salvage, bills of lading, collision, mariner’s wages, and other matters. 6. After 1691. Prior to that time admiralty commissions were granted under the King’s Great Seal. 7. Andrews, Vice-Admiralty, 74. 8. Commission of William Willoughby, Collections of Documents Relating to the History of Massachusetts (Boston, 1913), 2:365. 9. Samuel Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Providence, RI, 1894), 1:153. 10. William Beeston to the Lords of Trade, 22 July 1696, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series 1696–1697 (London, 1860) 14 n101. 11. Acts of the Privy Council, vol. 2, n142. 12. John Russell Bartlett, ed. Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England (Providence, RI, 1858), 1:101 (hereafter referenced as RCRI) 13. Arnold, Rhode Island, 490. 14. Stevens Collection, Collection of Documents Relating to the History of Rhode Island, John Carter Brown Library, vol. 8, n510. 15. For a comparison of the two colonies’ exercise of admiralty jurisdiction see Hugh Rankin, The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina (Raleigh, NC, 1992). 16. Marguerite Appleton, “Rhode Island’s First Court of Admiralty,” New England Quarterly 5, 1 (1932): 148–58. 17. RCRI, 1:9. 18. Andrews, Vice-Admiralty, 93. 19. Appleton, “Rhode Island,” 150–51. 20. Howard Chapin, Privateer Ships and Sailors (Toulon, 1926), 39. 21. Ibid., 44. 22. For a comparative study see James Lydon, Pirates, Privateers and Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1970), 38–59.

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

3 9. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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RCRI, 3:176. Ibid. Chapin, Privateer Ships, 63. RCRI, 3:156. Ibid. RCRI, 2:329. An account of Tew’s exploits appears in Charles Johnson (pseudo. Daniel Defoe) History of the Pyrates (reprint as Pirates, New York, 1999), 397. Edward Randolph to the Board of Trade, 19 February 1697, CSP 1697–1698, 396. Report of Thomas Dyer, 5 June 1693, Colonial Office series, PRO 5/1259, no. 40. RCRI, 3:340. Lords of Trade to Governor Easton, 8 September 1693, CSP 1693–1696, n543. Stevens Collection, vol. 8, n565a. Letter to the Privy Council, 21 December 1698, CSP 1698, n1071. Chapin, Privateer Ships, 74; RCRI, 2:14; RCRI, 3:110. See Mark Hanna, “The Pirates’ Nest: The Impact of Piracy on Newport, Rhode Island, and Charlestown, South Carolina,” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2005) 121–50. For a comparative study of another colony’s relations with pirates, see Randall Bridwell, “Mr. Nicholas Trott and the South Carolina Vice-Admiralty Court: An Essay on Procedural Reform and Colonial Politics,” South Carolina Law Review 28 (1976). Appleton, “Admiralty,” 149. Act for Preventing Frauds, and Regulating Abuses in the Plantation Trade 7 & 8 William III, c.22. Journal of the Board of Trade, 22 November 1697, CSP 1697–1698, n56. Full text of the bill may be found in Danby Pickering, ed., The Statutes at Large (Cambridge: 1762–1807), 9:432. The relevant passage reads in part: “All the penalties and forfeitures before mentioned, not in this act particularly disposed of, shall . . . be recovered in any of his Majesty’s courts at Westminster, or in the Kingdom of Ireland, or in the court of Admiralty held in his Majesty’s plantations respectively, where such office shall be committed.” Quoted in Michael G. Hall, “The House of Lords, Edward Randolph and the Navigation Act of 1696,” William & Mary Quarterly 3, 14 (1957): 495. RCRI, 3:321–22. For a more thorough examination of Bellomont’s role in the colonies, see Section I, chapter 3. Journal of the Board of Trade, 5 April 1697, CSP 1696–1697, n896. See also Hanna, “Pirates’ Nest,” 216. Sydney James, Colonial Rhode Island (New York, 1975); see also RCRI, 3:329. Governor Clarke to the Rhode Island Assembly, British National Archives, Colonial Office, C.O. 5, f.1259 ; for a complete account of the conflict over Sanford’s commission see Appleton, “Admiralty,” 153–54.



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49. As both the character and actions of Governor Cranston are crucial to understanding Rhode Island’s role in the pirate trade, not to mention the overall view of piracy and legal relations in the Atlantic colonies, it is regrettable that there is so little record of him. The most complete biography appears in John Garraty and Mark Carnes, eds., American National Biography (Oxford, 1999), 5:683. 50. Stevens Collection, vol. 6, n355, n356. 51. Leo F. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament Respecting North America (Washington, DC, 1924), 2:205; see also W. L. Grant and James Munro, Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series (Hereford, 1910), 2:543. 52. Board of Trade to Governor Clarke, 29 December 1697, CSP 1696–1697, n132. 53. RCRI, 3:376–77. The relevant passage is as revealing as it is amusing: “We required from you authentic copies of all Acts or laws . . . but instead thereof, you have sent us some leaves of paper stitched indeed together, but without any Seal. . . . [The] blots in some places, the blanks in others, the want of sense in some expressions, the want of titles of different acts, and the disorderly placing of some of the said acts (those of later dates before those of former) are such marks of negligence that we can no means depend thereupon.” 54. William Popple to William Blathwayt, 11 August 1699. Blathwayt Papers Add. Ms. 9747, f.19. 55. Addington’s remarks, 5 January 1700, CSP 1700, n14viii. 56. Jahleel Brenton to the Board of Trade, 14 October 1698, CSP 1698, n896. For relations between Brenton and Randolph, see Hall, Randolph, 142. 57. Report of the Board of Trade, 21 December 1698, CSP 1698, n1071. 58. Hall, “House of Lords,” 494. 59. Ibid. 60. Stock, Proceedings, 2:104, 106–8. 61. See, generally, Hall, Randolph. 62. A full text of Randolph’s report and recommendations appears in Randolph Letters, 7:474–77. 63. Orders in Council, 13 January 1696, Manuscripts of the House of Lords 1695–1697 (London, 1903), 2:445, 453–54; see also Randolph Letters, 5:124–25. 64. For a detailed history of his experiences in each colony, see Hall, Randolph, 178–200. 65. Randolph to the Board of Trade, 24 March 1700, NA CO 5/1289, 4–11. 66. Ibid., 12–16. 67. See, generally, Steele, Politics. 68. Lord Bellomont to the Board of Trade, 14 September 1698, C.S.P.1698, n642. 69. Ibid., n434; RCRI, 3:336–37. 70. RCRI, 3:337. 71. Ibid., 377. 72. Ibid., 352. 73. Board of Trade to Jahleel Brenton, 2 February 1699, CSP 1699, n63. 74. A full transcript of Bellomont’s report to the Board of Trade and his journal appears in RCRI, 3:385–93.

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75. The apparently aggressive tone of Bellomont’s examination was not entirely his doing. In the 9 March 1699 letter to Bellomont giving him his instructions, the Board of Trade submitted a list of questions to be put to Greene, Easton, Clarke, Cranston, and others. Among them: “Did you commission any privateers?” “To whom did you grant such commissions?” “What security did you take of them?” In each case, the questions were tailored to fit the information the board had already received from Randolph and Brenton, as in “Did you not grant a commission to Thomas Tew?” to John Greene, and “Did you not hear that Cornish and Downe were of the pirate Avery’s company?” to John Easton. Bellomont’s instructions appear in RCRI, 3:363–67. 76. RCRI, 3:385–93, 399–400. The original examinations conducted by Lord Bellomont were contained in the John Carter Brown collection, nos. 362, 368, 370, 372. These are now lost; however, excerpts appear in the Stevens Collection vol .7, nn494–516. 77. Ibid., n494. 78. Unknown agent to William Popple, 2 January 1697, CSP 1696–1697, n554. 79. “I was in Philadelphia on the fourth day of March last,” Randolph wrote in 1698, “and I there saw several of the pirates .  .  . walking about the streets.” To add further insult, Randolph penned this note to the Board of Trade on the reverse of Pennsylvania governor William Markham’s proclamation against piracy. Blathwayt Papers, 7:2. 80. See, for example, RCRI, 3:322, 327–28. 81. A perusal of the colony’s records would seem to suggest a different view: in the critical period of 1698–1701, nearly every piece of correspondence from or to the Board of Trade is followed by assembly minutes in which the issue of piracy is raised. Yet the critical question is not whether Rhode Island was cognizant of the board’s attitude; clearly it was. Rather, we must consider the manner of response. The assembly obligingly passed two bills against piracy during this time: both defined it as an act of foreign aggression (necessarily exculpating locals). Nor did the colony ever provide a “true” copy of its laws to Whitehall; we find the board still requesting it as late as the 1720s. RCRI, 3:156, 321–400. 82. From the board’s representation to William III on the irregularities of the government of Rhode Island, 21 December 1698: “We have been made sensible of the mischiefs arising there, from irregular trade and piracies . . . It has been frequently intimated to us by the officers of your Majesty’s customs there that the whole body not only of the Magistrates but inhabitants of this colony, pretending to be exempt from the obligation of taking any oath, act accordingly . . . that no manner of justice is done. . . . [We are] well informed what constant encouragement they give to pirates to come in with their spoils, and likewise what connivance is made at the breach of acts of trade. . . . And we are not only assured that they have granted those [privateering] commissions, without any lawful authority, but have done it knowingly, for unlawful purposes and ends, of which the trade of Madagascar is a strong indication.  .  .  . This being the state of your Majesty’s colony in Rhode Island, we humbly offer to your Majesty



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to prosecute these and other high misdemeanors of that government.” RCRI, 3:352–53. 83. For example, Robert Livingston, whose family would remain a central force in New York politics for most of the century, was an early patron of Captain William Kidd and avowed enemy of the alleged “pirate broker” Governor Benjamin Fletcher. 8 4. Karraker, Piracy, 98.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrews, Charles. Vice-Admiralty Courts in the Colonies. Washington, DC, 1936. Arnold, Samuel. History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Providence, RI, 1894, vol. 1. Bartlett, John Russell, ed. Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England. Providence, RI, 1858. Botein, Stephen. Early American Law and Society. New York, 1983. Chapin, Howard. Privateer Ships and Sailors. Toulon, 1926. Greene, Jack. Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History. Charlottesville, NC, 1994. Greene, Jack. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788. Athens, GA, 1986. Hall, Michael G. “The House of Lords, Edward Randolph and the Navigation Act of 1696,” William & Mary Quarterly 3, 14 (1957): 494–515. James, Sydney. Colonial Rhode Island. New York, 1975. Johnson, Charles. (pseudo. Daniel Defoe). History of the Pyrates (reprint as Pirates). New York, 1999. Karraker, Cyrus. Piracy was a Business. Rindge, NH, 1953. Lydon, James. Pirates, Privateers and Profits. Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1970. Rankin, Hugh. The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina. Raleigh, NC, 1992. Steele, Ian K. “The Board of Trade, the Quakers, and Resumption of Colonial Charters, 1699–1702,” William & Mary Quarterly 23, 4 (1966): 596–619. Steele, Ian K. The English Atlantic, 1675–1740. New York, 1986. Steele, Ian K. “Governors or Generals?: A Note on Martial Law and the Revolution of 1689 in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, 2 (1989): 304–14. Steele, Ian K. The Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720. Oxford, 1968. Stock, Leo F., ed. Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament Respecting North America, v. II. Washington, DC, 1924. Tilly, Charles, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ, 1975.

Chapter 3

The First War on Drugs Tobacco Trafficking, Criminality, and the Fiscal State in Eighteenth-Century France

O

Michael Kwass

Three officers climb into their cab on a Friday morning in July to investigate a hot tip: an addict has just ratted out a neighborhood dealer who trades in a certain illicit substance. Navigating the labyrinthine streets of a sprawling metropolis, they reach a quiet, old-money neighborhood on the east side. At the suspect’s home, their probing questions prompt a tall, thin, middle-aged man named Jean-Claude Loviat to fly into a rage. “Get the hell out of here!” he shouts, grabbing one officer by the sleeve. When the commissioner warns that this brusque reaction is in itself a serious offense, Loviat pivots and punches an agent in the face. The men fall on one another. As Loviat and the officers brawl, the suspect’s wife rushes to a cupboard to salvage what she can of the contraband. Stuffing three grey packages into her apron, she bolts, only to fumble the parcels. Two officers seize the packages and chase her down, while Loviat pummels the third agent with his front-door keys until the man’s face and clothing are covered in blood. Pressing his advantage, the dealer draws a weapon and chases his victim through the undulating arcades of the city square until the latter reaches the safety of his waiting cab. Loviat continues to threaten the officer but is held back by his neighbors. He flees, now a fugitive from justice. At headquarters, the police send three bags of weed to a lab for analysis and question the wife. She insists that the stuff was only for her husband’s personal use, not for sale, and that the police provoked the altercation by 76



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beating him with a cane. But her testimony fails to dissuade a special law court from convicting Loviat, in absentia, of possession and trafficking. The police circulate an arrest bulletin with the fugitive’s name and physical description. Should he be captured, he is to be shackled in front of a large government building for two hours, wearing a placard that reads “rebellious and violent smuggler,” and then incarcerated in a high-security prison packed with fellow traffickers. ***** This is a disturbingly familiar story. The police investigate a petty dealer for selling small quantities of a psychoactive substance smuggled into the country by a transnational criminal network. Violence erupts, and the trafficker is sentenced to long incarceration. Although intellectuals of the day bemoan the severity of the penal code and call for decriminalization, the courts continue to dispatch multitudes of convicted smugglers, dealers, and consumers to an ever-expanding prison system. The police report on which this account is based, however, was not filed in present-day New York or Tijuana but in Paris on 16 July 1773.1 Indeed, when we stop to consider the peculiar historical circumstances that conspired to produce Loviat’s violent encounter with the police over two hundred years ago, much of what initially seems familiar becomes strange. Loviat was no down-and-out street peddler. He was the concierge of a well-connected aristocrat who resided at the Place Royale, the elegant square in the Marais now called the Place des Vosges. Nor were the agents involved in the bust real police officers. They worked for a large, private company called the General Farm, which collected taxes for the king. It was outside the Farm’s splendid Paris headquarters in the hôtel de Longueville that Loviat was sentenced to be shackled and publicly shamed for trading in a strictly regulated substance. Strangest of all, that substance was not marijuana (or cocaine or methamphetamine) but another kind of drug: tobacco. Historians have long observed that tobacco was one of a number of exotic consumer goods to inundate Europe in the eighteenth century, as transoceanic trade with the New World, Africa, and Asia surged. What is less well known is that much of that trade was illicit. From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, a global underground economy developed to feed rising European demand. This essay analyzes the impact of that shadow economy on eighteenth-century France, by exploring the underground world of tobacco trafficking. The byproduct of a rapidly expanding fiscal state, tobacco smuggling helped fuel a revolution in consumption by flooding the kingdom of France with cheap contraband. But it also gave rise to a violent cycle of judicial repression and revolt that shook the monarchy even before

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the French Revolution. Only by delving into the illicit economy can we see heretofore hidden connections between state formation, globalization, consumption, and rebellion in prerevolutionary France.

ALTERED STATES Western Europe experienced a revolution in consumption during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 As aristocrats spent lavishly, ordinary men and women of the middling classes freed themselves from the grip of scarcity to initiate a buying spree of historic proportions. They filled their homes with beds, dressers, and pottery; expanded their wardrobes to include white linens, frocks, and stockings; and sported new personal accessories such as fans, umbrellas, and pocket watches. They also replaced locally grown herbal remedies with a host of psychoactive products imported from distant continents, turning to tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa, and sugar, all of which produce strong psycho-physiological effects when ingested. According to medical experts of the day, such products acted upon the body’s humoral system to produce remarkable therapeutic effects. They cured everything from headaches to epilepsy, enlivening the mind and catalyzing sociability in the process. From its inception, the global commerce that gave birth to modern European consumption entailed a brisk trade in drugs.3 Tobacco was the first and arguably most successful psychoactive import. In the sixteenth century, after Spanish explorers witnessed its use among Amerindians, European merchants and sailors began to stash small amounts of the leaf in their sea chests before crossing back over the Atlantic. In the succeeding two centuries, what began as a trickle became a flood as Europeans colonized the New World and established slave plantations along its eastern seaboard. Harvested by African slaves, the labor-intensive weed was encased in heavy wooden casks called hogsheads and shipped across the Atlantic to feed growing metropolitan demand. As tobacco inundated the continent, Europeans from all walks of life developed a habit they have yet to kick. Aristocrats offered one another pinches of snuff from precious silver boxes. Merchants smoked in coffeehouses to keep their wits about them while conducting business. And peasants took tobacco while toiling in the fields or drinking in village taverns. “What passion men have for this drug,” observed one disapproving French writer.4 By the late eighteenth century, Europeans were chewing, smoking, and above all snorting some 125 million pounds of imported tobacco a year. A new article of mass consumption was born.5 The commodification of tobacco did not take place in a political vacuum. This was, after all, the age of “mercantilism,” when bellicose European



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rulers vigorously intervened in the expanding global economy. As the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities became the object of intensive (if not always enforceable) state legislation, rival sovereigns ruthlessly extended their economic reach by founding overseas trading companies, building blue-water navies, and establishing colonies and trading posts. At the same time, states implicated themselves in trade to raise unprecedented levels of revenue. Desperate to finance ever-more-costly wars (and service the ballooning public debts they generated), rulers harnessed the fiscal power of trade by establishing an array of customs duties, excise taxes, and state monopolies. As they fiscalized the movement and consumption of commodities, early modern states became further entangled in global commerce.6 Nowhere was the connection between the development of the fiscal state and that of transcontinental trade more apparent than in the case of tobacco. As soon as the commercial prospects of the plant manifested themselves, revenue-hungry states stepped in to tax its circulation and sale. Two countries (Britain and the United Provinces) established customs duties on its importation, while many more (Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, and German and Italian polities) created state monopolies. Louis XIV established the French tobacco monopoly in 1674 and promptly subcontracted its management to the General Farm, a private company headed by forty wealthy financiers. In the hands of the Farmers General, the monopoly was to become the largest institution of its kind in the world. Tobacco was not the first consumer good to be monopolized by the French monarchy; state retailers had been selling salt for centuries. But the monopolization of tobacco was a much more ambitious operation, extending far beyond the European continent. In the midcentury heyday of the trade, after experiments in the French Caribbean and Louisiana foundered, the Farm annually purchased millions of pounds of Chesapeake Bay tobacco from British merchants. It processed the Virginian leaf in French manufacturies and shipped the final product to forty-odd regional distribution centers throughout the kingdom. The centers supplied local warehouses, which in turn furnished some ten thousand tobacconists in cities, towns, and villages across France. It was through these local retail shops that the Farm marketed the weed to millions of French subjects—old and young, rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban. Consumers bought sticks of tobacco called “carrots,” which they took home, grated into powder, and snorted at their leisure. From the point of view of the state, the beauty of the monopoly lay in its ability to tap revenue from voluntary consumption. The salt monopoly had always been involuntary. Not only was salt understood to be a good of

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“first necessity,” an essential mineral for the human body, but in northern France royal subjects were required by law to buy a fixed amount of state salt every year. By contrast, as Moreau de Beaumont, a member of Louis XV’s finance council, stressed, the tobacco levy “is a purely voluntary tax for the people: if [tobacco] has in some way become a need, they are themselves the authors of this new necessity. Can the king find a less onerous resource to provide for the expenses of state?” What was the harm in taxing a product that consumers elected to purchase? There was no denying tobacco’s fiscal value. Of all the different branches of revenue, Moreau went on, “none has made progress as rapidly and substantially as tobacco.  .  .  . Although the most recent, [it] has nevertheless become one of the most considerable.”7 By the late eighteenth century, the Farm’s rent on this single monopoly provided the crown with over 30 million livres a year, more than 7 percent of total state revenue.8

THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY The tobacco monopoly certainly boosted French finances, helping the monarchy to sustain its great-power status, but it also had the unintended consequence of spawning a massive underground economy. Undercutting the high prices of the Farm, contraband leaf flooded into France from all quarters, from the Mediterranean littoral of Languedoc in the south to the Atlantic coasts of Brittany and Normandy in the west. Supply ships hovered off the mainland as small craft ran the tobacco ashore, where traffickers picked it up and carried it inland for distribution. The most heavily trafficked routes into the territory of the French monopoly, however, lay to the north and east, where Virginian tobacco entered the Continent by way of Dunkirk and Holland to pool just beyond the French fiscal border in an arc that stretched across Alsace (a privileged French province not subject to the monopoly) all the way down to the Pays de Vaud in Switzerland. In this very same region, European farmers had been growing their own tobacco since the early seventeenth century. Not possessing the fine “scent and solidity” of Virginian, the locally grown weed fell into three basic grades: high-quality leaf from Holland and Flanders; respectable leaf from Alsace; and poor-quality leaf from Switzerland and Franche-Comté (the other large French province situated outside the monopoly zone).9 By mixing homegrown weed with superior American leaf, producers created a lowpriced but good-quality blend that was perfect for smuggling into the French interior. Traffickers purchased blends for as little as 12 sols a pound and sold them in the monopoly zone for as much as 36 sols in the provinces and up to



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50 sols in Paris, which was still well below the 62 sols charged by the Farm. The abundant supply of cheap contraband encouraged the habit of consuming tobacco, especially among the poor.10 By the middle of the century, an estimated one third of the tobacco consumed in France was illicit.11 An entire parallel economy formed around the product as it was relayed across the border, transported through the countryside, and funneled into towns and villages. The bulk of the work was carried out by indigent peasants eager to supplement their incomes with an occasional foray across the frontier. They were men like Antoine Garnier from the village of Marcouls in the Vivarais, a “poor peasant who has a young wife and four small children.” The extreme misery that had befallen him, explained the Ladies of Mercy of Montpellier, “obliged him to buy tobacco in Comtat with the intention of reselling it in the Vivarais, in order to maintain the subsistence of his family.”12 Having spent his last sou purchasing thirty pounds of weed in the tobacco-rich papal enclave, he was nabbed in the middle of the night as he crossed the Rhône back into his home province. Such painful stories of traffickers eking out an existence in a punishing economy abound. Asked why he and his partners carried contraband, a peasant named Hubert replied poignantly, “Because hunger chases the wolf, and guards on patrol cannot be everywhere.”13 Desperate peasants were not the only ones involved in the trade, however. Noble and merchant investors wheeled and dealed behind the scenes, all but immune from prosecution. Mobile professionals (peddlers, coachmen, merchants, cart-drivers, soldiers, and bargemen) built false compartments in their vehicles or buried contraband beneath heaps of legitimate cargo, moving the illicit weed across fiscal borders into the heart of the kingdom. Along the way, inn- and tavern-keepers provided crucial support, offering weary smugglers everything from credit and storage space to food and shelter. As contraband moved from the countryside into towns, domestic servants (like Jean-Claude Loviat) stored wholesale supplies in their masters’ residences and either sold them directly to consumers or passed them on to dense networks of urban retailers, the capillaries of the distribution system. Paris was positively crawling with petty dealers who, operating out of cramped apartments, neighborhood bars and cafés, and secluded cemeteries, hawked half ounces of snuff wrapped in paper cones—the “dime bags” of the eighteenth century. Although the majority of traffickers worked alone or with a single partner (often a relative), some joined gangs that ran large quantities of contraband deep into the interior. In the 1750s, for example, Louis Mandrin commanded a veritable army of traffickers who whisked tobacco from Switzerland into towns and villages dotting southeastern France. Mounted,

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armed, and operating in broad daylight, Mandrin occupied provincial towns and sold contraband in marketplaces “more publicly than one sells spangles and rosary beads.”14 More discreet bands were equally effective, passing tobacco to urban retailers under the cover of night. In the 1730s, the intendant of Dauphiné grew alarmed as gangs began to transport tobacco across his province on their way from Switzerland and Savoy to Provence and Languedoc. He estimated that around 400 full-time smugglers were active in 25 to 30 different bands, the largest of which, the band d’Orange, was composed of 70 men, all “armed to the teeth.”15 In northeastern France, likewise, an examination of court records reveals that 38 large bands were in operation in the second half of the eighteenth century, not including those which evaded detection by authorities.16

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Faced with a rapidly developing transcontinental trade in illicit tobacco, the French monarchy introduced a sweeping overhaul of the criminal justice system. Instead of minimizing traffic by simply lowering the monopoly’s exorbitant prices, as some royal officials urged, the crown opted to keep prices high and to roll back the underground by implementing a series of repressive measures unprecedented in their severity. This “war” against smugglers, as contemporaries did not hesitate to call it, was multipronged.17 First, between 1680 and 1730 the crown established a penal code for smugglers that was draconian even by old-regime standards. Traffickers who were armed, violent, assembled in gangs of five or more, or who resisted arrest were to be sentenced to death (on the wheel or by hanging) or dispatched to the galleys where convicts were forced to row warships under brutal conditions.18 Nonviolent, individual smugglers, meanwhile, were fined 1,000 livres, a crippling sum that amounted to more than three times the annual income of many peasants. If “people of low condition” were unable to pay, their financial penalty was converted to a galleys sentence without a new trial.19 This automatic conversion of sentences was a particularly sinister innovation, because it punished what was a violation of civil law (namely, defrauding the Farm) with a punishment designed for major criminals. Indeed, the death penalty and the galleys had traditionally been reserved for such heinous criminals as traitors, heretics, murderers, and highwaymen. To impose such punishments on smugglers was to inflict pain and suffering on a wholly new yet rapidly proliferating species of criminal. Harsh penalties were also designed to stain smugglers with judicial infamy. Unable to arrest and convict the vast majority of illicit traders, the



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crown sought to make an example out of those it did capture by publicly humiliating them. Traffickers condemned to the death penalty were tainted on the scaffold by the polluting touch of the executioner, while those sent to the galleys were branded in front of court houses, attached to chain gangs, and marched hundreds of miles to galleys on the Mediterranean or Atlantic coast.20 To enforce the new laws and bring suspected smugglers into the criminal justice system, the crown expanded the Farm police. Data on the size of the force is hard to come by, but at its height in the late eighteenth century it consisted of more than twenty thousand guards, making it the largest paramilitary force in Europe and by far the most powerful police unit in France.21 Each Farm guard was armed and invested with formidable public powers, such as the right to search houses and coaches, to seize contraband, and to arrest, imprison, and initiate legal proceedings against alleged traffickers. Despite a degree of corruption in its ranks, which allowed many traffickers to ply their trade with impunity, this gargantuan force captured multitudes of petty smugglers and delivered them into the hands of justice. In a matter of decades, smuggling became the most heavily pursued crime in the French kingdom. It was one thing to announce a new penal code and expand the size of the fiscal police. It was quite another to have judges apply the code in their courtrooms. Magistrates who served in centuries-old courts of appeal balked at punishing smugglers with such harsh penalties. Hostile to royal fiscality (and to the Farm in particular), the judges of the parlements and cours des aides were reluctant to impose the death penalty, the galleys, or even heavy fines in contraband cases. Undaunted by such judicial recalcitrance, however, Louis XV invoked the principle of “retained justice,” the margin of justice reserved for the monarch over and above what he and his predecessors had already delegated, and bypassed the upper judiciary by creating a new set of extraordinary courts called commissions. Like the military courts on which they were modeled, the commissions were authorized to impose the death penalty and corporal punishment without appeal—a step that cut the parlements and cours des aides out of the judicial loop. At first, in the 1720s and 1730s, the commissions were headed by provincial intendants, administrators dispatched by the royal council to handle “justice, police, and finances” in the provinces. But when the intendant of Dauphiné learned that the local lawyers serving on his commission found the penal code “too severe” to apply, he proposed the creation of a special high court staffed by “foreign judges who, without customs rooted in the region, would only be concerned with the disposition of the ordinances, the interest of the king and that of the public.”22 On 31 March 1733, just days

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after Fontanieu submitted his proposal to the finance minister, Louis XV established the commission of Valence, a court without precedent whose jurisdiction stretched across the whole of southeastern France. Appointed directly by the royal council and paid handsomely by the Farm, the magistrates of Valence heard all smuggling cases involving weapons, gangs, violence, or resistance to arrest. Never hesitating to punish smugglers to the fullest extent of the law, the commission was such a success that the monarchy created sister courts in Reims in 1740, Saumur in 1742, Caen in 1766, and Paris in 1771. The commissions did their work assiduously. Winning convictions was not difficult, for the accused had no right to counsel and could be found guilty on the basis of a single report filed by two Farm guards. For Valence, only 877 sentences are extant, a fraction of the cases the court heard, but of that number 162 men (roughly 18 percent) were sentenced to death, a rate of punishment more than twice that of the parlement of Paris at the peak of its severity.23 Despite the commission’s apparent taste for executions, however, the majority (71 percent) of the condemned—rank-and-file members of tobacco bands, a sprinkling of salt and calico dealers, and a handful of corrupt Farm officials—were sent to the galleys for life or, more frequently, for a fixed term of three to nine years.24 The remainder of the accused—women, lesser offenders, shady state-licensed tobacco retailers—were banished from the region, whipped, temporarily imprisoned, or (in the case of merchants) stripped of the right to conduct business. Almost all defendants were sentenced to pay heavy fines. Only one was acquitted. Data from Valence may well be skewed toward tougher punishments, since they have been compiled from a collection of printed judgments disseminated by the commission to instill fear in the populace. A more reliable picture of the justice meted out by commissions emerges from the records of Valence’s sister court in Reims, whose jurisdiction encompassed northeastern France. Between 1740 and 1788, some 5,809 individuals were hauled before the commission of Reims for smuggling-related crimes, 4,134 of which received verdicts. The most egregious cases, usually involving the murder of a Farm agent, resulted in death sentences; 159 men (4 percent) were hanged or broken on the wheel in the city’s public square. Many more (1,404 or 34 percent) were sent to the galleys for working in gangs, most for sentences of three to twelve years. The commission did hand down lighter, “nonafflictive” punishments such as fines, but because unpaid fines automatically converted to galleys sentences, a good number of the 787 fined smugglers (19 percent) probably ended up in the galleys just the same. An additional 7 percent of the accused were banished from the region, and the remaining 36 percent were either acquitted, pardoned, or released after stints in prison.25



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What stands out from this data is the galleys sentence, the toughest weapon in the penal arsenal after the death penalty. All told, when we include the sentencing of other commissions and numerous lower financial courts, tens of thousands of smugglers—perhaps half of the more than 100,000 men who entered the galleys and labor camps between 1685 to 1791—were incarcerated for their participation in the underground economy. Indeed, the birth of the modern prison owes much to this extraordinary crackdown on smuggling, a point that Michel Foucault overlooked in his influential study on incarceration.26

REBELLION If the fiscal exploitation of tobacco was reinforced by severe police and judicial repression, that repression met with widespread resistance. Passive resistance in the form of persistent clandestine trade implicitly challenged the authority of the state, testing the crown’s ability to control its territory and making a mockery of royal law. But active resistance in which smugglers openly engaged Farm guards in violent conflict was also on the rise. In fact, the ubiquity of such conflict in the eighteenth century significantly alters our conception of old-regime rebellion. It has long been assumed that rebellion generally took the form of tax and antimilitary uprisings in the crisis-ridden seventeenth century and protorevolutionary bread and seigneurial riots in the more stable eighteenth century.27 But a path-breaking work by Jean Nicolas exposes deep flaws in this narrative. Compiling evidence from across France, Nicolas demonstrates that from 1660 to 1789, tax rebellion was the single most common form of revolt, far outpacing other types of collective action, such as bread riots, seigneurial disturbances, workplace disputes, and religious conflicts. Moreover, within the predominant category of tax rebellion, the vast majority of incidents involved contraband tobacco or salt. Such findings dramatically change our understanding of the history of popular revolt in early modern France. Far from petering out after the splendid reign of Louis XIV, fiscal rebellion remained vigorous down to the French Revolution.28 Rebellion did change form, however. In the middle third of the seventeenth century, when “tax innovations were most noticeable and the central government was most divided,” France experienced twenty or thirty huge, province-wide uprisings.29 Called “émotions populaires” in the terminology of the day, such massive revolts posed serious territorial challenges to an embattled monarchy. In the eighteenth century, alternatively, as large-scale uprisings subsided, small-scale attacks by smugglers and their allies became

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increasingly prevalent. The enormous tax revolts of the Grand Siècle had indeed been relegated to the past, but the monarchy never firmly established what German sociologist Norbert Elias (following Max Weber) claimed was a double monopoly on taxation and the use of legitimate violence.30 Behind the veneer of stability raged an ongoing guerilla war between the gigantic Farm and legions of traffickers. In the century before the French Revolution, the two most common types of tax rebellion consisted of individual acts of resistance to arrest (or to the seizure of contraband) and community-wide interventions in which crowds of local residents went after Farm agents. The bloody incident in Paris with which this chapter opened perfectly illustrates the first kind of revolt: Loviat fiercely resisted arrest when Farm police descended on his home. An example of the second form of revolt—communal rebellion—can be found in an event that took place in the Norman parish of St. Victor de Cretieuville. In 1710, six Farm officials from Bernay travelled to the parish to investigate a tip that a man named Vivien was openly dealing contraband tobacco. Upon arrival, they asked four villagers for the location of Vivien’s house, but, after seeing the sashes that identified the outsiders as agents of the Farm, the locals took flight, crying “seize your weapons, the dog-buggers are here .  .  . let’s kill them and cut them in pieces.” Hearing the cries, a priest named Hardy stepped out of a house next to the church and, rifle in hand, sounded the tocsin. (An act of communal self-defense in early modern Europe, ringing church bells alerted villagers to such external threats as marauding armies, brigands, wolves, and, in many places, the arrival of Farm agents). At the sound of the tocsin, another priest appeared at the head of a crowd of villagers “armed with muskets, pitchforks, halberds, billhooks, axes, and metal-tipped staffs.” The Farm brigadiers cautioned that they had come to protect the rights of the king, but their words only incited Hardy to sound the tocsin again, and twice as hard. Claiming that he did not “give a damn what might happen,” the priest urged that the agents “be torn to shreds.” After he invoked the name of God in a tirade against the Farm, a man stepped forward from the crowd to swing a staff, missing the brigadier’s head but striking his left hand. The Farm agents attempted to reassert their authority, commanding Hardy in the name of the king to declare the crowd’s intentions, but the rebel only responded by sounding the tocsin yet again. This time an even larger crowd assembled, forcing the officials to retreat. Better to withdraw and draft a report than to suffer the blows of an angry crowd.31 Less common but far more aggressive, a third type of rebellion consisted of premeditated assaults such as attacks on customs posts, ambushes of ambulatory Farm guards, and the liberation of imprisoned smugglers.



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These were the kinds of brazen acts of rebellion that legendary smuggler Louis Mandrin staged during his midcentury expeditions. Not content to conduct his trade clandestinely in the murky depths of the underground, Mandrin appeared in the full light of day to bust open the tobacco monopoly. With a force of over a hundred men, he raided state warehouses and compelled Farm agents to purchase his contraband tobacco. On 5 October 1754, for example, his band rode into the provincial capital of Bourg-enBresse and deposited 38 hundred-pound sacks of tobacco with the wife of Jean Hersmuller de la Roche, the local director of the Farm. In exchange, Mandrin asked Madame de la Roche for 20,000 livres, a request she could not refuse. With the help of local officials, Roche managed to raise the money and pay the sum in full. Mandrin graciously accepted the coin and issued a signed receipt to document the sale. His gang then made a quick stop at the municipal prison to free captured smugglers and proceeded to the next town.32 Such forced sales became Mandrin’s signature method (literally) of doing business in the fall and winter of 1754. Although he could have easily plundered the coffers of the Farm without leaving any contraband in return, he deliberately sustained the pretext of engaging in a reciprocal commercial transaction—coercive to be sure but morally legitimate in the eyes of the band and many local spectators. Mandrin’s forced sales provide a window onto the “moral economy” of contraband rebellion in the eighteenth century. Not unlike food riots in which crowds of men, women, and children assembled to demand grain or bread at a “just price,” the smuggling chief’s forced sales were imposed by agglomerations of ordinary people who, far from acting as an unthinking mob, conducted themselves with a surprising degree of deliberation and restraint.33 Further, the coercion involved in both food riots and forced sales was perceived as legitimate—rioters and smugglers did not think of themselves as thieves—because it aimed to correct markets warped by monopoly. Just as food rioters threatened merchants who they believed (rightly in many cases) were colluding to push food prices higher, Mandrin sought to strike the Parisian monopolists who ran the Farm.34 The receipts tell the whole story. Mandrin’s purpose in drafting them was to shift the costs of his forced sales from innocent, low-level officials to the notorious financiers who headed the monopoly, by giving warehousers means by which to seek reimbursement from the Farmers General. As one receipt that he signed spelled out, “I acknowledge to have received from M. François the sum of three thousand livres for three loads of tobacco that I delivered to him, for which sum he will be paid by MM. les fermiers généraux.”35 By targeting the Farmers General and forcing them to purchase what they were in the business of repressing, Mandrin stepped from the shadows of clandestinity to challenge

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the state monopoly head on. In effect, he drew a battle line between two forms of capitalism: an underground capitalism of illicit (yet morally legitimate) trade and a court capitalism of licit (yet morally illegitimate) fiscality. As these three examples of rebellion illustrate, the war between Farm and smuggler was propelled by competing normative structures. As the monarchical state fiscalized Atlantic commerce and domestic consumption through the tobacco monopoly, it criminalized illicit trade and attempted to taint convicted smugglers with judicial infamy. But criminalizing smuggling was not like criminalizing murder, theft, or vagabondage, the punishment of which corresponded to everyday understandings of such acts as moral transgressions.36 By far the largest purveyor of tobacco in the kingdom, the French state was hardly in a position to demonize the plant as prohibited narcotics are demonized today.37 The naked fiscal interest of the state or, worse yet, of the Farm completely undermined attempts to stigmatize trafficking as a genuine transgression. Small wonder, then, that smugglers and the communities that sustained them stubbornly refused to internalize the criminal status imposed on them. How else to explain why convicted smugglers preferred to do time in the stocks—a punishment that was supposed to inflict painful public humiliation—rather than pay heavy fines? Why else would traffickers expose the brands on their shoulders (a mark of the galleys) as a badge of honor?38 Illicit traders never accepted the degrading moral status that criminalization implied. Even clergymen, the moral watchdogs of the local community, did not hesitate to protect smugglers in their midst, as the rebellion in St. Victor de Cretieuville attests. According to a frustrated provincial intendant in 1732, illicit tobacco trafficking was rampant “because parish priests . . . in no way make a crime out of it. I discussed this with the bishop of Grenoble who, for his part, spoke strongly about it to his clergy, but to no avail.”39

ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION The fiscalization of consumption and its judicial corollary, the criminalization of smuggling, engendered widespread hostility toward the Farm, provoking rebellions that disrupted public order, destabilized border provinces, and challenged the fiscal state itself. But the cycle of repression and rebellion might have remained a mere political distraction had it not unfolded in the midst of the Enlightenment, an age of great intellectual ferment in which state institutions were subjected to widening public scrutiny.40 As a critical public sphere developed, the din of rebellion was amplified by a popular press that transposed the war against the Farm into print and by



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Enlightenment literature that openly criticized the criminalization of smuggling and asserted that a tyrannical complex of fiscal and judicial institutions was ravaging the kingdom. The case of Louis Mandrin reveals how popular media politicized the issue of smuggling in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1755, Mandrin was captured, tried by the commission of Valence, and broken on the wheel before a large (and largely sympathetic) crowd. While his smuggling expeditions had already drawn the attention of newspapers, Mandrin’s execution provoked an outpouring of subversive literature that, within weeks of his demise, transformed his memory into a powerful political symbol. Singers celebrated his heroic exploits and mourned his tragic death; engravers hawked images of him vanquishing the Farm; and writers churned out easily digestible popular biographies. Not everything sung, etched, or printed represented the kingpin in a favorable light but, on the whole, popular culture exalted the outlaw, allowing listeners, viewers, readers to experience the vicarious thrill of rebellion. The best-selling chapbook on Mandrin characterized him as a man of “wit, an admirable deftness, & good cheer” who possessed “a natural eloquence which persuaded, a lively imagination, the courage to organize great undertakings, and the audacity to succeed.”41 Recounting how he showed mercy to the wife of a Farm agent, distributed receipts to warehousers, and respected decent citizens, the text conjured up a kind of Gallic Robin Hood who had the courage to stand up to the greedy financiers who had taken over the French state. To the extent that they openly endorsed rebellion, popular images of Mandrin certainly packed a punch. But it took another form of literature, one associated more narrowly with the high Enlightenment, to transform popular resentment of the Farm into a learned critique of absolute monarchy. The first Enlightenment thinkers to rush to the defense of smugglers were not the philosophes of great renown but economists who espoused a new liberal vision of society. Poised at midcentury to disseminate their “new science” among elites, economists sounded themes of natural law, humanitarianism, and consumer sovereignty to argue that the so-called crime of smuggling was in fact no crime at all but an artifact of a badly flawed fiscal regime. Impoverished smugglers might have broken political law, conceded Véron de Forbonnais in 1758, but they “in no way violated natural law” and should therefore be treated with leniency.42 Economist and philosopher André Morellet asked: Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying in Geneva at 22

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sols what he could sell in Grenoble for 58? Will they be able to believe that men in often dire poverty were presented with such a strong temptation as profit & were punished so severely when they succumbed to it?43

After the Seven Years War (1756–1763), magistrates and lawyers joined economists in lambasting the Farm. Fearing that despotism was about to engulf the monarchy, men of law shone a public spotlight on the abuses of overzealous Farm tribunals and customs guards. The culmination of the legal critique came from the pen of Lamoignon de Malesherbes, president of the cour des aides of Paris and the man responsible for bringing Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments to a broad European public. Radicalized by a case before his court in which an artisan falsely accused of dealing tobacco was thrown in prison by agents of the Farm, Malesherbes drafted the remonstrances of 1775, which differentiated between royal absolutism, by which the king legitimately held unlimited authority, and outright “despotism,” a condition in which “each of the executors of [the king’s] orders also employs a power without limits.” The president systematically applied this theory to every level of Farm power: to the Farmers General who forced cash-starved monarchs to issue draconian penal legislation, to the commissions that handed down sentences that were “repugnant to humanity,” and to the guards who rode roughshod over defenseless peasants.44 The significance of the movement to reform the old regime’s fiscaljudicial complex should not be underestimated. In 1789, popular and Enlightenment opposition to the state helped set the course of the French Revolution. That revolution began not with the storming of the Bastille, as is commonly thought, but with the destruction of the customs gates encircling the city of Paris. From 11 to 14 July, large crowds of men and women, many of them involved in the parallel economy, sacked the customs checkpoints that had been erected in the 1780s to clamp down on the flow of illicit tobacco (and wine) into the capital.45 After Parisians set the neoclassical gatehouses aflame, word of the rebellion spread to the provinces where peasants quickly followed suit, attacking customs barriers in their own towns. Rebellions against consumption taxes rocked the provinces for the next two years, as delegates to the National Assembly scrambled to institute a new fiscal system.46 In 1791, responding to such popular pressure and applying the tenets of physiocratic economics, the National Assembly swept away the tobacco monopoly (along with the rest of the indirect tax system) and dismantled the judicial machinery that had criminalized smuggling. No longer would consumption taxes and the repressive state apparatus that collected them tyrannize the people, the deputies proclaimed. The new political order



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would be based strictly on direct taxes that, if levied properly, would usher in a new age of liberty and equality.

CONCLUSION The abolition of consumption taxes ended up fatally weakening the French revolutionary state, but that is another story. Our story concerns the dark side of the consumer revolution and the global trade that sustained it. As historians of the Atlantic slave trade well know, the development of global capitalism in this period was not a peaceful process by which markets smoothly, progressively, inexorably integrated.47 Indeed, the simultaneous rise of three formidable historical forces—globalization, the fiscal state, and European consumption—produced crime and political turmoil not only in the colonies but in the very heart of the metropole. In France, where the state sought to harness the fiscal power of overseas trade and domestic consumption by establishing a monopoly on American tobacco, it stimulated robust underground markets—with ramifying political consequences. Such markets helped fuel a revolution in consumption as cheap, illicit leaf inundated France, but they also gave rise to a protracted “war” between Farm and trafficker. As the monarchy criminalized smuggling by hardening the penal code, creating extraordinary judicial bodies, and (for the first time in French history) incarcerating tens of thousands of convicts, traffickers and their allies among the laboring classes struck back by resisting arrest, rescuing captured goods and comrades, and attacking agents of the General Farm. Rooted in a profound disjunction between state fiscal policy and popular economic culture, the conflict was further politicized by Enlightenment writers who deplored the criminalization of smuggling and demanded the abolition of what they claimed was a tyrannical fiscal-judicial complex at the heart of the monarchy. Ultimately, popular and Enlightenment opposition to the fiscalization of consumption and its judicial counterpart, the criminalization of trafficking, helped galvanize a revolutionary movement to tear down the regime and build a new political order. NOTES 1. Archives Nationales (hereafter AN), Y 9512/B, report of 27 July 1773. 2. The early study that inspired a vast literature was Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982). Recent scholarship has

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broadened beyond England to encompass much of Western Europe and colonial America. For a synthesis of current work, see Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008), chap. 4. 3. David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY, 2008); Jordan Goodman, “Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs,” in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sheratt (London, 1995); and Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). 4. Projet pour la suppression des douanes dans l’intérieur du royaume (Avignon, 1763), 87. 5. Goodman, “Excitantia,” 126. Carole Shammas, “Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), 179, defines mass-consumed groceries as those sufficiently imported to allow a quarter of the adult population to use them at least once daily. 6. For recent analyses that emphasize the role of the state in early modern globalization, see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA, 2004), chaps. 1–3; A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York, 2002); and Richard Bonney, ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999). 7. Moreau de Beaumont, Mémoires concernant les impositions et droits en Europe, 4 vols. (1768–1769), 4:581 and 4:680. 8. Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973), 1:38 and 1:373–75. 9. AN, 29 AP 85, Observations sur la constitution et le régime de la ferme du tabac. 10. Demand for addictive products tends be elastic for new users, which helps explain why the consumption of tobacco spread. Gianluca Fiorentini and Sam Peltzman, eds., The Economics of Organized Crime (Cambridge, 1995), 20–21; Friedrich Schneider and Dominik H. Enste, The Shadow Economy: An International Survey (Cambridge, 2002), 171. Although here I emphasize the psychoactive aspects of tobacco, there are also cultural explanations for its diffusion. See Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures. 11. Price, France and the Chesapeake, 1:407. Marc and Muriel Vigié, L’Herbe à Nicot: Amateurs de Tabac, Fermiers Généraux et Contrebandiers sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1989), chap. 11. According to the calculations of Farmer-General Dupin in 1732, 38 percent of the tobacco consumed in the department of Chalons was illicit. AN, 129 AP 29. 12. Archives Départementales (Hereafter AD) de l’Hérault C 1696. 13. Quoted in Nicolas Schapira, “Contrebande et contrebandiers dans le nord et de l’est de la France, 1740–1789 (mémoire Université de Paris I, 1991), 134. 14. AD Hérault C 1978.



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15. Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter BN), Ms. Fr. 8390 and 8476. 16. Nils Liander, “Smuggling Bands in Eighteenth-Century France” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1981), 291. 17. Administrators, economists, and newspaper correspondents regularly used the term “war” to describe both the Farm’s offensive against smugglers and the smugglers’ rebellions against the Farm. “Inept and barbarous” fiscal laws, Jacques Necker observed, produced a “war” that pitted one part of society against the other. De l’administration des finances, 2 vols. (1784), 2:57–58. For a similar use of the metaphor of war during the Restoration, see David Todd, L’Identité économique de la France: Libre-échange et protectionnisme (1814–1851) (Paris, 2008), chap. 3. 18. In 1748, the obsolete ships were replaced by coastal labor camps where convicts worked on naval projects, although the term “galleys” continued to be used in sentencing. Exempt from the galleys, female convicts were banished or publicly flogged. 19. AN, G-7 1290. 20. André Zysberg, “La Société des galériens au milieu du XVIIIe siècle,” Annales ESC (Jan–Fev 1975): 43–67; and Les galériens: Vies et destins de 60,000 forçats sur les galères de France 1680–1748 (Paris, 1987). 21. Vida Azimi, Un modèle administratif de l’Ancien Régime: les commis de la Ferme générale et de la Régie générale des aides (Paris, 1987). 22. BN, Ms. Fr. 8390. 23. AD Drôme B 1304; Bernard Balsan, “La Commission du Conseil de Valence et la Répression de la Contrebande au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue drômoise 85 (1988): 473–78. Dominique Müller, “Magistrats français et la peine de mort au XVIIIe siècle,” Dix-huitième siècle 4 (1972): 90. 24. Calico smuggling was widespread because importation of the colorful Indian cloth had been prohibited in 1686. The demand for “indiennes” remained so intense that a black market rapidly developed in the shadow of the ban. 25. AN, 603Mi1; Liander, appendix A. 26. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979) was written before the publication of research on the galleys and therefore failed to account for the role played by smuggling in the genesis of the modern European prison system. For more recent work, see Zysberg, “La Société des galériens”; Zysberg, Les galériens; and Frédérique Johannic-Seta, Le bagne de Brest, 1749–1800: Naissance d’une institution carcérale au siècle des Lumières (Rennes, 2000). 27. The classic statement regarding this shift was formulated by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,” Annales ESC 29 (1974): 6–22. Le Roy Ladurie’s thesis was further popularized by Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC, 1991), 141–45. 28. Jean Nicolas, La Rébellion Française: Mouvements Populaires et Conscience Sociale 1661–1789 (Paris, 2002), annexe 2.

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29. William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, 1997), 258. Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, 2 vols (Geneva, 1974). 30. Norbert Elias, Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1982), 91–225. 31. AN, G-7 1292. 32. AN, AB XIX 793, nos. 1–7; AD Hérault C 6877; Adolphe Rochas, Biographie de Dauphiné (Geneva, 1971), 102–3; and the Gazette d’Amsterdam, 5 November 1754. 33. For English food riots, see the classic essay by E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. For France, see Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols (The Hague, 1976); Louise Tilly, “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (Autumn, 1983): 333–49; and, most recently, Cynthia Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society (University Park, PA, 1993). 34. In stressing market correction over market rejection, I am tacking away from Thompson toward more recent literature. Steven L. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 28, argues that price fixing was not intended to “to throttle commerce but to domesticate it and moralize it, not to obliterate the market principle but to correct it.” Similarly, Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth contend, “The moral economy market model was therefore not an alternative to a capitalist market . . . but a model of a capitalist market subject to careful regulation.” Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (London, 2000), 17. 35. Rochas, Biographie de Dauphiné, 103 (The emphasis is mine). Such receipts were eventually honored by the finance minister. AD Puy-de-Dôme, 1C 1639, Relation. 36. Pascal Bastien, L’Exécution Publique à Paris au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 2006), 225–43. 37. Indeed, the lack of demonization in the French example throws into relief the extremely moralistic character of the contemporary war on drugs in the United States. According to officials prosecuting the contemporary war, nothing less than the moral fiber of the nation is at stake. See Paul Gootenberg, “Talking Like a State: Drugs, Borders, and the Language of Control,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, ed. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (Bloomington, IN, 2005), chap. 3; and Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (Boston, 2003), chap. 1. 38. AN, G-7 1290. 39. BN, Ms. Fr. 8390. The history of “legitimate crime,” that is, of practices deemed illegal yet viewed as morally sound, remains to be written. But recent work in the social sciences has begun to investigate “bad laws,” state regulations that generate illicit yet widely popular economic practices. See Marcela



40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

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Vasquez-Leon, “Neoliberalism, Environmentalism, and Scientific Knowledge: Redefining Use Rights in the Gulf of California Fisheries,” in States and Illegal Practices, ed. Josiah McC. Heyman (Oxford, 1999), chap. 8. The foundational text on this development is of course Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1991). Histoire de Louis Mandrin, depuis sa naissance jusqu’à sa mort (Troyes, 1755), 160. Véron de Forbonnais, Recherches et considérations sur les finances de France (Basle, 1758), 508; and Examen des avantages et des desavantages de la prohibition des toiles peintes (Marseille, 1755), 75–76. Reflexions sur différens objets du commerce (Geneva, 1759), 36. “Remontrances relatives aux impôts, 6 mai 1775,” in Elisabeth Badinter, ed., Les “Remontrances” de Malesherbes, 1771–1775 (Paris, 1985), 167–284. V. de Clercq, “L’incendie des barrières de Paris de 1789 et le procès des incendiaires,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Isle de France (1938): 31–47. John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA, 1996), 233–40 and 275–76. For trenchant critiques of such liberal conceptions of globalization, see Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213; Michael Lang, “Globalization and Its History,” Journal of Modern History 78 (December 2006): 899–931; and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Azimi, Vida. Un modèle administratif de l’Ancien Régime: les commis de la Ferme générale et de la Régie générale des aides. Paris, 1987. Balsan, Bernard. “La Commission du Conseil de Valence et la Répression de la Contrebande au XVIIIe siècle.” Revue drômoise 85 (1988): 473–78. Bastien, Pascal. L’Exécution Publique à Paris au XVIIIe Siècle. Paris, 2006. Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Malden, MA, 2004. Beik, William. Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution. Cambridge, 1997. Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge, 2002. Bercé, Yves-Marie. Histoire des Croquants. 2 vols. Geneva, 1974. Bonney, Richard, ed. The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815. Oxford, 1999. Bouton, Cynthia. The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society. University Park, PA, 1993. Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Durham, NC, 1991.

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Cooper, Frederick. “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective.” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213. Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA, 2001. de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge, 2008. Elias, Norbert. Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York, 1982. Findlay, Ronald, and Kevin H. O’Rourke. Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. Princeton, NJ, 2007. Fiorentini, Gianluca, and Sam Peltzman, eds. The Economics of Organized Crime. Cambridge, 1995. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, 1979. Goodman, Jordan. “Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs.” In Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sheratt. London, 1995. Gootenberg, Paul. “Talking Like a State: Drugs, Borders, and the Language of Control.” In Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, ed. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham. Bloomington, IN, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA, 1991. Hopkins, A. G., ed. Globalization in World History. New York, 2002. Johannic-Seta, Frédérique. Le bagne de Brest, 1749–1800: Naissance d’une institution carcérale au siècle des Lumières. Rennes, 2000. Kaplan, Steven L. Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV. 2 vols. The Hague, 1976.    . Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY, 1984. Karras. Alan L. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History. Lanham, MD, 2010. Klooster, Wim. “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800.” In Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault. Cambridge, MA, 2009. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788.” Annales ESC 29 (1974): 6–22. Liander, Nils. “Smuggling Bands in Eighteenth-Century France.” PhD diss., Cambridge, MA, 1981. Markoff, John. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park, PA, 1996. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: the Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington, IN, 1982. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York, 1985.



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Müller, Dominique. “Magistrats français et la peine de mort au XVIIIe siècle.” Dixhuitième siècle 4 (1972): 90. Nicolas, Jean. La Rébellion Française: Mouvements Populaires et Conscience Sociale 1661– 1789. Paris, 2002. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY, 2008. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NY, 2000. Price, Jacob M. France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791. 2 vols. Ann Arbor, MI, 1973. Randall, Adrian, and Andrew Charlesworth. Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority. London, 2000. Schapira, Nicolas. “Contrebande et contrebandiers dans le nord et de l’est de la France, 1740–1789.” Mémoire de maîtrise, Paris, 1991. Schneider, Friedrich, and Dominik H. Enste. The Shadow Economy: An International Survey. Cambridge, 2002. Shammas, Carole. “Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800.” In Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter. London, 1993. Thompson, E. P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. Tilly, Louise. “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (Autumn 1983): 333–49. Todd, David. L’Identité économique de la France: Libre-échange et protectionnisme (1814– 1851). Paris, 2008. Vigié, Marc, and Muriel Vigié. L’Herbe à Nicot: Amateurs de Tabac, Fermiers Généraux et Contrebandiers sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris, 1989. Winslow, Cal. “Sussex Smugglers.” In Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow. New York, 1975. Zysberg, André. Les galériens: Vies et destins de 60,000 forçats sur les galères de France 1680–1748. Paris, 1987.    . “La Société des galériens au milieu du XVIIIe siècle.” Annales ESC (Jan–Fev 1975): 43–67.

Chapter 4

Befitting Bedfellows Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan

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On a fall afternoon in 1919, several dozen yakuza bosses—heads of Japanese mafia groups—climbed into cars at a Tokyo hotel. The caravan of smartly dressed men then proceeded to the Home Ministry for an appointment with top ministry officials, including the home minister himself. This meeting between Home Minister Tokonami Takejirō and Kansai-area bosses eventually led to the founding of an influential nationalist group of the interwar era: the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association). What made this event notable was not just the seemingly remarkable cooperation between yakuza and a minister of state, but its coverage in the media as relatively unremarkable. Newspapers listed the names of all the participating yakuza bosses, and the tone of the published articles was utterly mundane and matter-of-fact.1 This collaborative moment in October 1919 was but part of a larger story about the close relationship between yakuza and the state—the Home Ministry and to a lesser extent the military and the police. In the late 1910s and 1920s, they came together for various, interconnected reasons having to do with ideological kinship, financial interest, and a shared attitude toward the use of violence. In the shadow of the Russian Revolution, both yakuza and the state were deeply concerned about the upsurge in leftist activism and labor union strikes that were perceived as unpatriotic threats to societal stability. The state had much to gain from uninterrupted, capitalist production and yakuza were more than happy to accept the payment of company management willing and able to hire them as strikebreakers. Yakuza and the 98



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state also came together out of a mutual characteristic: the purposeful use of violence as a means to exert and maintain power. It may come as no surprise that the mafia and the state operated through the use of physical force and viewed violence as a significant, instrumental tool, with violence being defined here as physical coercion of the physical body. More surprising may be that both, including the state, were implicated in what might be called criminal violence—violence that was illegal, as defined by the laws promulgated by the state itself, and used for illicit ends.2 For all of these reasons, the yakuza and the state became bedfellows in a world where the legitimacy of their violence was ambiguous. The cooperation between yakuza and the state challenges conventional assumptions about the illegitimacy of the mafia, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of the state, on the other. In the 1920s and 1930s, yakuza were not unequivocally condemned as criminals or parasitic mafiosi by the societies in which they operated or the political universe in which they thrived, and they were considered just legitimate enough by those who decided to do business with them. And the state, intentionally or not, capitalized on this blurring of boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate because in supporting yakuza violence instead of flagrantly wielding that of the police or military, it could forward its ideological, financial, and political interests while taking cover in a gray area where state violence was not patently identifiable and therefore more difficult to criticize. Or to put it another way, this modern and arguably democratic state cooperated with nonstate violence specialists in order to violently suppress dissent while evading questions about the legitimacy of such use of force.3 In Japan, as elsewhere, the emergence of a modern state, democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law did not render impenetrable the boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the lawful and the criminal, but left them fluid and porous such that there were extended moments of symbiosis between the state and the yakuza. This phenomenon resonates with the state’s “partnership with private bodies” that Béatrice Hibou discusses in her contribution to this volume; though she takes neoliberalism as her specific context, she too examines how the state avails itself of opportunities “to strengthen political domination through intermediaries and private actors.” In the case of the interwar Japanese state, financial and political anxieties combined with the powerful instrumental logic of violence to make alliances with yakuza, as private actors, quite attractive. Both Hibou and I follow in the footsteps of those who have highlighted the connections between organized crime and capitalism, and have argued that “the modern state is not made up of law and order alone.”4 As Hibou also points out, historical sociologists such as Charles Tilly have made the important point that crime

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is not the opposite of state legitimacy. Examining the ties and similarities between the state and the yakuza, rather than treating each separately, also enables us to illuminate the ambiguous space between legitimacy and illegitimacy in the context of Japan’s modern history. The closeness of yakuza and the state within this ambiguous space exacerbated economic and political disparities in these interwar years. In labor strikes, yakuza groups were paid to stand behind management, which tended to be sympathetic with state goals and have deeper pockets than leftist labor unions. Yakuza violence, then, served to augment the coercive power of those who were able to afford their brawn. For the state, its activities in this murky zone of legitimacy did not lead to the erosion of its authority or the disintegration of its power, but quite the opposite. This because many Japanese at the time who criticized the collusion between yakuza and the state called for an unambiguous alternative—the removal of yakuza influence from politics and the empowering of the police and the military alone to maintain domestic order. We can argue, then, that the state’s willingness and ability to work with nonstate violence specialists like the yakuza contributed, however indirectly and modestly, to the dismal fate of democracy in interwar Japan. More broadly, the extent of the ties between the modern Japanese state and the yakuza over much of the twentieth century raises questions about how we might understand, indeed rethink, assumptions about the illegitimacy of mafias and the legitimacy of states.

MURKINESS OF PLACE: YAKUZA IN JAPANESE SOCIETY When the yakuza bosses met with Home Minister Tokonami in October 1919, they were not considered to be, or treated as, dangerous outlaws or threatening mafiosi by the Home Ministry or the press. Instead, they were viewed as representatives of the regions from which they hailed and the industries that they championed. This reflected a long history of yakuza, and yakuza bosses in particular, playing leadership roles in their local communities such that they occupied a place as potentially menacing but desired providers of goods and services that at least some people very much wanted. This nebulous position of the yakuza stemmed from a long history of its complicated relationships with society and the state. During the early modern Tokugawa period (1600–1868), yakuza and their violence were viewed critically by the local societies in which they operated. Yakuza built their organizations and expanded their territories in part through physical violence—armed fights, bloody brawls, and murders. They engaged in predatory activities such as extortion, blackmail, and burglary.5 And what is believed



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to be the root of the term “yakuza” (“ya-ku-za” means “eight-nine-three,” a losing hand in a gambling card game) reflects both their gambling origins and their early reputation as losers.6 At the same time, some precursors of the modern yakuza—namely gamblers, or bakuto—were viewed as important figures in their communities as they contributed to village upkeep, mediated disputes, served as moneylenders, gave money to the poor, protected villagers, and generally provided services (legal and illegal) demanded by local communities. The Tokugawa shogunate recruited gamblers to help police more offensive criminal offenders and often turned a blind eye to their gambling enterprises.7 This is not to say that the state or localities embraced the yakuza or had infinite patience for their violence, but the yakuza were not outlaws in the sense of being denigrated and quarantined by the state or “nonoutlaw” society. At least some yakuza bosses continued to play this role of local notable past the turn of the twentieth century. Well into the 1920s and 1930s, a number of yakuza were elected to public office at various levels. One particular gambling boss, Yoshida Isokichi, served as a Diet member in the House of Representatives and was championed by at least one newspaper as a courageous figure whom other parliamentarians should aspire to emulate.8

MURKINESS OF ASSOCIATION: YAKUZA-STATE NETWORKS IN INTERWAR JAPAN Given the complicated historical relationship between yakuza and the communities that they inhabited, the interwar collaboration between the Japanese state and yakuza should not be oversimplified. Indeed, it was not a straightforward relationship between a monolithic state and a criminal organization, for over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s both became part of an expansive network that wove together not only various state actors (bureaucrats and military men) and yakuza (bosses and foot soldiers) but also politicians, industrialists, and nationalist leaders. One of the most prominent of these networks was the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai. During this nationalist organization’s life, its executives included illustrious bureaucrats, the likes of Suzuki Kisaburō (former justice minister, home minister, and future president of the Seiyūkai, one of the two main political parties of the time) and Takahashi Mitsutake (former chief cabinet secretary).9 By the mid-1930s, military men joined the mix as well—the general headquarters’ vice-president was also a vice-admiral in the navy; the chief director was a lieutenant general in the army; the directors consisted of four army lieutenant generals, one navy vice-admiral, and three navy major generals; and

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the advisors included three navy vice-admirals, and one army lieutenant general.10 Also at the helm of the Kokusuikai were those who had a long history of involvement with violent politics. Murano Tsuneemon, the organization’s second chairman, had served time in prison for the Osaka Incident of 1885 in which activists planned an invasion of Korea. He became a local organizer of political ruffians (sōshi), and ascended the political ranks to become the head of the Seiyūkai’s pressure group (ingaidan) and later, the party’s secretary-general.11 These prominent political figures did not seek to hide their association with yakuza, or to dull the vivid yakuza coloring of the organization. In mid-November of 1919, yakuza from the Kansai and Kantō regions gathered to solidify their commitment to the Kokusuikai by participating in a sakazuki ceremony, a ritual traditionally performed by yakuza (but not just yakuza) to initiate members and mark the creation of ties. Conducted with the almost fifty people who filled the hall, the ceremony was part of an evening of rituals and festivities from formal greetings to a banquet, but the gathering of such a large number of bosses from different regions had moments of tension and awkwardness—at points, the entire hall fell silent. Nonetheless, the evening solidified the relationship between the Kansai and Kantō bosses of the Kokusuikai. The next morning, a pilot scattered ten thousand handbills from the skies over Tokyo that read: “The nationwide yakuza organizations (kyōkakudan) that live their lives with chivalry are dedicated to imperialism for the sake of the country and here from the air announce to all citizens the establishment of the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai.”12 When the organization celebrated the founding of its Osaka headquarters on 15 December, at least fifteen yakuza groups attended.13 And the membership of the Kokusuikai consisted primarily of construction contractors and yakuza bosses.14 Yakuza involvement did not render the Kokusuikai a small and marginal political organization—by the early 1930s, it had approximately ninety branches up and down the Japanese mainland and abroad in the empire with an estimated total membership at its height of about 200,000.15 Part of what brought the state and yakuza together was shared anxiety— financial, ideological, and political—over recent labor union strikes. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the labor union movement expanded, the major union federation (Sōdōmei) gained members, the number of labor unions rose, and strikes grew in length, size, and level of violence.16 For the many yakuza bosses who worked as construction contractors, these strikes were an income-jeopardizing disturbance against which they should all unite and “wave a clenched fist.” For Home Minister Tokonami, too, labor unions were financially destabilizing. Labor issues were of such interest that one of



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the original names proposed for the group was the Construction Industry Council (Dobokugyō Gikai).17 Financial concerns were not mutually exclusive of ideological worries. The stated platform of the Kokusuikai reflected the nationalist leanings of both the state and the yakuza.18 The organization and its branches venerated the imperial house and sought to combat “the corruption of national morals and beautiful customs.”19 Central to the Kokusuikai’s ideology was its own version of Japanese history—a nationalist remaking of the past that highlighted its purity and authenticity. Celebrated were the three thousand proud and unblemished years since the country’s founding during which time it overcame numerous national crises and courageously stood up to foreign enemies. The foreign was portrayed as a contagion from which the country was protected only through the Yamato, or Japanese, spirit.20 To be sure, some of the Kokusuikai’s ideas also served as rhetorical attempts to legitimize its use of physical force. It explained and justified its violence by defending it as historically valued and necessary for the defense of the country, attempting to tie it to fonts of popular, romantic, heroic violence. In ideological tracts, the “way of the warrior” and its embodiment of the Yamato spirit were valorized, and in an artful variation on the warrior myth, yakuza—or kyōkaku (men of chivalry), as they were referred to by the Kokusuikai—were constructed as the samurai’s present-day descendants.21 Kokusuikai members, and the yakuza in particular, were thus honorable men who chivalrously helped the weak and defeated the strong. Article One of the association’s rules highlighted this point, stating: “Our association is founded with spirit and is a group of those characterized by chivalry.”22 In practice, this ideology could be molded to legitimize the Kokusuikai’s intimidation of striking laborers by portraying company management as “the weak” who needed to be defended against the laborers, or “the strong,” who had to be crushed because they were blocking industrial production and thus national progress. What this language attempted to mask was another shared characteristic of the state and yakuza: the willingness and ability to purposefully use violence as a means to an end—in this case, the snuffing out of labor union activism. The state clearly had no qualms about using violence to curb or silence dissent, having done so on numerous occasions in the recent past. In this case, there was the advantage that it could attempt to dodge accountability for its use of physical force, standing in the shadows and cloaking state violence in the guise of nationalist violence. The yakuza too obviously had no qualms about using violence, having done so routinely to establish and expand their groups and to conduct their business. In the

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context of labor union strikes, yakuza violence consisted largely of intimidating and beating dissenters with iron bars, clubs, and fists, and occasionally unleashing daggers, swords, and firearms. Encounters between the yakuza and strikers rarely escalated to outright murder, having mainly been at the level of brawls. This commonality of tactics drew the Kokusuikai closer to the violent wing of the Seiyūkai’s pressure group over the course of the 1920s. The Seiyūkai pressure group, which had consisted of political ruffians since its inception two decades earlier, increasingly attracted yakuza, membership of nationalist groups, and continental adventurers (tairiku rōnin) or those of various occupations who traveled to Korea and China, typically in support of Japanese expansionism or imperialism. Under the direction of Seiyūkai member Mori Kaku, the group came to be described as not unlike a bōryokudan, or violence group. And by the late 1920s, the boundaries between the Seiyūkai pressure group and nationalist organizations such as the Kokusuikai had become quite porous.23 In this zone of ambiguous legitimacy, with its web of political connections, the Kokusuikai wielded its violence. The Kokusuikai intervened in a number of labor disputes, including the Yahata Ironworks strike (1920), the Tsurumi Incident (1925), the Singer Sewing Machine Company strike (1925), and the Noda Shōyu strike (1927–1928).24 The strike at Noda Shōyu, a big soy sauce producer, was one of the longest and costliest of the interwar period. In this case, the Kokusuikai seems to have wanted to take a relatively benign role mediating between company management and workers striking over pay and benefits, at least initially.25 But by the later stages of the strike, Kokusuikai members had clearly been brought in by management to suppress the protestors. In one pitched battle over control of the Noda theater, which strikers had been using as a gathering place, the laborers lit a bonfire at the building’s entrance to keep out the Kokusuikai, which evicted them nonetheless. Having reclaimed the building, 100 Kokusuikai members were stationed there to secure their position. That Kokusuikai members had been recruited for their ability to wield violence was made clear by several mishaps that revealed their choice instruments of violence. One car headed from Tokyo to a Kokusuikai member in Noda was stopped by the police, who confiscated its contents of 12 swords, 18 clubs, 41 cartridges, and 2 guns. The police also searched the lodgings of 4 Kokusuikai members where they uncovered 1 gun, 1 sword, 2 daggers, and several dozen iron bars.26 The Kokusuikai aimed their violence not only at labor unionists and strikers, but also at others who were seen as vaguely liberal or leftist. Association members were known to block the enactment of universal manhood suffrage and disrupt socialist gatherings.27 And one of the Kokusuikai’s



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most well-known incidents involved a battle in 1923 against the Suiheisha (The Levelers), a national organization with a socialist bent that opposed discrimination against the oppressed Burakumin minority. This Kokusuikai-Suiheisha incident was ignited by an encounter between a Burakumin bride and an elderly man named Morita Kumakichi who held up four fingers (a gesture of insult against Burakumin) as she passed by. Tensions quickly escalated over the next day as the Suiheisha demanded an apology from Morita, who refused and called in the Kokusuikai for reinforcement. Skirmishes broke out between over a thousand Suiheisha supporters and a similarly large force of Kokusuikai members. At the height of the conflict, about 394 police had gathered in Nara.28 The intervention of the police in this incident underscores the folly of painting the state with a broad brush, for the police and the military did intervene to contain even Kokusuikai violence when it seriously threatened order and stability. Laws were also enacted to limit the excesses of nationalist violence. For example, a 1926 law (Bōryoku Kōi Nado Shobatsu ni Kansuru Hōritsu) targeted violent acts and had provisions related to group coercion, weapons possession, and the disruption of meetings. In its first article, it also made special mention of crimes committed in the course of mediating labor disputes. But at the same time, uneven application of laws by agents of the state revealed their fundamental sympathy with the ends for which the Kokusuikai wielded violence. With the Kokusuikai-Suiheisha incident, the police investigated the Suiheisha much more rigorously than it did the Kokusuikai and ultimately arrested many more Suiheisha than Kokusuikai members.29 With the 1926 law, the punishment called for was slight enough (modest fines from 50 to 500 yen) not to discourage the persistence of violent strike breaking through the early 1930s.30 In its sanctioning of anti-leftist violence, the state operated in, and took advantage of, zones of ambiguous legitimacy. First, the yakuza themselves were not viewed as unequivocally illegitimate partners with whom to do business. That mere association with yakuza did not invite condemnation could be seen in the coverage of the initial meeting between Home Minister Tokonami and the yakuza bosses in October of 1919. There was nothing secretive about this event. Neither the home minister nor the yakuza attempted to hide it, and as mentioned above, the major newspapers reported on the rendezvous with most running the names of the yakuza bosses in attendance. Some controversy did arise, however, over who had initiated this conversation—Tokonami denied reports that he had invited the yakuza bosses to Tokyo. But such rumors did not stop Tokonami from proceeding with the meeting.31 Only the issue of who had called for this cooperation—not the relationship itself—was remotely questionable.

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Second, the kind of political violence wielded by the Kokusuikai and the yakuza was not uniformly or resoundingly condemned. Indeed, by the interwar period, there existed a culture of political violence in which ruffianism was at least tacitly accepted as a routinely used tool of political life. This was a time when the major political parties, like the Seiyūkai, institutionalized ruffians into their operational structure as violent wings of their pressure groups. These hired violence specialists protected party members, intimidated opposition candidates, rallied popular support for party initiatives, disturbed the gatherings of opposition parties, and the like.32 Against this backdrop, the violence of the Kokusuikai was not a conspicuous aberration. The state, the Home Ministry in particular, capitalized on these ambiguities. It could forge a cooperative relationship with yakuza without inviting too much criticism and could quietly sanction violence to serve its interests while enjoying a certain degree of deniability. While the ties between the Kokusuikai and the state were widely acknowledged, the state had more room to distance itself from any unpalatable violence in a way that it could not if it chose to unleash the police or the military. For even though the state had significant violent resources at its disposal, it could not use them to the fullest extent of their power without at least some negative backlash. And anxieties about the extent of violence it could use might have shaped the decision to ally with yakuza through the Kokusuikai.

AMBIGUOUS LEGITIMACY AND THE EROSION OF DEMOCRACY Ultimately, the violence of the Kokusuikai did inspire probing questions about the organization, but the murkiness of the state-yakuza relationship helped shield the state from the brunt of criticism. The Kokusuikai’s detractors, a relatively small group of moderate leftist intellectuals, were critical of political violence in general as well as the violent suppression of labor unrest in particular. Philosopher and historian Miyake Setsurei, for example, speared the Kokusuikai for its shallow ideology, asserting that it was not concerned with either the national essence or chivalry but with crushing the weak. Pacifist Mizuno Hironori concurred, pointing out how the organization tormented laborers.33 But the critics aimed their sharpest attacks at the government, the political parties, and parliamentary politics—not at the state. This was in part because of their own intellectual proclivities, but their near-sightedness may have been exacerbated by the complicated relationships and legitimacy of the Kokusuikai, which allowed them to hold on to the fundamental and contradictory assumption that the state was



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legitimate even though its associates and the Kokusuikai’s actions were not. Here we see an example of the phenomenon described in Hibou’s chapter, in which the desire to criminalize one element leads to a situation where “the illegal practices of legitimate actors are underestimated and deliberately overlooked.” In short, the ambiguous zone of legitimacy in which the Kokusuikai operated may have influenced a discourse about the ills of political violence that had the unintended consequence of undermining interwar liberalism and democracy.34 Government support of the Kokusuikai was a point of contention for these intellectuals. Playwright and writer Kikuchi Kan warned that the government’s involvement in the establishment of violent groups like the Kokusuikai would only exacerbate tensions between the right and the left. And socialist and Christian educator Abe Isoo specifically highlighted the Kokusuikai-Suiheisha incident as evidence of impending violent, ideological strife. All of these thinkers specifically excoriated the government for condoning and encouraging Kokusuikai violence.35 That they all spoke of the “government” (namely, the political parties) and not “the state” (the structures of authority and order outside of the political parties, such as the police and the bureaucracy) is significant, for it meant that their ire was directed not at the Home Ministry (part of the state’s bureaucracy) or the police (the state’s enforcement arm) but at politicians and the political parties to which they belonged. Indeed, one of the perilous aspects of this discourse was that it not only condemned the violence of organizations like the Kokusuikai, but it also extended to the main political parties, which were viewed as wielding a similar kind of violence. As a result, the political parties were implicitly, if unintentionally, delegitimized. Some writers, like businessman and politician Watanabe Tetsuzō, described both the ruffians of political party pressure groups and members of the Kokusuikai as “shishi”—the youth who had sought to violently overthrow the Tokugawa regime in the early 1860s. Unlike their early modern predecessors, however, there was nothing redeeming about the shishi of his day, who Watanabe described as uneducated, ignorant, cowardly, and lacking any true understanding of patriotism.36 Others placed the Kokusuikai and the pressure groups in the same category of violent phenomenon, and painted both as despotic.37 Such criticisms were not meant as a fundamental assault on parliamentary politics by these moderate leftists, most of whom supported socialist change through the democratic process. But the discursive construction of violence as a societal and political ill and the explicit jabs at the political parties undermined them at a time when they, unlike the Kokusuikai, were responsible for governing the country.

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That these writers focused their criticism on what they considered “the government”—and not “the state”—reflected some misunderstanding of the connections between the state and organizations like the Kokusuikai and, more significantly, enabled some of these moderate leftists to turn to the state for order. Thinkers like Abe Isoo viewed the state as relatively, though not completely, untarnished by criminal violence and had surprisingly great faith in both the legitimacy of the state and its ability to restore order to a seemingly chaotic society. Here, Abe revealed the extent to which he had been influenced by German social democracy, which was not fundamentally skeptical of the state. In particular, Abe insisted that the police be more quick and stern in punishing the violent of any political stripe: “If the police force took the stand of forbidding all violence, then violent incidents would gradually decrease, and so it is undeniable that we would have less reason to worry. Of course, it would not be difficult for the state’s police force to control the degree of violence that I have described. If the police force is insufficient, military force (heiryoku) could also be used.”38 Even though elements of the state were bound up with the Kokusuikai, Abe turned to the perceived legitimacy and power of the state, and away from the political parties, to violently clamp down on violence. This discourse on political violence, sparked by concerns about groups like the Kokusuikai, helps to illustrate the ways in which collaboration between the state and nonstate violence specialists, the integrative power of criminal violence, and zones of murky legitimacy can be a catalyst for transformations of political systems. It certainly could not be said that the Kokusuikai alone, as a network of criminal violence, shoved interwar Japan down its path to militarism. But concerns about political violence, which implicated the government, were construed as reflections on the shortcomings of democracy, so some offered the solution of a stronger state with a more steadfast and unforgiving “monopoly” on violence.

TRANSWAR CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES: CRIMINAL VIOLENCE IN THE EARLY POSTWAR DECADES The intimacy of the connection between criminal violence and the state in interwar Japan was not indicative of a particularly troubled modern state or a particularly troubled modern democracy. The interwar Japanese state was not struggling to maintain order, and the country’s modern democracy could boast of universal manhood suffrage and a two-party political system by the mid-1920s. The embeddedness of criminal violence in a political system might not necessarily, then, be a sign of fatal illness.



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That a relatively healthy state and democracy could be imbricated with criminal violence could be seen in postwar Japan as well. The democratic “revolution from above” instigated by the US occupation authorities did not extirpate yakuza influence from the workings of the state or the practice of politics.39 Quite to the contrary, the concerns and characteristics that had bound the interwar state and yakuza reemerged in the postwar period with the United States as the newest addition to this network of criminal violence.40 The difference between the interwar and postwar periods was that the public came to have significantly less tolerance for political violence, thus shifting the definition of legitimate and illegitimate behavior. As in the interwar period, one of the main worries of the state and the yakuza was the resurgence of a vibrant left, with the revitalization of the Japan Socialist Party and labor unions as particular concerns. The US occupation authorities too, although initially granting political liberties by legalizing the Communist Party and bestowing upon labor the right to unionize, eventually came to fear the activism of labor unions and other popular organizations in the early shadows of the Cold War. The Japanese state, the yakuza, and the United States were ideologically antagonistic to communism and socialism, and also feared what social and financial disruption might result from the unionization of labor and popular protests of various stripes. And as in the interwar period, the state and the yakuza did not oppose the use of violence to silence their political enemies.41 For these reasons, organizations that were part yakuza and part rightist political group—not unlike the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai—reemerged in the 1950s. According to the Metropolitan Police, twenty-eight such hybrid groups presented themselves as political entities but, in the eyes of the police, were more like “violence groups” (bōryokudan).42 The yakuza rebounded from the dry years of the early 1940s by running the black markets that sprang up across the country after war’s end. Having staked out their turf, yakuza bosses managed vendors who sold various necessities like food and clothing, as well as amphetamines, to impoverished customers. As the economy recovered, the yakuza transitioned out of the black markets and returned to traditional industries such as gambling, bars, restaurants, prostitution, and labor racketeering. Fueled by the proceeds from their successful business ventures, the postwar yakuza developed into expansive and sophisticated mafia syndicates.43 Operating fundamentally as businesses, yakuza groups’ financial interests were particularly salient in encouraging their nationalist leanings and lubricating their relationship with the state. It made financial sense to maintain a good relationship with the ruling conservative hegemony, who as lawmakers and government officials could crimp the sources of yakuza income.

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Conservatives were also more likely than liberals to side with management in labor disputes and as in the interwar period, the company and not the labor unions had the funds to pay for extra muscle during strikes. Direct and specific connections existed between the networks of criminal violence of the 1920s and 1930s and their postwar reincarnations. In the early 1950s, former members of the Kantō Kokusuikai (a splinter group of the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai) reconverged and sought to hold a “countrywide national essence meeting” (zenkoku kokusui taikai) in Tokyo in March of 1953.44 One of the organization’s faithful, Umezu Jinbei, was asked to help mobilize yakuza to serve anti-Soviet and anticommunist causes. The person who approached Umezu was Kimura Tokutarō—politician, lawyer, and minister of justice in two cabinets. The Umezu-Kimura partnership proved fruitful, as their cooperation resulted in the establishment in 1954 of the Gokokudan (National Protection Corps) and its subsidiary Gokoku Seinentai (National Protection Youth Corps).45 There was also the Nihon Kokusuikai (Japan National Essence Society)—as the name suggests, a resurrection of the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai. It used a similar language of chivalry, love of the fatherland, protection of the nation’s “beautiful customs,” and resolute opposition to the left. It included yakuza among its ranks, like its earlier counterpart, as well as members of the Gokokudan. But it did have to nod to a new environment in which tolerance for violence was low, at least paying lip service to the eradication of “cruel violence.” And the group was not nearly as large as the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai, with only 250 members in 1960.46 The Nihon Kokusuikai operated in an undeniably different context from its predecessor but the attempt, if not the visible audacity, to forge the connections of the 1920s and 1930s was no less muted. Indeed, it has long been speculated that seed money for the Liberal Party came from two well-known political fixers—Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryōichi. Kodama (a suspected Class A war criminal with close yakuza ties) and Sasakawa (a prison mate of Kodama’s, motorboat racing tycoon, and vocal anticommunist) may not have been able to operate as brazenly as their interwar counterparts, but they had the money and connections to grease the wheels of violent and corrupt conservative politics.47 Kodama in particular was known to have regularly solicited the financial and physical assistance of yakuza and, on at least one occasion, hosted several dozen yakuza bosses at his home along with other right-wing personalities and a cabinet minister.48 Another Kodama connection was Ōno Banboku, a former member of the Seiyūkai pressure group who, in the postwar period, served as speaker of the House of Representatives, minister of state, and vice-president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Not only was Ōno described



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as having a rough-and-tumble, yakuza-like demeanor, but even when he was vice-president of the LDP he was freely photographed with yakuza bosses— specifically Honda Nisuke and Hirata Katsuichi, the first and second presidents of the yakuza group Hondakai (Honda Association).49 Violence was an acceptable means of doing business in the eyes of those in this network. In the late 1950s, physical force was wielded in numerous incidents against various groups on the left, be it the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) or the Japan Teachers’ Union (JTU). On one such occasion, in October 1958, three men disrupted a meeting of the JTU by setting off what they claimed was dynamite. Though their “weapons” turned out to be smoke bombs, they managed to darken and empty the room nonetheless. Two of the three instigators were arrested and discovered to be members of the Kokusuikai’s Youth Corps (Seinen Teishintai).50 The Kokusuikai along with other right-wing groups—including the Dai Nihon Aikokutō (Greater Japan Patriotic Party), the Gijintō (Party of Righteous Men), as well as the Gokoku Seinentai—also attempted to violently suppress the well-known, mass popular protests against proposed revisions of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960. In April of that year, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in an attempt to forestall ratification of the treaty, fueled by concerns that Japan would be trapped into a subordinate position vis-à-vis the United States, which would drag its reluctant Asian ally into a war that was not of Japan’s own making. These activists came face-toface with members of the right-wing groups, who also sat menacingly in the gallery of the Diet chamber during key debates on the floor and scuffled with JSP politicians and party members in the hallways of the parliament building. On 19 May, several JSP parliamentarians reported having been assaulted by yakuza.51 On this particular evening, ratification of the treaty was forced through the Diet by the LDP, igniting protests against what were seen as the coercive methods of the dominant conservative party. Those in the streets went beyond criticizing the treaty to demanding the resignation of Kishi and his cabinet. With antagonism ratcheted up to potentially explosive levels, the LDP turned to violent groups like the Kokusuikai. There were rumors that Prime Minister Kishi himself asked his former prison mate Kodama Yoshio to rally and unify such organizations to suppress the protests.52 Whether that actually came to pass is unclear, but hundreds of men from these groups, including the Kokusuikai, clashed with protesters. Many of them were armed with clubs, some of which had been fitted with nails to inflict greater injury. In the midst of this tumult, the enforcement arm of the state—the police— either sat idly by or intervened mainly on the side of the violent groups. One of the important differences between the interwar and postwar periods was that such violence met vociferous criticism—no longer was

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such criminal violence considered even tacitly legitimate by large swaths of the population scarred by militarism and war. While the nationalist nexus might have been practicing business as usual, it increasingly bumped up against a distinct shift in popular attitudes toward political violence. After all, utter defeat after years of sacrifice lifted the silence about the destructive power of violence. And the more blame for the war fell on the shoulders of wartime militarists and so-called fascists, the more peace and democracy came to be seen as a vaccine against the violence of the recent prewar and wartime past. As such, the death of college student Kanba Michiko in a showdown between rock-throwing students and club-wielding police was taken up by the security treaty protestors as an emblem of police injustice.53 And at least one political cartoon satirized the close relationship between the police and the yakuza by picturing a baton-wielding yakuza lighting the cigarette of a club-wielding policeman, both of them standing over the lifeless body of Kanba.54 The violence eventually died down with the inevitable enactment of the revised treaty and the resignation of Kishi, but the physical force wielded by the right-wing organizations was not forgotten. That violent groups also battled with labor in the extended Miike strike of the same year only highlighted the visibility of the extent to which criminal violence laced the conservative network. The vocal and widespread condemnation of yakuza ruffianism and seemingly unjust state violence may have discouraged the most blatant and visible forms of state-yakuza cooperation in the decades to come, but it did not extinguish it. Indeed, it had the unintended consequence of replacing some criminal violence with corruption, for money could be more surreptitious than physical force, rendering even more murky the extent of the relationship between the yakuza and the state.

CONCLUSION The story of modern states entwined with mafias is not unique to Japan— Italy, the United States, and Russia come readily to mind as comparable cases. Nor are mafias the only kind of criminally violent group that has had a hand in shaping the political systems and cultures of the nation-states in and through which they operated—bandits, brigands, pirates, and political ruffians should also be considered and included in this category. And the list of states that have wielded criminal violence or have been bound up with the criminally violent is too long to enumerate here, although Nazi Germany bears special mention. In interwar Japan, intimate and expansive ties between parts of the state apparatus and yakuza inspired a discourse about the legitimate use of



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physical force that helped to nudge a two-party, democratic political system toward militarism.55 The extent to which the Japanese state, and states in general, have been bound up with the criminally violent and transformed through interactions with criminal violence suggests the difficulty of drawing clear distinctions between the violence of the state and the violence of nonstate entities, and between what was legitimate and what was illegitimate. Indeed, democracy and capitalism did not require impenetrable spheres of legality and legitimacy; to the contrary, yakuza and the state (as political and economic actors) operated in a world of flexible, shifting, and porous boundaries. Insofar as both the yakuza and the modern Japanese state inhabited this world, drawn to it by shared interests and characteristics, it could be suggested that they were not entirely dissimilar entities. By examining the social history of these groups and treating them not just as political operatives but as social and economic actors, it seems evident that both used violence in similar ways and both had to negotiate popular conceptions of their legitimacy; they had to juggle their acts of illegitimate violence with the need to be endowed with some sense of legitimacy in order to operate. In these respects, states might not be a world away from organized criminal groups.56 That yakuza and the state operated in a fluid realm and were not fundamentally different entities should challenge the notion that one was unquestionably illegitimate, and the other unquestionably legitimate.57 As we have seen, yakuza have historically been viewed by some as important members of local communities who provide needed, or at least desired, services. And to adhere to the textbook definition of all organized crime groups as “nonideological” would be to overlook the conservative and nationalist hue of the yakuza and to diminish their weight as political actors.58 Perhaps more important, the extent to which states have been bound up with criminal violence and the criminally violent should inspire a challenge to the very definition of a state that rests on assumptions about its legitimacy. The state, by virtue of its role as arbiter and enforcer of laws, often enjoys at least an air of legitimacy—of being a legal, socially accepted entity sanctioned by common practice. As such, the illegal and illegitimate acts of the state are sometimes viewed as regrettable missteps or unfortunate aberrations, as suggested by some of the historical scholarship on the modern Japanese state. The problematic tendency to view states as intrinsically legitimate is especially apparent in considerations of state violence, in which Max Weber’s classic contention that “the state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” continues to have great traction.59 To be fair, Weber was proposing an ideal type rather than a precise or comprehensive definition. Nonetheless, this ideal type has become

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part of a conventional definition of a state. Even Charles Tilly, who famously stressed the illegitimate elements of state making, conceptualized developed states as “relatively centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence,” in a rather concrete iteration of Weber.60 One of the problems with this oft-invoked definition is the implication that state violence is legitimate—that violence, by virtue of falling under the control of the state, is legitimate.61 It leaves room for the assumption that the line between legitimate and illegitimate violence is clear, and becomes clearer as states develop.62 Perhaps more significantly, it dampens the impulse to question the legitimacy of state violence and evades the difficult and important issue of who determines the legitimacy of violence wielded by the state. To be sure, the idea of states gaining an upper hand over those that violently challenge their authority can be useful in understanding the early stages of state formation and moments when a state faces existential threats. Yet the Weberian conception of a state may discourage exploration of the complex relationships—sometimes oppositional and sometimes cooperative—between states and illegitimate violence. As a result, we miss an opportunity to reflect on violence as the means by which various political actors operate and to remember the need to be vigilant against abuses of state authority. The question of what constitutes legitimate violence was significant not just in the early stages of modern state formation, but continues to be relevant for the life of the modern Japanese state and, to make an arguable reach, states in general. Not contesting legitimate violence allows for a kind of violent legitimacy, whereby the assumed legitimacy of the state serves as a cloak for violence of an unjust and undemocratic kind. In interwar Japan, leftist moderates had ideas about what constituted legitimate violence and who constituted legitimate violent actors, but their assumptions about the legitimacy of state authority ironically and unintentionally contributed to the undoing of democracy. In the postwar period, the legitimacy of state violence was more vigorously questioned, and popular antipathy toward political violence shaped how criminal violence, including that of the yakuza, could manifest itself. In different ways and to varying degrees, legitimacy was contentious and contested, as it should have been and should always be in a modern democracy. NOTES I am deeply appreciative of those colleagues who generously offered comments on drafts of this chapter: Peter Frost, Andrew Gordon, Bob Jackall, Jim Wood,



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and members of the Columbia University Seminar on Modern Japan, especially Carol Gluck, Laura Neitzel, and Greg Pflugfelder. They are, however, in no way implicated in the arguments and missteps of this piece. This chapter is a slightly revised version of the following article, “Befitting Bedfellows: Yakuza and the State in Modern Japan,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 3 (spring 2012): 623–41. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for the permission to reprint the article here. 1. Tokyo asahi shinbun, 10 and 14 October 1919; Osaka mainichi shinbun, 9 October 1919, in Taishō nyūsu jiten, vol. 4, ed. Edamatsu Shigeyuki et al. (Tokyo, 1987), 378. 2. I recognize that what may be considered “criminal” can sometimes be murky, especially in more arbitrary and fickle legal systems. Yet I do not want to eradicate the distinction between the legal and illegal, and so I simply use the term “criminal violence” to emphasize the point that not all state violence was beyond reproach, that it was arguably bound up with the criminal. 3. By violence specialist I mean those nonstate actors who made a career out of wielding physical force in the political sphere, or who received compensation for performing acts of political violence. See Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 5. 4. See Alan A. Block and William J. Chambliss, Organized Crime (New York, 1981); Josiah McC. Heyman and Alan Smart, “States and Illegal Practices: An Overview,” in States and Illegal Practices, ed. Josiah McC. Heyman (Oxford, 1999), 9. 5. On a particular yakuza boss named Kunisada Chūji, see Abe Akira, Edo no autorō: Mushuku to bakuto (Tokyo, 1999), 11–16, 20; Tamura Eitarō, Yakuza no seikatsu (Tokyo, 1964), 179–205; Takahashi Satoshi, Kunisada Chūji (Tokyo, 2000). 6. Kata Kōji, Nihon no yakuza (Tokyo, 1993), 17. 7. For a more lengthy discussion of yakuza relationships with the state and society in the Tokugawa period, see Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, 21–25. 8. On Yoshida Isokichi’s political career, see ibid., 91–100. 9. Other aspirants would be passed over for office; Gotō Shinpei (former civilian governor of Taiwan, president of the South Manchuria Railway, minister of communications, director-general of the colonization bureau, home minister, minister of foreign affairs, and mayor of Tokyo) was denied the presidency of the organization because of perceived shortcomings in his anticommunist credentials. Arahara Bokusui, Dai uyokushi (Tokyo, 1966), 53. Gotō did have a working relationship with another nationalist organization with yakuza ties, the Dai Nihon Seigidan (Greater Japan Justice Organization). See Sakai Eizō, Buenryo ni mōshiageru (Tokyo, 1927), 89–94. 10. Naimushō Keihokyoku, Dai Nihon Kokusuikaiin no fukusō ni kansuru ken, [17–18]. 11. Tokyo asahi shinbun, 12 August 1922; Irokawa Daikichi, Ruten no minkenka: Murano Tsuneemon den (Tokyo, 1980), 342, 345–46. 12. Tokyo asahi shinbun, 15 November 1919, in Edamatsu, Taishō nyūsu jiten, 379–80; Osaka-fu Keisatsushi Henshū Iinkai, Osaka-fu keisatsushi, vol. 2 (Osaka, 1972), 197. 13. Osaka-fu Keisatsushi Henshū Iinkai, Osaka-fu keisatsushi, 197.

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14. On association membership, see Moriyasu Satoshi, “Imada Ushimatsu to Suiheisha sōritsusha tachi: Dai Nihon Kokusuikai to Nara-ken Suiheisha,” Suiheisha hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō 2 (March 2000): 5. 15. A sum of all branch members yields a more modest total membership of 41,000 people. It could be that the figure of 200,000 members includes those who did not belong to a regional branch. Naimushō Keihokyoku Hoanka, Shakai undō dantai gensei chō, June 1932, 31. In 1934, the number of branches had decreased slightly from 92 to 87, with the size of the largest local organizations shrinking as well. Total membership also declined to around 36,500. Naimushō Keihokyoku Hoanka, Shakai undō dantai gensei chō, June 1934, 39. 16. Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 42, 71; Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 144–48. 17. Tokyo asahi shinbun, 10 October 1919, in Edamatsu, Taishō nyūsu jiten, 378; Osaka mainichi shinbun, 9 October 1919, in Edamatsu, Taishō nyūsu jiten, 378. 18. Skeptics will surely argue that yakuza ideology was mere window dressing, a way to make its illegal and illegitimate actions at least tacitly acceptable. While it is difficult to substantiate an argument that many yakuza sincerely believed in nationalist ideas, it should be pointed out that they retained their nationalist hue even at times when it did not best serve their interests (e.g., the early months of the American Occupation) and extolled nationalist ideas even in relatively private spaces where they did not need to perform political legitimacy. For example, in the altar or alcove of their meeting spaces, they would often hang three scrolls that read: Hachiman Daibosatsu (deity of archery and war), Amaterasu Ōmikami (Shinto sun deity considered the progenitrix of the imperial line), and Kasuga Daimyōjin (originally the tutelary deity of the Fujiwara house). For the place of these scrolls in yakuza ceremonies, see Iwai Hiroaki, Byōri shūdan no kōzō: Oyabun kobun shūdan kenkyū (Tokyo, 1963). On the three deities (called sanshatakusen), see Nihon kokugo daijiten, vol. 6 (Tokyo, 2001), 315. 19. See Chinzei Kokusuikai, “Chinzei Kokusuikai kaisoku,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 52, 16–18; “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai Ōita-ken honbu kaisoku,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 52, 12–13; “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai Ōita-ken honbu setsuritsu shuisho,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 52, 14–15; “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai Tanabe shibu sōritsu shuisho,” in Naimushō materials at the National Diet Library, 9.5–7, 2334; “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai Yahata shibu kiyaku,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 52, 21–22. 20. Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, 112. 21. The anachronistic irony of the construction of this myth is rich, for samurai and kyōkaku had different backgrounds, distinct ideologies, and conflicting interests in the Tokugawa period. Many thanks to Greg Pflugfelder for this astute observation. 22. Dai Nihon Kokusuikai, “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai setsuritsu shuisho,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 52 (November 1919), 5; “Wareware no shinjō,” Kokusui 4 (15 October 1920); Dai Nihon Kokusuikai, “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai kari kiyaku,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 52 [1919], 9.



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23. Maejima Shōzō, “Shishiteki pucchi to kokka kenryoku,” Nihonshi kenkyū 24 (May 1955): 57; Takahashi Hikohiro, “Ingaidan no keisei: Takeuchi Takeshi-shi no kikigaki o chūshin ni,” Shakai rōdō kenkyū 30, no. 3–4 (March 1984): 107. 24. On the Yahata Ironworks strike, see Hirokawa Tadahide, “Yahata seitetsujo ni okeru 1920-nen no sutoraiki,” Jinbun kenkyū 24, no. 10 (1972): 59–92; Yahata seitetsujo rōdō undōshi (Fukuoka, 1953). The Tsurumi incident was a clash between two contractors, each backed by yakuza. See Saitō Hideo, “Keihin kōgyō chitai no keisei to chiiki shakai: Iwayuru ‘Tsurumi sōjō jiken’ o megutte,” Yokohama shiritsu daigaku ronsō: Jinbun kagaku keiretsu 40, no. 1 (March 1989): 1–121; Satō Makoto, Tsurumi sōjō jiken hyakka (Yokohama, 1999). On the Singer Sewing Machine strike, see Kamei Nobuyuki, “Shingā mishin gaisha bunten heisa oyobi bunten shunin kaiko mondai ni kansuru ken,” in Kyōchōkai shiryō, reel 80 (17 December 1925), 502. 25. Kyōchōkai rōdōka, Noda rōdō sōgi no tenmatsu (Kyōchōkai Rōdōka, 1928), 59, 70; Machida Tatsujirō (Kyōchōkai Councillor), Rōdō sōgi no kaibō (Tokyo, 1929), 64–65; Morinaga, “Noda Shōyu rōdō sōgi jiken: Nihyaku jūnana nichi no chōki, saidai no suto, II,” Hōgaku seminā 203 (November 1972): 89. 26. Nihon Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo, Noda kessenki, 238–39, 242–43; Noda Shōyu Kabushikigaisha rōdō sōgi gaikyō, in Tokkō keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 9, ed. Ogino Fujio (Tokyo, 1991), 290; Kyōchōkai Rōdōka, Noda rōdō sōgi no tenmatsu, 83; Noda Shōyu Kabushikigaisha, Noda sōgi no keika nichiroku (Noda-machi, 1928), 65, 67, 71–72. For a more complete discussion of the strike, see Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, 118–22. 27. Watanabe Tetsuzō, “Taishō shishi ron,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 12 (November 1923): 83; Shihōshō Chōsaka, Shihō kenkyū, vol. 8 (December 1928), 509–10. 28. Moriyasu Satoshi, “Imada Ushimatsu to Suiheisha sōritsusha tachi: Dai Nihon Kokusuikai to Nara-ken Suiheisha,” Suiheisha hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō 2 (March 2000): 2; Ian Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-War Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation (Manchester, 1989), 87; Yamamura Masako, “Suiheisha, Kokusuikai tōsō jiken no kentō: Saiban kiroku o chūshin to shite,” Buraku kaihō kenkyū 27 (September 1981): 136, 140. The numbers of Kokusuikai supporters were as follows: 800 on 18 March; 1,200 on 19 March; and 275 on 20 March. The figures for the Suiheisha: 750 on 18 March; 1,220 on 19 March; and 970 on 20 March. “Suiheisha tai Kokusuikai sōjō jiken,” in Tanemura-shi keisatsu sankō shiryō (n.d.), 44–46. At the National Archives. The numbers of assembled police were: 81 on 18 March; 394 on 19 March; 218 regular forces and 17 special forces on 20 and 21 March. “Suiheisha tai Kokusuikai sōjō jiken,” 36–38. 29. “Suiheisha tai Kokusuikai sōjō jiken,” 48–51, 55. 30. Shihōshō Chōsaka, Shihō kenkyū 8 (December 1928): 509; Osaka-fu Keisatsushi Hensan Iinkai, Osaka-fu keisatsushi, 195–96; Asahi shinbun, 9 March 1926, in Shiryō: Taishō shakai undōshi, ge-kan, ed. Tanaka Sōgorō (Tokyo, 1970), 961. 31. Tokyo asahi shinbun, 10 and 14 October 1919; Osaka mainichi shinbun, 9 October 1919, in Edamatsu, Taishō nyūsu jiten, 378–79.

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32. For more on political ruffians, see chapters 2 and 3 of Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists. 33. Miyake Setsurei, “Kokusuikai ni nozomu,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 213–14; Mizuno Hironori, “Bōryoku mokunin to kokka hinin,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 206. 34. “Liberalism” is difficult to define with any precision, but in this context, I take it to entail some concern for the individual, a certain commitment to the freedom of thought and expression, and a demand for the expansion of popular participation in politics. 35. Kikuchi Kan, “Bōryoku ni tayorazushite oote no koto o shorishitashi,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 9 (August 1923): 95; Abe Isoo, “Kokkateki ‘chikara’ no hatsugen o kōhei nara shimeyo,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 9 (August 1923): 74. Both articles were part of the series: “Bōkō, kyōhaku kyōsei nado ni taisuru tōkyoku no torishimari no kantai o katanzu.” Abe Isoo, “Hōchikoku ni bōryoku o yurusu to wa nanigoto ka,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 220; Abe Isoo, “Bōryoku ni taisuru kokumin no futetteiteki taido,” Kaizō 6, no. 5 (May 1924): 94. 36. Watanabe, “Taishō shishi ron,” 84–85. 37. Horie Kiichi, “Bōryokuteki dantai no sonzai o mokuninsuru ka,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 212; Inoue Kinji, “Gunshū shinri ni tsūgyō seyo,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 9 (August 1923): 102. 38. Abe, “Kokkateki ‘chikara’ no hatsugen o kōhei nara shimeyo,” 74, 76–77. 39. For more on the Occupation’s democratizing efforts see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999), especially part 4. 40. There are few sources about what happened to yakuza during the wartime period. There was no state crackdown on yakuza as there was on mafiosi in Italy, largely because yakuza did not impede nationalism or threaten the Japanese wartime state. It is likely that the military conscripted many young, male yakuza. 41. The United States dealt more in money than violence to influence political outcomes in Japan. In the late 1950s, for example, the CIA funded candidates and parties considered friendly to US interests. See Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, 152–53. 42. “Bōryoku no ōkō to seiji,” Sekai (June 1960): 185. 43. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 140–44; Peter B. E. Hill, The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State (Oxford, 2003), 42–47. 44. Yomiuri shinbun, 22 January 1953. 45. Ōno Tatsuzō and Takagi Takashi, “Asanuma ansatsu jiken to uyoku bōryokudan: Sengo uyoku bōryokudan no jittai, seijiteki yakuwari, haikei,” Rōdō hōritsu junpō 395 (October 1960): 21; Hori Yukio, Uyoku jiten (Tokyo, 1991), 235. 46. Keishichō, “Uyoku shiryō,” in “Asanuma jiken” kankei shiryōshū (1960), 12–13; “Shūyō uyoku dantai ichiranhyō,” October 1960, in “Asanuma jiken” kankei shiryōshū, 2; Hori, Uyoku jiten, 474–75. 47. For a discussion of Kodama Yoshio and Sasakawa Ryōichi, see Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, 153–57.



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48. CIA Report, 14 December 1956, US National Archives, CIS-2829, CIA Name File, Box 67, Folder: Kodama Yoshio, vol. 2. 49. Tomita Nobuo, “Sengo uyoku no kinō to yakuwari: Kodama Yoshio to shin Nikkyō o chūshin ni,” Ekonomisuto 43, no. 28 (June 1965): 67; Takagi Takeo, “Ōno Banboku to iu otoko,” Seikai ōrai 18, no. 12 (December 1952): 31–32; “Ninkyō ni tsunagaru hoshu seijika,” Shūkan yomiuri (18 August 1963): 12–13. 50. Yomiuri shinbun, 14 October 1958. 51. Yomiuri shinbun, 26 April 1960; “Shuyō uyoku dantai ichiranhyō,” 2; Shinobu Seizaburō, Anpo tōsōshi: Sanjūgonichikan seikyoku shiron (Tokyo, 1969), 162, 167– 68, 171–72, 175; Nishii Kazuo, ed., 60-nen anpo, Miike tōsō: 1957–1960 (Tokyo, 2000), 125; George R. Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 238–41. 52. In an interview, Kishi claimed that he did not call upon right-wing organizations, but did mobilize fire brigades and youth groups from outside of Tokyo. Hara Yoshihisa, ed., Kishi Nobusuke shōgen roku (Tokyo, 2003), 292. 53. Nishii, 60-nen anpo, Miike tōsō, 127–29, 140, 153; Nakamoto Takako, Watashi no anpo tōsō nikki (Tokyo, 1963), 219, 243–45; Packard, Protest in Tokyo, 289–90, 294–96; Asahi shinbun, 16 June 1960; Chūō Iinkai Kanbukai, “Seimei,” 15 June 1960, in Anpo tōsō: 60-nen no kyōkun (Tokyo, 1969), 185–86. 54. Nasu Ryosuke, “The Honorable Prime Minister,” Sekai 176 (August 1960). 55. This article has dealt primarily with nationalist and rightist violence, and left virtually untreated the physical force wielded by others along the political spectrum. This is not because leftists were not violent, but is a function of the focus on yakuza as violence specialists who did not work with the political left in either the prewar or postwar periods. This was likely due to a combination of ideological disagreement and the shallow pockets of many groups of the left, who could not afford to hire violence specialists. 56. Charles Tilly made the somewhat similar suggestion, “Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum.” Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), 170. 57. This is not to say that these categories are artificial or should be collapsed into each other, for the attempt to determine what is criminal and what is illegitimate carries great moral weight and meaning. 58. Howard Abadinsky argues, “An organized crime group is not motivated by social doctrine, political beliefs, or ideological concerns; its goals are money and power.” See Howard Abadinsky, Organized Crime (Chicago, 1997), 5–6. 59. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 78. Emphasis in the original. 60. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” 170. 61. Another problem with the definition is the concept of a “monopoly,” which is vague at best and misleading at worst. Weber did not elaborate on what

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constitutes a monopoly. This ambiguity is especially troubling because the word connotes a kind of exclusive control over violence that may not be achievable or desirable and imbues the state with a potentially false sense of strength and permanence. Tilly did nod to the fuzziness of the concept of a monopoly by speaking of states “more or less successfully claim[ing] control” over violence. In other places, he explicitly describes government tendencies to “monopolize the concentrated means of violence” and the “monopolization of the means of coercion,” suggesting that he understood a monopoly as more or less successful control. Ibid., 171, 175. 62. Tilly views the distinction between state and nonstate violence as one between “‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ force.” He also contends that “the distinctions between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the state’s armed forces became relatively unified and permanent.” Ibid., 172–73.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Abadinsky, Howard. Organized Crime. Chicago, 1997. Abe Akira. Edo no autorō: Mushuku to bakuto. Tokyo, 1999. Abe Isoo. “Bōryoku ni taisuru kokumin no futetteiteki taido.” Kaizō 6, no. 5 (May 1924): 88–95.    . “Hōchikoku ni bōryoku o yurusu to wa nanigoto ka.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 216–21.    . “Kokkateki ‘chikara’ no hatsugen o kōhei nara shimeyo.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 9 (August 1923): 74–79. Arahara Bokusui. Dai uyokushi. Tokyo, 1966. Block, Alan A., and William J. Chambliss. Organized Crime. New York, 1981. “Bōryoku no ōkō to seiji.” Sekai (June 1960): 183–87. Chinzei Kokusuikai. “Chinzei Kokusuikai kaisoku.” In Kyōchōkai shiryō. Reel 52. Chūō Iinkai Kanbukai. “Seimei.” 15 June 1960. In Anpo tōsō: 60-nen no kyōkun. Tokyo, 1969. CIA Report. 14 December 1956. US National Archives. CIS-2829. CIA Name File. Box 67. Folder: Kodama Yoshio. Vol. 2. Dai Nihon Kokusuikai. “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai kari kiyaku.” In Kyōchōkai shiryō. Reel 52. [1919].    . “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai setsuritsu shuisho.” In Kyōchōkai shiryō. Reel 52. November 1919. “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai Ōita-ken honbu setsuritsu shuisho.” In Kyōchōkai shiryō. Reel 52. “Dai Nihon Kokusuikai Yahata shibu kiyaku.” In Kyōchōkai shiryō. Reel 52. Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York, 1999.



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Garon, Sheldon. The State and Labor in Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA, 1987. Gordon, Andrew. Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Berkeley, CA, 1991. Hara Yoshihisa, ed. Kishi Nobusuke shōgen roku. Tokyo, 2003. Heyman, Josiah McC., and Alan Smart. “State and Illegal Practices: An Overview.” In States and Illegal Practices, ed. Josiah McC. Heyman. Oxford, 1999. Hill, Peter B. E. The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State. Oxford, 2003. Hirokawa Tadahide. “Yahata seitetsujo ni okeru 1920-nen no sutoraiki.” Jinbun kenkyū 24, no. 10 (1972): 59–92. Horie Kiichi. “Bōryokuteki dantai no sonzai o mokuninsuru ka.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 210–13. Hori Yukio. Uyoku jiten. Tokyo, 1991. Inoue Kinji. “Gunshū shinri ni tsūgyō seyo.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 9 (August 1923): 99–104. Irokawa Daikichi. Ruten no minkenka: Murano Tsuneemon den. Tokyo, 1980. Iwai Hiroaki. Byōri shūdan no kōzō: Oyabun kobun shūdan kenkyū. Tokyo, 1963. Kamei Nobuyuki. “Shingā mishin gaisha bunten heisa oyobi bunten shunin kaiko mondai ni kansuru ken.” In Kyōchōkai shiryō. Reel 80. 17 December 1925. Kata Kōji. Nihon no yakuza. Tokyo, 1993. Keishichō. “Uyoku shiryō.” In “Asanuma jiken” kankei shiryōshū. 1960. Kikuchi Kan. “Bōryoku ni tayorazushite oote no koto o shorishitashi.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 9 (August 1923): 95–96. Kyōchōkai rōdōka. Noda rōdō sōgi no tenmatsu. Kyōchōkai Rōdōka, 1928. Machida Tatsujirō (Kyōchōkai Councillor). Rōdō sōgi no kaibō. Tokyo, 1929. Maejima Shōzō. “Shishiteki pucchi to kokka kenryoku.” Nihonshi kenkyū 24 (May 1955): 55–63. Miyake Setsurei. “Kokusuikai ni nozomu.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 213–16. Mizuno Hironori. “Bōryoku mokunin to kokka hinin.” Chūō kōron 38, no. 1 (January 1923): 204–10. Morinaga Eizaburō. “Noda Shōyu rōdō sōgi jiken: Nihyaku jūnana nichi no chōki, saidai no suto, II.” Hōgaku seminā 203 (November 1972): 88–91. Moriyasu Satoshi. “Imada Ushimatsu to Suiheisha sōritsusha tachi: Dai Nihon Kokusuikai to Nara-ken Suiheisha.” Suiheisha hakubutsukan kenkyū kiyō 2 (March 2000): 1–29. Naimushō Keihokyoku Hoanka. Shakai undō dantai gensei chō. June 1932 and June 1934. Nakamoto Takako. Watashi no anpo tōsō nikki. Tokyo, 1963. Neary, Ian. Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-War Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation. Manchester, 1989. Nihon Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo, ed. Noda kessenki. Tokyo, 1928. Nishii Kazuo, ed. 60-nen anpo, Miike tōsō: 1957–1960. Tokyo, 2000. Noda Shōyu Kabushikigaisha. Noda sōgi no keika nichiroku. Noda-machi, 1928. Noda Shōyu Kabushikigaisha rōdō sōgi gaikyō. In Tokkō keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 9, ed. Ogino Fujio. Tokyo, 1991.

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Ōno Tatsuzō, and Takagi Takashi. “Asanuma ansatsu jiken to uyoku bōryokudan: Sengo uyoku bōryokudan no jittai, seijiteki yakuwari, haikei.” Rōdō hōritsu junpō 395 (October 1960): 19–24. Osaka-fu Keisatsushi Henshū Iinkai. Osaka-fu keisatsushi. Vol. 2. Osaka, 1972. Packard, George R. Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960. Princeton, NJ, 1966. Saitō Hideo. “Keihin kōgyō chitai no keisei to chiiki shakai: Iwayuru ‘Tsurumi sōjō jiken’ o megutte.” Yokohama shiritsu daigaku ronsō: Jinbun kagaku keiretsu 40, no. 1 (March 1989): 1–121. Sakai Eizō. Buenryo ni mōshiageru. Tokyo, 1927. Satō Makoto, Tsurumi sōjō jiken hyakka. Yokohama, 1999. Shihōshō Chōsaka. Shihō kenkyū. Vol. 8. December 1928. Shinobu Seizaburō. Anpo tōsōshi: Sanjūgonichikan seikyoku shiron. Tokyo, 1969. “Shūyō uyoku dantai ichiranhyō.” In “Asanuma jiken” kankei shiryōshū. 1960. Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960. Ithaca, NY, 2008. “Suiheisha tai Kokusuikai sōjō jiken.” In Tanemura-shi keisatsu sankō shiryō. n.d. Takagi Takeo. “Ōno Banboku to iu otoko.” Seikai ōrai 18, no. 12 (December 1952): 30–32. Takahashi Hikohiro. “Ingaidan no keisei: Takeuchi Takeshi-shi no kikigaki o chūshin ni.” Shakai rōdō kenkyū 30, no. 3–4 (March 1984): 91–118. Takahashi Satoshi. Kunisada Chūji. Tokyo, 2000. Tamura Eitarō. Yakuza no seikatsu. Tokyo, 1964. Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge, 1985. Tomita Nobuo. “Sengo uyoku no kinō to yakuwari: Kodama Yoshio to shin Nikkyō o chūshin ni.” Ekonomisuto 43, no. 28 (June 1965): 65–69. “Wareware no shinjō.” Kokusui 4. 15 October 1920. Watanabe Tetsuzō, “Taishō shishi ron,” Chūō kōron 38, no. 12 (November 1923): 83–85. Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York, 1946. Yahata seitetsujo rōdō undōshi. Fukuoka, 1953. Yamamura Masako. “Suiheisha, Kokusuikai tōsō jiken no kentō: Saiban kiroku o chūshin to shite.” Buraku kaihō kenkyū 27 (September 1981): 136–76.

Chapter 5

Mobilizing Convict Bodies Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Early Nineteenth Century

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In March 1821, a convict identified as “Cunden” in the colonial records, who had escaped from Penang more than a year earlier on 14 February 1820, was apprehended in Bangalore and brought before the Madras authorities. According to his “declaration” to the police, the Supreme Court at Madras had banished him overseas in 1818 as a punishment for “setting fire to the hut of one Francais . . . and on his arrival at Prince of Wales Island [Penang] with his cousin Cavalee and one Coalee who were likewise transported” he worked for five days in the convict jail before he was “ordered to serve a sergeant named Watson . . . and his successor in the Fort for nearly two years [as a cook].” During this period he became acquainted with a trader named Lubay who sold rice and other goods. When he told Lubay that he wanted to return home to see his family, the latter agreed to take him there. “[O]ne evening about 4 o’clock the said Lubay desired that the declarant follow him to the sea beach and embarked him [on] board his vessel of one mast . . . [and] this declarant had no difficulty whatever to quit the said island as he was not watched by any body from the time he entered the service of the said sergeant.” From Penang they went to Aceh, the northern tip of Sumatra, where he was initially locked up by the king but then released after two days. Thereafter he boarded a boat for Pondicherry, from where he went to Bangalore and entered into the service of a Reverend Malkin.1 123

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The facility with which Cunden could walk away from Penang and return to India prompted the Madras authorities to question the stringency and effectiveness of the disciplinary regime in that penal colony and to consider alternative destinations for their convicts. In their estimation, local officials in the penal settlements needed to be more vigilant about the conditions under which convicts worked and periodically escaped. As they reminded the Penang authorities, convicts had to perform “hard labour in irons for life” as part of their punishment, as long as they were healthy and strong enough to do so.2 At the same time the Madras government also sought to address its concerns about the lax penal regimen in Penang by proposing to transfer convicts already in Southeast Asia and those en route there to other locations. The proposed new sites were to be farther removed and less accessible from Madras: Mauritius, where convicts had been going since 1814, and the ‘new’ settlement of Singapore, under British control since 1819. Singapore’s location in the “eastern islands” made it especially attractive as a penal colony because it afforded less “easy means of escaping.”3 Penang officials did not dispute the Madras government’s assessment of its penal conditions, choosing instead to take issue only with the contention that convict escapes resulted from inadequate supervision. (They also pointed out, even as they acknowledged the plausibility of Cunden’s escape story, that his crime was much more grievous than he had let on: he had committed a murder.) He had escaped, they insisted, while part of a work team at the garrison; he was not in chains because his sentence did not specifically mention that he had “to be imprisoned or worked in irons, only transported for life.” Escapes, they conceded, occurred occasionally, and were difficult to prevent because of the constant flow of boat traffic between Madras and Penang. In the words of one official, there was “continual intercourse carried on by native vessels between this place and the coast of Pedier [in west Sumatra], and [the] Coromandel Coast affords such temptations and facilities for desertion and escape of convicts, (particularly Madras convicts) that it is impossible to prevent some at times from getting away.” There were also many people from the Coromandel Coast “liv[ing] at Achin [Aceh] and . . . settled all along the Pedier coast; from whence they are constantly visiting this island in trading prows.” And with traffic likely to increase, this Penang official conceded that his island was not “an eligible place for transporting convicts,” especially from Madras but also Bombay. Convicts from Bengal, however, were a different matter because European ships mostly plied that route and were not likely to take on escapees.4 Ironically, T. S. Raffles, later hailed as the “Father of Singapore,” challenged the arguments advanced in favor of designating Singapore a penal



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colony. Stationed in 1821 in Bengkulen in west Sumatra, he wrote to Madras to point out that “native boats and vessels of all descriptions” also sailed in and out of Singapore, which, he, furthermore, characterized as “an infant colony,” presumably implying that it did not have great labor needs. By contrast, his own settlement Bengkulen, he asserted, was not accessible and frequented by traders from India, and therefore more escape proof. And it had the additional advantage of needing more laboring hands—its four to five hundred convicts were mostly employed on public works, leaving few to do plantation work, which he believed could do with many more workers. Therefore, he made a case for Benguklen over Singapore by emphasizing that it was a place not frequented by “native traders” and had a pressing need for “most useful and advantageous” labor.5 To clinch his brief, Raffles added that his settlement supervised convicts well, for which proof he cited the 1820 “Regulations for the Better Management of the Bengal Convicts.” Instituted apparently because of “irregularities” in the management of convicts and the need for guidelines for administrators charged with managing the convicts, these rules were designed to effect “a reformation” in the convicts and to spur them to become productive “so as to induce them to become respectable settlers and useful members of the community, instead of remaining for ever a burden on the resources of the country without contributing anything to its benefit.”6 In other words, the Bengkulen authorities aimed to transform them into convict workers, to use a term that has come into vogue in the new scholarship on Australian convict history to underscore their roles as productive laborers and to shift attention away from their criminal pasts; work was the path to respectability and a return to the community, albeit as second-class citizens.7 Their ‘free’ labor for the settlement entitled them to become “useful members,” their service constituting a savings to a settlement that would otherwise have had to hire people and a return on the government outlay for their upkeep. Reclamation, in short, came through virtuous labor, which had the added advantage of saving the colonial state from expending its own funds to maintain them. The Straits government made a point of highlighting this fact in its annual convict report to its supervisory authorities in Calcutta. By the 1840s, this report routinely included a balance sheet spelling out in some detail the numerical difference in rupees between the value of convict labor (assets) and the costs of their maintenance (liabilities) at each of the three penal settlements of Malacca, Penang, and Singapore. Bengkulen’s convict regulations also sought to discipline prisoners by setting up a system of rewards and some punishments—more carrots than sticks—for promoting good behavior and industry. The ultimate reward was emancipation. Criminal bodies, in other words, were to be forged into docile

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and productive ones, their disciplined behavior organized to generate the order and self-regulation essential to managing transmarine convicts in the penal colonies. The Bengkulen system organized convicts into three “classes” based on their conduct. The “best” were placed in the first class: as “artificers” they could “reside at large” and enjoy certain rights. Some among them who had put in long years of service were exempted from additional labor and rewarded with plots of land. Overseers (gourdans) were recruited from their ranks. The “middling or dubious class” made up the second category. Convicts in this class engaged in “ordinary occupations” and received the “usual allowances” of rice and other goods. Far different was the lot of the third class of prisoners “of abandoned and profligate character” who received the same provisions as everyone else but not a money allowance. Furthermore, they had to perform “harder kinds of labor,” were “confined at night within a suitable stockade erected around a portion of their present lines under a guard to prevent their going out,” and had to be present at roll call “every evening and morning.” Failure to abide by the regulations led to demotion to a lower class, instead of corporal punishment, a practice followed earlier; those deemed “incorrigible” were sent away to nearby Rat Island (Pulo Tikoes) to perform “hard labor” and their provisions reduced.8 According to Raffles, Bengkulen’s convict regulations effectively minimized escapes because they held out “encouragement” to convicts to regulate and reform their behavior. In passing he also noted that married convicts tended to work more efficiently. Unmarried convicts were generally tardy and performed labor “of little or no value,” in his estimation, “but he no sooner marries and forms a small settlement than he becomes a kind of colonist, and if allowed to follow his inclination, seldom feels inclined to return to his native country.”9 The Madras government also heard from authorities in Mauritius who expressed a willingness to take as many as 500 to 1000 convicts. As they put it, escape from the Isle of France was “impossible.” However, they also pressed Madras to give them various allowances for feeding and clothing such a large body of people, a request that prompted Madras to inform them that they had already made arrangements for sending convicts to Bengkulen which had agreed to accept 200 to 300 additional convicts to their existing collection of 400 to 500 convicts.10 The rest of this chapter examines the penal practices perfected in Bengkulen and Penang prior to the emergence of Singapore as the principal penal destination in Southeast Asia after 1825 when it received its first batch of convicts. It focuses on this history to highlight the antecedents of Singapore’s system of convict management and the different uses and



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values that authorities in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, on the one hand, and the government of the penal colonies in Southeast Asia, on the other hand, ascribed to transportation. Indeed, the very decision by the Madras government to suspend its penal traffic to Penang in 1821 speaks to its interest in maintaining and ensuring transportation as a harsh punishment that inflicted a “just measure of pain.” In its view, it was incumbent on penal destinations to enforce the sentences that spelled out varying degrees of constraints and time periods of labor for the convicts. These conditions, moreover, required penal colonies to exercise a level of supervision and vigilance seemingly absent in Penang, as evidenced by Cunden’s decampment, and seemingly more visible in Bengkulen, on paper at least, as suggested by its convict regulations. This essay will also show that the penal regimen established in Singapore differed little from the one in Penang—or, for that matter, Bengkulen. Singapore, in fact, introduced Bengkulen- and Penang-like rules to discipline its convict population, over time developing and amplifying them to better mobilize and tame convict bodies. Ideas and personnel also trafficked widely between Australia and Southeast Asia, as well as throughout the length and breadth of the British Empire, particularly in the Indian Ocean area. Briefly, in the late eighteenth century, Botany Bay was proposed and quickly rejected as a possible destination for Indian convicts. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Singapore system of penal discipline aimed largely at utilizing the labor potential of convicts. While it touched on their reformation—paid lip service to it, I would argue—it primarily emphasized maximizing their labor output, an overriding concern that shaped the disciplinary system under which they lived and worked. It played down corporeal violence in the name of labor mobilization, effected through a system of rewards that sought to discipline convicts into becoming productive bodies. It enforced discipline through practices that differentiated and categorized them according to their willingness to assume roles as laboring bodies in exchange for the promise of varying degrees of freedom in the future. As with several of the essays in the volume, this chapter, too, explores the intersection between crime and the state, specifically the ties that bound illegal practices—actually those guilty of committing them—to state and especially empire building. It does so by showing that those condemned to penal transportation in colonial India for their highly illegal acts were made legal in the penal colonies, certainly rendered acceptable in these outposts of the British Empire, by virtue of the labor value of their bodies. Not here but elsewhere I have discussed convict resistance as well as political prisoners who were subjected to a harsher and more closely monitored penal regimen.11

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As Cunden’s escape highlights, convicts routinely challenged their system of penal discipline, their actions, however, expressed in everyday forms of resistance rather than outright rebellion. At times, they fled their islands, mostly only to be recaptured; on other occasions, they protested their living conditions verbally, raising their voices particularly over changes in their food rations or money and clothing allowances. That the weapons they deployed were of the weak rather than the strong suggests their highly disadvantaged position in distant insular prisons—a condition, no doubt, heightened by occasional floggings and branding, a practice followed in some penal colonies for some periods of time to mark their difference from the rest of society. On the whole, as the studies of Bengkulen, Penang, and Singapore reveal, the convict management system was successful in manipulating convict bodies to perform hard labor. J.F.A. McNair, who served as comptroller of Indian convicts in the Straits Settlements from 1857 to 1877, characterized this system as making Prisoners Their Own Warders, a phrase that he enshrined as the title of his book about the administration of convicts in Singapore specifically and in Southeast Asia generally. That is, convicts were employed as warders over their fellow-inmates: those “sentenced to long periods of penal servitude . . . placed in certain such positions of trust under free warders.” Note that he chose to play up convict self-regulation and acquiescence to a disciplinary regimen and not the extent to which this system was engineered to mobilize their labor. There is, as well, in his text, as there often is in most colonial accounts, a sense of self-congratulation about a job well done under arduous conditions, in this instance, of normalizing the “lesser breed” through civilized methods rather than brute force. In this version of events, European ingenuity and reason save the day by transforming a population of dangerous men and some women into a laboring corps. To continue in McNair’s words: In our case, with the exception of two or three European warders, the whole warder staff were convicts; and at first, certainly, there was the fear that so large a number of convict warders might side with the convicts, when a rule they might have thought repugnant to all, was introduced by the governing body. There also appeared the danger that discipline might be undermined by a system of favoritism, especially amongst men of the same caste, or that they would shut their eyes to breaches of the rules. None of these apprehensions were, however, experienced; but, on the contrary, these convict warders were always the first to apprise the authorities of any contemplated attempts at escape, or of any ill-feeling that might be brewing among any particular class, or breach of prison rules; so that, in a great measure, they acted in the double capacity of both detectives and police. It was only



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upon very rare occasions that a convict warder had to be disrated [reduced in rank]; and the punishment amongst them consisted for the most part in fines for want of vigilance and attention to detail, and such like petty offences. They all manifested the highest appreciation of the trust reposed in them, and lived in perpetual fear that they might forfeit their position, and have to begin anew the whole course of jail punishment.12

Drawn primarily from McNair’s personal experiences on the job in Singapore, this portrait of the convict system in the Straits rightly considers the Bengkulen, Malacca, and Penang episodes as part of the same history. Indeed, the disciplinary regime developed in Bengkulen and Penang, where offenders from India were initially dispatched, set the stage for subsequent establishments in Singapore and Malacca. Moreover, beginning in 1826, Malacca and Penang were administered together with Singapore as the Straits Settlements, with Penang the headquarter town until 1832 when Singapore took over that role. Bengkulen by then had been ceded to the Dutch, as per the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, and its Indian convict population transferred in 1825 primarily to Singapore. In 1867 the Straits became a Crown colony directly administered by the Colonial Office instead of the Indian government based in Calcutta. The convict experiment in the Straits was considered so successful that its lessons about penal discipline were applied to the Andaman Islands, which became the principal venue for transported felons in the wake of the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857. Thereafter, the traffic to the Straits from India was halted, as neither Penang nor Singapore wanted to accept either the hardened prisoners from Alipur Jail in Calcutta who were being cleared out to make room for captured rebels or the rebels themselves whom the Indian government was eager to ship overseas. Both local authorities and the local European community vehemently opposed adding such “dangerous” mutineers to their mix of prisoners whom they mostly employed in extramural construction projects. Thus, after 1858, the only additions to the convict population in the Straits were from the ranks of Indian prisoners who had originally been sent to the penal settlements in Burma. As for the convicts who stayed on in the Straits, they lived out their days in various states of freedom and control until the beginning years of the twentieth century. In all, India dispatched 4,000–6,000 convicts to Bengkulen between the 1780s and 1825 and 15,000 to the Straits Settlements between 1790 and 1860. Another 1,000–1,500 were exiled from Ceylon to Malacca, and several thousand more were sent to Burma (Myanmar) and to areas outside of Southeast Asia, principally to Mauritius between 1815 and 1837 and the Andaman Islands after 1857. The convict population was predominantly male.

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There was some return traffic of convicts to India: one or two every few years were sent back home for being overly disruptive and a handful every year or so chose repatriation over staying on after they had completed their sentences. In addition, several hundred offenders were transported to India from Southeast and East Asia. These were predominantly Malays from Southeast Asia and Chinese from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia whom the local authorities thought better to send away than confine in a place surrounded by their countrymen. The Singapore government worried especially about adding prisoners from Hong Kong to its majority Chinese population.13

BENGKULEN The extent to which labor imperatives shaped the development of the emerging system of convict management in Southeast Asia can be gauged from its beginnings in Bengkulen. In their string of settlements in west Sumatra, seemingly always vulnerable to takeover by other European powers, especially the Dutch, the British were constantly reminded of their tenuous position in this part of the archipelago by the endemic problems they encountered in recruiting local labor. Not only was the pool of laboring men and women limited because many locals already had other masters, but also because labor could not be procured from nearby areas that lay beyond the Company sphere of influence and under the jurisdiction of indigenous states. And within the territories controlled by the British, many men and women elected not to work for the meager wages that the Company offered. Almost from the beginnings of their settlement in west Sumatra in the late seventeenth century, the British found themselves shorthanded because they could not recruit locally. “Labouring” was “deare,” as one late seventeenth-century official observed in noting that local labor would not work for less than one fourth of a Spanish dollar per day. The solution was to import labor by procuring African slaves or “kafirs” from Madagascar and elsewhere in Africa.14 However, because Bengkulen could never obtain a sufficient number of African slaves, local authorities sought to alleviate their “labor-starved economy” by turning to other sources of slave labor: India, specifically the Malabar Coast and Bengal, and within the region, from the islands of Pulo Nias off the northwest coast of Sumatra. Company slaves were, however, disproportionately of African descent.15 When growing opposition to the slave trade and slavery in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century further cut back the already small contingent of slaves, local authorities



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sought to make up the labor deficit by bringing in convicts. Convicts therefore supplemented and replaced slave labor, the two groups initially working closely together in the beginning years of the convict traffic.16 Their relationship to one another is recounted in the changing Company roster of slaves and convicts in this period. By the late eighteenth century, the Company only had about 600 slaves remaining in its possession, down from almost 900 a few decades earlier. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, fewer than 400 Company slaves remained. By then most of these slaves were Bengkulen born and bred: children of slaves originally purchased by the Company.17 No wonder Walter Ewer, commissioner of Bengkulen between 1800 and 1805 and a former India hand—he had previously served as the high sheriff of Calcutta—described it as “a very proper place for the Bengal convicts. . . . They will be of great use in such an uncultivated country as this is, and so thinly inhabited.”18 By then Bengkulen already counted about five hundred convicts, many of them shipped en masse on ships beginning with the hundred or so who had been transported there in 1797.19 Thereafter, the convict population declined because of deaths and discharges of those whose terms of transportation had expired. And with relatively few newcomers added to their ranks, particularly between 1800 and 1805 when only three new convicts arrived, the number of convicts only tallied 314 in 1805; by contrast, there were 366 Company slaves. Two years later, in 1807, convict numbers had shrunk to 265 while the number of slaves remained constant at 366.20 By 1810 only 216 convicts remained in Bengkulen.21 From the very outset, Bengkulen authorities employed convicts in “public service” and instituted some precautionary measures “to prevent them from making their escape.”22 In recruiting them as convict workers, they felt confident that they could capitalize on their labor “both safely and usefully” as well as save government the expense of maintaining them.23 Convicts and Company slaves worked side by side on construction projects. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming number of male convicts often paired up sexually and permanently with slaves who were much more evenly divided between men and women, with women generally outnumbering men somewhat. Female slaves also cohabited with the Indian sepoys who formed the bulk of the military stationed at Fort Marlborough. These soldiers often had tours of duty that lasted several years, even decades. Although some came with families, many did not and consorted with local women, slaves as well as free Malay women. The British had some concerns about these liaisons, enough so that they that they consulted with local chiefs to make sure that they did not oppose these “connexion[s] between their female dependents and the military.”24

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Convicts, by contrast, were not allowed to bring their families. Like sepoys, however, they developed relationships with local women, at times with the encouragement of their supervisory British officials. In fact, the possibility of “connexion” was built into the local system of convict labor that essentially treated them as workers desperately needed to fill labor shortages and less so as criminals whose terms of punishment had to be scrupulously enforced. Moreover, Company control in this outpost, far removed from the other British possessions in Southeast Asia and surrounded by rival powers, was stretched thin. So attenuated was the British presence in this locality that it resorted to reinforcing its small military contingent with a militia comprised of slaves. On at least one occasion, local authorities recruited convicts to man its military force.25 The thin line of colonial control and the system of convict workers meant that convicts were largely left on their own, as long as they performed their directed public and private service. R. S. Perreau, a magistrate and trader who had organized and managed the convicts at the turn of the nineteenth century, understood this dynamic well when he explained that he had to supervise as many as 550 convicts without much of a support staff and therefore could not “check the propensities natural to the two sexes of mankind.” Furthermore, he added that he had not been “placed over them as a reference of their morals.” Nor could he regulate their activities and movements because, being “employed in active labor, at miles distance from each other,” they were not even required to reside together. In addition, some convicts worked in a private capacity for Europeans who were “at liberty to secure themselves the services of convicts in paying the Company fifty sicca rupees to indemnify them for their passage to this place, and on maintaining them free of any subsequent expense to the Company, according to which rule, they were secured.”26 That is, this arrangement not only reimbursed government for the costs of the sea passage but also freed it from having to pay for their daily upkeep. Thus, Perreau, a key figure in shaping Bengkulen’s initial convict regulations at the turn of the nineteenth century, viewed his supervisory role less in terms of enforcing punishments and more in terms of disciplining their bodies so that they would become productive workers. In his words, his primary responsibility was “to see them supplied with their monthly quantum of provisions to proportion their labour according to the orders,” a regimen that he emphasized had led to few “broils, commotions, depredations and insubordination.”27 To this he might have added that providing convicts sexual opportunities fitted in with his notion of how to maintain order in this population. To the Government of India, Bengkulen’s system of managing convicts appeared much too lax. Calcutta frequently chided its representatives in



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west Sumatra about their tendency to remit sentences passed on convicts, reminding them that it expected convicts would be “compelled to labor and subjected to that state of constraint from which Mr. Ewer appears to have so injudiciously emancipated them.” It also urged Bengkulen authorities to “take the necessary measures for the confinement of the convicts and for compelling them to labor, conformably to the tenor of the sentences passed upon them.” Nor did government look favorably upon the practice of farming out convicts to Company men who generally employed them as domestic servants or help. Such service, in its view, did not instill discipline or foster “habits of industry.”28 Absent a force large enough to supervise convicts and the valuable labor they provided, local authorities in Bengkulen saw no alternative but to let them work on public works projects scattered all over the settlement and in the employ of various local European settlers. Their dispersal, moreover, as one administrator noted, was “calculated to prevent their assembling in any number where their strength might induce them to commit acts of violence.”29 Furthermore, by relying on convict instead of coolie labor and by hiring them out to individuals who had to assume the costs of their upkeep, Bengkulen officials minimized the costs to their government through such “salutary retrenchments” that Calcutta was always urging them to introduce. Increasingly, the pressure on Bengkulen was to impose greater control and vigilance over its convict population. In 1809 the Superintendent of slaves and convicts was told to furnish monthly reports.30 The dispersal of convicts across the settlement also alarmed the Indian authorities when they discovered that their former subjects could “fix their habitation wherein they consider most convenient for themselves.” In the government’s view, such a practice was “incompatible with the character and objects under which they were sent to this settlement, prejudicial to its police, and to offer temptations to commit offences against society, which their habits and propensities cannot be supposed in all cases able to withstand.” Therefore, the local authorities were enjoined to compel convicts “to live in one distinct spot, . . . [with] their dwelling . . . as contiguous and connected as may be practicable.” As for those laboring elsewhere, they, too, were to be restricted to confined areas set apart by a trench.31 Bengkulen’s attempts to balance its labor needs with an appropriate disciplinary regimen led over time to the establishment of the “Bengkulen Rules” that increasingly entrusted convicts with their own supervision and surveillance. These regulations were designed to permit convicts to continue to engage in public works, ranging from the construction of roads across the settlement to their maintenance in town to the clearance of nearby forest lands, while also taking into consideration the penal objectives of

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transportation and the criminality of the convicts. Central to their workings were the distinctions the rules made among convicts, creating what in effect became a system of classification and, subsequently, a ticket-of-leave system whereby some convicts received a license allowing them to earn their own livelihood and live independently. A similar system of managing convicts developed in Australia at roughly the same time. Bengkulen’s rules, in their first iteration, categorized felons according to their ability for hard labor, the nature of their sentence, and general character. Government construction projects drafted able-bodied convicts, with those less physically fit offered to individuals willing to pay for their maintenance. Those in government service made bricks, cut timber, and cleared land for cultivation while the less physically able and “of better character and conduct” worked in public offices, jobs usually undertaken by “lascars and office coolies.” The next category of convicts were eligible to be hired out as servants, a practice intended to take them off the government rolls and to put them on the expense accounts of private individuals. In all these different capacities, convicts enjoyed considerable freedom, being relatively free to wander out on their own, to work in a variety of jobs, and show up at muster only at appointed times.32 Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant Governor of Bengkulen between 1818 and 1823, further systematized and developed these rules. He aimed to forge an “improved system of management” whereby the condition of convicts was “considerably ameliorated [and] their industry .  .  . effectually and advantageously exerted for the benefit of the settlement, while crime and misbehavior on their part . . . manifestly and greatly decreased.”33 Not established until after Raffles’s departure, his “regulation for the better order and management of the convicts” appointed a superintendent of convicts to manage convict discipline and labor and organized the colony’s almost eight hundred prisoners into three classes.34 However, this regulation was barely in effect a few months when the entire convict population was sent to Penang and Singapore because the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of March 1824 had ceded Bengkulen to the Dutch in return for Malacca and other Dutch possessions in Asia. More so than in Australia, convict management regulations in Bengkulen concentrated on maximizing the labor value of convicts, at least those who were ready to work after a suitable interval of penal exile, and not to address the reformation of convicts. Whereas in the former settlement, positions of trust and responsibility were assigned to convicts and ex-convicts according to how much they had mended their criminal ways, in the latter colony prisoners were categorized according to their labor value, the able and willing rewarded with a greater degree of freedom. Reformation of



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Indian convicts, in other words, was not the highest priority because colonial officials both in India and in Southeast Asia considered them to be no better or worse off morally than the rest of their colonized subjects, whom they believed to be deficient in morals and civilization.

PENANG Labor imperatives also shaped the system of convict discipline that emerged in Penang, a settlement developed as a penal colony at about the same time as Bengkulen. What differentiated it from the latter was that Penang became not only a destination for the rank-and-file criminals shipped to Bengkulen but also the venue for political prisoners whose rebellions criminalized them and earned them banishment. First to Penang came “two men, named Eyeno Deen Sheikdar and Mahomed Heiant.” They arrived in 1790 aboard the Snow Industry, their crimes of “considerable magnitude” resulting in “perpetual imprisonment” and transportation. Governor-General Cornwallis, who had dispatched them to what was then also known as the Prince of Wales Island, intended to make these two men the first of many to be transported there, as he informed Captain Francis Light in person in Calcutta prior to the latter’s return to resume his post as the first superintendent of Penang (1786–1794). “You may employ them in any manner that you think proper,” Cornwallis added, as long as it was “consistent with the security of their persons, but . . . keep a watchful eye over them at all times, so as to prevent the possibility of their escape, or in other words their return. . . . Whatever charge is incurred for their maintenance, will of course be inserted in your accounts.”35 Thirty years later, Governor W. E. Phillips noted, on looking back on that moment when the first Indian convicts set foot on his settlement, that no other instructions followed in the wake of that first order issued by Cornwallis. As a result, as he admitted, the treatment of convicts was not based on a “fixed principle” and not regulated by that “great object of all such punishment, the reformation of the offenders.” To continue in his words, “They have been sent here under very different sentences, and under very different circumstances. Whilst some sentenced to transportation and hard labour for life, have come here loaded with irons, many have arrived without such restraint, and several under sentence of simple banishment only. It would, of course, be most unjust if the whole of these men were treated with equal rigor and severity, by the local government.”36 Many convicts came on the heels of Sheikdar and Heiant, the traffic only momentarily halted when a decision was made to designate the

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Andaman Islands as the principal convict colony in 1793. Only after it was closed down in 1796 were transportees once again dispatched to Penang. Thereafter, streams of convicts flowed to Penang, except during a brief period between 1811 and 1813, when the punishment of transportation was suspended altogether. In 1803 the total stood at 650; in 1805 it had climbed to 772 with some local officials urging that the settlement could accommodate as many as 1,500 convicts. Its numbers included the so-called Poligar prisoners, political exiles who were kept apart from the rest of the convict population.37 In 1824 Penang tallied 1,469, many of these making their way there in the five-year period preceding 1824 when 960 convicts arrived at the rate of 192 a year. Over this same period, there were 103 deaths, 15 desertions, and 22 discharges a year.38 Penang authorities had sought out these convicts. As Phillips observed in 1814, this settlement offered a “commodious and safe harbour, salubrious climate and water and contiguity to a plentiful source of supplies.” Therefore, it stood out as “a most convenient and desirable rendezvous, and place of refreshment to His Majesty’s India squadron and to the numerous and valuable shipping engaged in the extensive trade carried on between the ports of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay and China, the port of Manila, and other places of commercial resort in the eastern archipelago.” It was also “an entrepot for the merchandize of the east and west of India, . . . [and] a ready and safe means for the barter of opium, piece goods, and other commodities . . . of India, for the tin rattans, betelnut, pepper etc. of Malayan countries and these again . . . to the China market . . . for teas.”39 Convicts in Penang performed many of the same tasks that their counterparts in Bengkulen did. An 1805 roster of 773 convicts indicates that 80 were employed in the cultivation of the Company’s plantations, 100 in making bricks for the Company’s public works, 100 in building a canal and an aqueduct to Georgetown, 60 in constructing a pier opposite the custom house, 60 in building fortifications, 50 in constructing the new sepoys line, and others engaged in such tasks as working as scavengers (20), in the marine yard and custom house (10), in making roads (59), and in working at the government house (30). Of the remaining 204, age or infirmity had incapacitated 74 convicts, 53 were in the hospital, another 34 were identified as “convalescents,” and 43 were characterized as “in irons for crimes on this island, confined in prison and worked by the provost, as also those who from their very bad character have never been taken out of irons.”40 In presenting this report Lieutenant Governor R. T. Farquhar expressed not only great satisfaction with the Penang convict experiment but also a desire for a larger convict labor force. “If the establishment of convicts could be fixed at 2,000,” he wrote, “and that number be regularly kept up, every



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advantage that is looked to from this important settlement, might be derived in a very short period of time.” He believed that he could gainfully employ a thousand convicts on the docks alone; other public works projects could involve many, many more. In his assessment, the convicts were “by far the best coolies on the island; and, as the Company only pay for their provisions, their labor, even at the high estimation cannot be half so expensive as that of hired labourers, who receive here, each 6 dollars a month.”41 With rising numbers and labor needs came concerns about balancing the advantages that convicts offered the settlement as the “best coolies on the island” and the penal imperatives under which they had come to the island. As one report in 1805 acknowledged, Penang faced having to develop guidelines that took “into serious consideration . . . employing their labour in such manner as . . . appear best calculated to fulfill the intentions of the law, preserve order, and reform the morals of these unfortunate persons,” and “at the same time [ensure] that their personal labor may be so directed, and arranged, as in some degree to reimburse government for the expenses of their subsistence.”42 An initial attempt to juggle these different ends—and clearly to tilt in the direction of maximizing their labor value—led to the proposal that they be identified as convicts by a medal placed on their arm. The rest of the proposed regulation concentrated on developing their labor potential by organizing them along military lines into companies, with each company of fifty to seventy-five convicts supervised by lascars titled with the naval ranks of serangs or tindals (native crew or petty officers), designating well-behaved convicts. These supervisors were responsible for distributing the rations, monitoring the health of the prisoners, and keeping them at work between 6 and 11 in the morning and 2 to sunset in the afternoons and evenings. And if large bodies of convicts worked together, they were to have additional overseers who were Europeans. This initial set of rules for Penang also allowed Europeans to employ convicts as menial servants as long as they paid for their upkeep.43 More so than at Bengkulen, a small settlement with a small European population, at Penang local authorities worried much more about convict management, including of the political prisoners. Thus, local officials sought to take “every practicable measure . . . to restrain and remove temptations to the vices and immoralities which abound, and instances of which force themselves upon my notice frequently under trials.”44 They also recognized the urgent need to develop rules for the “internal management of that body of men” and to build “a house of correction” to aggregate the convicts together.45 At the same time, there was always the pressure to allow convicts “to repair to those places, where they may be best able in future to earn their livelihood.”46

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Increasingly, convicts in Penang worked at a variety of tasks: the cultivation of rice, sugarcane, fruits and vegetables, and other crops on “halfcleared lands,” as coolies for “merchants and husbandmen,” and as “servants to tend cattle.” Many also became “coolies and servants particularly saees [grooms or horse keepers] and grass cutters,” apparently difficult to find in the settlement.47 By 1830, 900 of the 1,300 convicts provided for themselves because they were “on security hired out to individuals and employed . . . [by] the local authority.” By then, many of the major public works projects were said to be nearly complete.48 As in Bengkulen, so too in Penang work assignments rested primarily on labor considerations, with some consideration paid to the criminal backgrounds of the convicts. Transportees who had “good security” were permitted to provide for themselves; all others except for those belonging to “criminal and atrocious gangs” and those employed in public works were let out on hire to individuals who assumed the costs of feeding and clothing them and watching over them. Not only did this practice reduce the number of prisoners that the government had to supervise but it also alleviated “the great inconvenience which seems to have always prevailed in respect of the want of hired servants.”49 Only members of criminal gangs were monitored closely at night; the rest were either part of the government workforce or in the hands of individual employers.50 In Penang also select groups of convicts disciplined and regulated other convicts. Initially, the tindals (native petty officer) and sardars (heads of a company), and their supervisors, were all titled munshis (native writers or secretaries). However, with concerns mounting about convict guards having more in common with their wards than with the interests of government and thus “counteracting the measures adopted for improvement in the general management,” local authorities made some alterations in the convict establishment.51 By 1830, the lineup in charge of convicts included 1 principal overseer, 1 line overseer, 10 tindals, and 24 sardars, still a rather small force to watch over the settlement’s 1,300 convicts but now with overseers not drawn from the ranks of convicts. Along with this reconfiguration of the convict establishment came a system of classification that elaborated on the Bengkulen Rules and was equally preoccupied with maximizing convict labor output and minimizing the risk of having large numbers of dangerous felons on the loose. The committee that had been appointed to develop a better system of convict management in Penang regarded convict self-policing to be “objectionable,” because “it is impossible that men so intimately connected with those over whom they are placed, can exercise that control and authority, which is so essential in the management of such a body of men as the convicts.” It also



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did not like convicts working as servants, but it could not come up with a solution for the “present [labor] deficiency.”52 Nor did local authorities ever lose sight of the goal of relieving “the Honorable Company as far as possible from the charge of maintenance by disposing of their labour on private account beyond the portion required for public duty.”53 Penang’s classification system grouped convicts into six categories: • 1st Class. Trustworthy convicts who possess means of providing for themselves; • 2nd class. Female and male convicts who are allowed to work as servants in care of individual employers or in hospitals or public offices; • 3rd class. Those [working] on roads and public works in Penang and Wellesley province; • 4th class. Those newly arrived and those degraded from other classes; • 5th class. Females not included in second class, invalids and superannuated [elderly] convicts; • 6th class. Atrocious and abandoned characters, and deserters.54 A number of other rules defined the class eligibility of convicts and the conditions of their work and lives in each category. As in Bengkulen—and in Australia—determinations about their character and trustworthiness partly depended on whether they had put in their time in the settlement: a minimum of 2 years if the sentence was for 7 years, 4 years if 14, and 8 years if for life. Another set of regulations correlated conduct with rations and money allowances and yet another group of rules pertained to the irons they were required or not required to wear while working in public or the vigilance with which they were to be watched at night.55 SINGAPORE These regulations made their way to Singapore as it emerged as the principal penal colony in Southeast Asia. Raffles’s 1821 arguments against it notwithstanding, Singapore’s development as one of the “Sydneys”56 of the region was inevitable once it came under British control in 1819, not only because other outposts of empire in the area had already become penal colonies but also because its growth as a colonial settlement depended on labor. In addition, Cunden’s escape from Penang and the return of Bengkulen to the Dutch led authorities in India to seek out their newest territory in Southeast Asia as an alternative to existing venues. The first Indian convicts in Singapore consisted of 90 Madras and 120 Bengal prisoners who arrived from Bengkulen in April 1825. They were put

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to work almost immediately—147 of them employed in public labor, that is, in making roads and improving streets—and right away organized into three classes, no doubt, a continuation of the system that they knew from their earlier experiences.57 The following year, 1826, 82 arrived, this time from Penang. By the end of 1827 the total had reached 382, and then 410 in 1830, more than double the 1825 tally. Briefly, this traffic slowed down in 1835 when the Madras government began shipping some of its convicts to Burma because it perceived the “exceedingly humane” rules of convict management in Singapore to be at odds with the sentences passed on them in India. But their numbers did not appreciably drop off because the Straits government diverted convict flows away from the other settlements to Singapore, which they determined to be the principal penal destination in Southeast Asia. Labor needs dictated this choice. As one official put it, Penang did not have pressing needs, whereas in Singapore, “public works of every description have yet to be constructed.” Consequently, its convict population continued to swell: 853 in 1837, 1,152 in 1841, 1,489 by 1846, and a high of 1,888 in 1854.58 According to colonial records, these newcomers quickly settled into the work routine. Initially housed in an open shed, the first cohort of prisoners in 1825 “worked willingly, and were well behaved” enough so that the local authorities “discharged the free ‘peons,’ or warders” hired to watch over them, and instead relied on “five Madrasees and five Bengalees from their number to supervise their fellow-convicts.” In the early years, they were tasked with “filling up of swampy ground near the town, and laying out plots of land for building purposes. They also blasted the rocks at the mouth of the Singapore river, on the site of which was afterwards constructed a fort. . . . Their services were also turned to account on any occasion when the presence of a body of men under discipline was required, such as the suppression of fires.” Some became “orderlies and servants to public officers.”59 Much of this work of reclaiming large plots of land from sea and river marshes and extending town lots followed on the heels of G. D. Coleman’s appointment as surveyor and executive officer of government in 1833. Responsible for the management of convicts, he is said to have made them into “a peaceable hard working body of men.” His parting advice in 1840 to his successors was that they would have to embark on the next round of construction projects: “new streets, opening of new bridge and durable corner posts.” By the early 1850s, according to one effusive appraisal of the handiwork of Singapore’s convicts, “all public roads and drains .  .  . [had been] entirely excavated by them; by their means the town was laid out in its present form, the country made accessible and the swamps drained.” Consequently, “[w]hat was a desert island covered with forest thirty years ago has



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been rendered traverseable by excellent roads and inhabitable by extensive drainage.” Next up were “permanent public works” and other needs of the city, “drainage of . . . streets and houses, supply of water, pavement of sideways, construction of wharfs, jetties and other improvement which, though not called for when the population was small and thinly distributed, are now looked upon as urgent necessities.” Critical as well were permanent government buildings, “which in the infancy of the settlement . . . [were] of merely temporary construction [but] are now . . . out of place and behind the time.”60 On the whole, Singapore’s convict workers earned the same high marks for discipline and order that their counterparts did elsewhere in Southeast Asia. As in Bengkulen and Penang, in Singapore, too, credit for organizing and mobilizing convict bodies belonged to the “management and superintendence” system that ostensibly molded convicts “into a perfect state of discipline . . . from whom a fair portion of useful work is now derived.” This achievement seemed all the more notable because the overwhelming majority of them, 90 percent according to one count, were “sentenced for crimes for which in other countries they [would] have most likely been executed principally for murder, decoity [armed robbery] and murder, arson, thuggie, and other acts of violence of a similar description. All these men are now in an orderly and wholesome state of discipline.”61 In other words, the British government had created an orderly body by being doubly merciful, first by sparing their lives and then in redeeming them through work. The disciplinary system in Singapore followed practices that had been tested in Bengkulen and Penang, with some refinements apparently derived from Australia, whose penal settlements local officials adjudged to be not on par with those operating in the Straits.62 From the very beginning, discipline centered on making allowances that lessened or even removed some of the bodily restraints required by the terms of convict sentences and leaving open the possibility of freedom in stages and in due time. Moreover, with the first convict work details in Singapore scattered across “remote stations,” close and effective supervision was nearly impossible. Instead they were bound together—even as they were separated into classes—and kept in place through a system of rewards, specifically, benefits for “a few of the most deserving men [rewarded] annually by emancipation from labour by releasing from chains.”63 In a few short years, the rules and regulations for disciplining convict bodies became more systematic. According to one official writing in 1835: When convicts arrive they are placed in irons and brought before the Resident Councillor and placed in the fourth class. They are informed that at the expiration of the 6th month, if their behavior warrants it, they will be promoted to the

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3rd class, i.e. be released from their irons and have a rupee in addition to their rations monthly. The general state of the convicts’ health is certainly good, and in their morals I believe they differ but little from their countrymen residing here. They are worked eight hours daily. Some of them are allowed to go into private service. They are at present 51 in private service.64

As this official acknowledged, Singapore’s arrangement for “private service” was “bad .  .  . and .  .  . discountenanced at this station as much as possible” because it was based on a convict’s “aptitude for service and not his character.”65 Nevertheless, “service” imperatives prevailed because the emphasis remained on labor extraction, on transforming convicts into laboring bodies. Over time, in Singapore too, convict management operated on the basis of a set of rules that drew on those developed in Bengkulen and Penang and adapted to local conditions. By 1845 these regulations became known as the Butterworth rules, named after Governor William J. Butterworth who presided over the Straits Settlements between 1843 and 1855. More so than before, Singapore’s rules for convict management entailed a greater degree of bodily controls in the initial period. Every convict began in the lowest class “as an ordinary labourer, in irons, for a specified term of years,” moving up only once that term had expired and only if his record during that period was clean—“for every offence, however slight, was duly recorded.” With promotion “to a higher class, his fetters were lightened, and if he showed an aptitude for learning any handicraft he was transferred to the workshops and taught some trade.” On completion of the second term, “he was in like manner again promoted, and employed as an artificer, receiving, according to his merits, some slight remuneration for his services.” To continue in this senior official’s words: “At the end of the third period he was raised to the position of a petty officer, and was permitted to leave the precincts of the jail for a short time after working hours. The full term of probation having expired, he was granted a ticket-of-leave, on condition, however providing a suitable security, who became bound for his good behaviour.”66 Thus, convict workers were scrutinized throughout their career; any misconduct lowered their standing, and any offense could lead to their losing their ticket-of-leave once they had finally attained that prized status by surviving the different stages of convict classification. Singapore officials also increasingly resorted to a mix-and-match strategy so that convict working parties consisted of people drawn from different parts of India. Captain H. Man, superintendent of convicts in the early 1850s, was particularly keen to apply this strategy whereby he organized his work teams by mixing up convicts “from different parts of the country,” thus, in his words constructing “ a very efficient counterbalance to all such



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conspiracies as might otherwise have naturally been expected from men in such situations.” To make his point he offered the following illustrations of his efforts to mix and match convicts: “a Bengal man as second class brickmaker falls sick and is replaced by a fourth class Madras man, another man from Bombay misconducts himself, and is remanded to another class for punishment and worked in a different locality or another man is promoted for good conduct and removed—not to mention the alterations caused in the numerical strength of parties by the greater or less press of business.”67 Furthermore, local authorities also took precautions against aggregating convict gangs in a single locale by splitting their ranks between Singapore and Penang. In addition, the authorities in Singapore carefully chose the kinds of criminals they were willing to receive. They turned down the possibility of becoming the home for convicts from Ceylon—they did not want the large numbers proposed and they feared their reputation as desperate characters—although they quickly added that they would accept those among them who were “carpenters, bricklayers, brick makers, blacksmiths turners, painters [and] could be advantageously employed in public works.”68 Nor would they accommodate “thugs,” the so-called ritual murderers, from certain localities, prosecuted in Punjab in the mid-nineteenth century and considered to be especially dangerous, even though they had accepted earlier batches of these from other areas. And when the Indian government sought to send mutineers/rebels to the Straits in 1857–1858, the authorities in Singapore quickly countered by stating that space was “very limited” in their settlements and their “system of convict management will not admit of desperate characters being kept in safe custody.” Moreover, the business community in Singapore had “great apprehensions and annoyance . . . at the idea of the settlement being selected as a receptacle for dangerous convicts from Bengal.”69 For, these “dangerous convicts,” as the governor of the Straits informed his superiors in Calcutta, were far different from the convict bodies that his settlements had grown accustomed to transforming into productive workers. His elaboration of the distinctions between the two is also a statement about the invaluable service that Indian convict workers had performed in Southeast Asia: Hitherto . . . convicts have been men from all parts of India, unknown to each other, speaking different languages and brought up in different habits and pursuits. These mutineers, on the other hand, are men bound to each other in a sort of tie of brotherhood, accustomed to act together, speaking the same language and naturally entertaining the most deadly sentiments of hatred and revenge against us. To keep such men under control requires an amount of

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physical force not at our disposal. . . . The internal economy of the lines and the supervision of the convicts when at work outside is entrusted to the convicts themselves, that is to men selected from their own body, but such a system cannot be applied to bodies of desperate mutineer sepoys to whom death could prove a release from the miseries they will endure here.70

The governor also expressed concern that these military men could trigger the “turbulent dispositions of the lower classes of our Chinese population.” Furthermore, he noted that his settlements did not need large bodies of convicts to do construction work because they were no longer in their “infancy.” Thereafter, the convict traffic from India to Southeast Asia was halted and the Andaman Islands became the principal venue for transported felons, political prisoners as well as rank-and-file offenders.71

CONCLUSION The British government in India prized transportation as a punishment in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century because it inflicted a just measure of pain on offenders found guilty of such heinous crimes as murder, dacoity, and thugi as well as political acts of rebellion and sedition. Colonial officials favored it not only because it removed offenders from their familiar surroundings to distant penal colonies overseas but also because it terrorized criminals who were said to be fearful of losing caste status from having to cross the kala pani or “black waters.” Colonial authorities also relied on transportation—along with imprisonment—to stake out high moral ground: it enabled them to claim that their penal system minimized state-sanctioned violence against subject bodies because it cut down on executions and replaced harsh Islamic punishments with the civilized and civilizing regime of colonial discipline and punishment. Transportation, in other words, was proof of the quality of mercy of the colonial state. Transportation, however, targeted colonized bodies in other ways. As Cunden’s case reveals, his life was spared even though he had committed murder, but on the condition that he serve out a sentence of “hard labour in irons for life.” That is, his body was transferred over to the Penang government to dispense with as it saw fit. Indeed, colonial authorities in Penang, as well as in Bengkulen and especially Singapore, effectively utilized transportation to secure much-needed labor for their outposts of empire. For them, convicts from India were laboring hands and limbs, accessible and usable bodies in their labor-scarce colonies that they forged into docile and productive workers.



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To make convict workers out of them, the colonial government in Southeast Asia was willing to allow considerable latitude in their living and working conditions, a seemingly lax system of control that facilitated a few convict escapes every year. The Cundens who occasionally got away—and many were subsequently caught—were a small price to pay for a disciplinary system that successfully mobilized and organized several thousand males and a few hundred females into a workforce to build the infrastructure of empire. This system remained in place until 1857–1858 when the Indian government’s intention to ship its “dangerous” mutineers and rebels to the penal colonies effectively ended the system of transportation from India to Southeast Asia. NOTES 1. Presumably the Reverend William Malkin, the chaplain of Hyderabad. “Declaration of Cunden a convict,” with W. Ormsby, Suptd of Police, Madras, to Secty, Govt, 22 March 1821, Madras Judicial Consultations (MJC), 10 April 1821, no. 15. 2. W. Oliver, Registrar, to Secty, Judicial, 15 April 1821; D. Hill, Secty, Govt., to Major Farquhar, 27 April 1821, MJC, 27 April 1821, no. 9. 3. Ibid. 4. R. Caunter, Penang, to W.A. Clubley, 22 June 1821, MJC, 14 August 1821, no l. 5. Raffles to D. Hill, 4 September 1821, MJC, 2 November 1821, no. 1. 6. “Regulation for the Better Management of the Bengal Convicts,” passed on 5 October 1820, in ibid. 7. See Anand Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003): 179–208. 8. Ibid. 9. Raffles to Hill, MJC, 2 November 1821, no. 1. 10. T. Munro, A. Campbell, G. Stratton, W. Thackeray, to Raffles, no. 449, in ibid.; G. A. Barry, Chief Secretary, Mauritius, to D. Hill, Secretary, Fort St. George, and Barry to Hill, 18 January 1822, 14 November 1821, MJC, 18 January 1821, no. 1. 11. A. Yang, “Convict Singapore: The Making of a Colonial Entrepot,” World History Association (WHA), Queen Mary College, University of London, London, 25–29 June 2008; “Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, 4 (2007): 881–96. 12. J.F.A. McNair, Prisoners Their Own Warders (Westminster, 1899). 13. Yang, “Indian Convict Workers,”180. 14. Yang, “Convict Singapore.” 15. John Bastin, The British in West Sumatra (1685–1825) (Kuala Lumpur, 1965), 88–89.

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16. See my paper on “The Making of a Convict Working Class in Southeast Asia,” presented at University of California, Irvine, April 1999. 17. Sumatra Factory Records, G/35/23; G/35/22; G/35/48, 1818–21, British Library. 18. Bastin, Sumatra, xxvii–xxviii, 108. 19. The first Indian convicts arrived in the early eighteenth century. But they did not reach any appreciable numbers until almost the end of that century, when transportation of Indian convicts attained new heights beginning in 1797. Bastin, Sumatra, 108. See Alan Harfield, Bencoolen: A History of the Honourable East India Company’s Garrison on the West Coast of Sumatra (1685–1825) (Barton-on-Sea, 1995), 65. 20. These slaves were categorized as consisting of 9 gourdans, 8 artificers, 84 able men, 112 able women, 23 superannuated men, 22 superannuated women, 16 able boys, 18 able girls, 24 young boys, and 28 young girls. Edward Atkins, Superintendant of slaves and convicts, to T. Parr, Resident, 1 June 1807, Factory Records, G/35/111, May–August 1807. 21. Atkins, to Parry, 24 March, Factory Records, G/35/121, March–May 1810. The number of “coffrees” in 1810 was 340. 22. Governor General to W. Ewer, Commissioner, 4 December 1800, Bengal Public Consultations (BPC), 4–30 December 1800. 23. Ewer to Governor General, 4 July 1800, BPC, 26 February–13 March 1801, 5 March, no 10. 24. Factory Records, G/35/131, January–March 1814. 25. Robert James Young, “The English East India Company and Trade on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1730–1760,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1970, 87. 26. R. S. Perreau, Magistrate, to T. Parr, Resident, Fort Marlborough, 30 October 1805, Factory Records, G/35/107, October–December 1805. 27. Perreau to Parr, 4 October 1805, in ibid. 28. G. Dowdeswell, Secretary, judicial, to T. Parr, Resident, 3 April 1806, Factory Records, G/35/109, August–December 1806. 29. T. Parr, Resident, to G. Udny, President and Members Board of Trade, 30 November 1805, Factory Records, G/35/24, 1799–1801. The garrison at Fort Marlborough generally included a small handful of European officers and enlisted men together with a hundred or more sepoys and some local recruits. 30. R. Parry, Resident, to E. Atkins, Superintendant, 28 January 1809, Home Miscellaneous (HM). 31. Parry to Atkins, 22 March 1809, ibid. 32. Extract Letter from Governor Fullerton, Boards’ Collection (BC), 1825–26, no. 21910. 33. T. S. Raffles, to Joseph Dart, Secretary, East India Company, London, 5 April 1824, BC. 34. Ibid. 35. Letter from Lord Cornwallis, 11 March 1790, with Minute by W. E. Phillips, President, Factory Records, G/34/94, 8 January–27 May 1824, 15 April.



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3 6. Ibid. Minute by Phillips. 37. See Yang, “Bandits and Kings.” 38. Minute by Phillips, 39. “Minute by W. E. Phillips,” Factory Records, G/34/44, 7 May to 25 August 1814, 25 June. 40. R. T. Farquhar, LG, POWI, to J. Lumsden, Chief Secretary., Fort William, 15 March 1805, BPC, 16 May 1805, no. 16. 41. Ibid. 42. Governor for the Board, “proposed regulations and establishment for the convicts,” Factory Records, G/34/12, 12 November to 30 December 1805, 17 December. 43. Ibid. 44. Stanley, Recorder, to Governor, 11 May 1806, Factory Records, G/34/22, 5 January to 20 June 1809, 11 May. 45. Ibid. 46. G. Dowdeswell, Secretary, Fort William, to T. Raffles, 8 June 1810, Factory Records, G/34/27, 22 June to 29 December 1810, 13 September. 47. Extract, F/4/825. 48. R. Ibbetson, Resident., Singapore to J. Pattullo, Deputy Secretary., 27 April 1831, BPC, 19 August 1833, no. 6. 49. J. Anderson, Fort Cornwallis, to Capt. Bunbury, Rolfe, Lake, and J. Boynton, 6 November 1827, BPC, 15 September, no. 12. 50. R. Ibbetson, Deputy Resident, Fort Cornwallis, to Fullerton, Chief Commissioner, 29 July 1830, and Ibbetson to Fullerton, 17 August 1830, 15 September 1830, no. 10. 51. Anderson to Capt. Bunbury, Rolfe, Lake, and J. Boynton, 6 November 1827, BPC, 15 September, no. 12. 52. Ibid. 53. Memo for carrying into execution the President’s Minute, Fullerton, 2 August 1830, in ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. M. A. Bunbury, Capt, President, Committee, to J. Anderson, Secretary, 28 November 1827, BPC. 56. See Yang, “Convict Singapore.” 57. J. Crawfurd, Resident, Singapore, to W. B. Bayley, Chief Secretary, Fort William, 1 November 1825, MJC, 10 February 1826, no. 3. 58. Yang, “Convict Singapore.” 59. McNair, Prisoners. 60. G. D. Coleman, Superintendant of Public Works, Overseer of Convict Labor and Land Surveyor, to S. G. Bonham, Governor, 14 November 1840, BPC, 20 January, no. 13. 61. Governor to G. A. Bushby, Secretary, Govt, Fort William, 15 November 1840, BPC, 20 January 1841, no. 12. 62. To Government of India, HM, vol. 531, 22 August 1854, no. 52.

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6 3. Bonham to Chamier, 15 April 1837, MJC, 8 June 1837, nos. 1 & 2. 64. Bonham, Report of the Committee on Prison-Discipline (Calcutta, 1838), Appendix no. 4. 65. Ibid. 66. Orfeur Cavenagh, Reminiscences of an Indian Official (London, 1884), 271–72. 67. Captain H. Man, Superintendant of Convicts to R. Church, Resident Councillor, 18 August 1854, no. 45. 68. Church to Governor, 7 April 1846, India Criminal Judicial Consultations, 13 June 1846, no. 22. 69. To GOI, from RC, HM, July–November 1857, 11 September, no 25. 70. Blundell, Governor, to Secty., GOI, no. 201, 26 November 1857, Governor’s Letters to Bengal, 1856–57. 71. On the Andamans story, see Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (New Delhi, 2000); also Aparna Vaidik, Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (New York, 2010); Clare Anderson, The Indian Rising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London, 2007).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Clare. The Indian Rising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion. London, 2007. Bastin, John. The British in West Sumatra (1685–1825). Kuala Lumpur, 1965. Cavenagh, Orfeur. Reminiscences of an Indian Official. London, 1884. Harfield, Alan. Bencoolen: A History of the Honourable East India Company’s Garrison on the West Coast of Sumatra (1685–1825). Barton-on-Sea, 1995. McNair, J.F.A. Prisoners Their Own Warders. Westminster, 1899. Sen, Satadru. Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands. New Delhi, 2000. Vaidik, Aparna. Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History. New York, 2010. Yang, Anand A. “Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, 4 (2007): 881–96.    . “Convict Singapore: The Making of a Colonial Entrepot,” World History Association, Queen Mary College, University of London, London, 25–29 June 2008.    . “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003): 179–208.    . “The Making of a Convict Working Class in Southeast Asia,” paper presented at University of California, Irvine, April 1999. Young, Robert James. “The English East India Company and Trade on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1730–1760,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970.

Chapter 6

The Underside of Overseas Chinese Society in Southeast Asia

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Carl A. Trocki

This essay examines the rise and transformation of Chinese secret societies or Triads. I argue that the Chinese who left China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought with them their own traditions that became tools of social organization. We might call these the “seeds” of their own state. I further argue that the colonial states and indigenous states, which were the ones recognized by most European and post-independence observers, were not the only contenders for political power at the time. In fact, the Chinese sociopolitical constructs were both contenders and were also occasionally collaborators with the European and indigenous structures. Starting in the nineteenth century European colonial rulers encountered a range of Asian political and social formations. At some point or other, these either hindered or abetted the expansion of the colonial state. Through a process of Darwinian struggle, Malay and Javanese sultans, Burmese monarchs, Vietnamese emperors, Chinese secret society leaders, revenue farmers, and other power magnates in the region were exploited, defanged, and replaced. The colonial apparatus reshuffled territory, peoples, and social groups according to its own designs. Some of these structures, however, managed to survive and vestiges of them have persisted to the present. The postcolonial era has been different only in the ethnicity of the state builders. The process of elimination seems continuous if one looks at states such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The ruling parties, in the name of the nation-state, have left little sustenance for primordial social and 149

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political constructs. At some point in the historical process, however, these alternative institutions may have been of some use to the “mainstream” powers. As such, they gained a certain legitimacy and experienced a level of institutional reform, transformation, or even “modernization” through the association, and thus reincarnated versions of these formations have managed to survive if only in the underworld.1 They have either become criminal organizations, or else clandestine groups that survive on the fringes of respectability either as rebels or “terrorists.” Despite this process of marginalization, some have proven remarkably resilient and adaptable. The Triads, or Chinese secret societies, have flourished among the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia since the eighteenth century. The trajectory of their growth and change has been from what seem to have initially been workers’ cooperative organizations, to secretive criminal gangs, moving from local roots to global criminal enterprises. Along the way, they have also functioned as colonial police forces, customs agents, and keepers of a myth of Chinese egalitarianism. They have also moved from control of a commodity economy to control of the illegal economy. Throughout, they have maintained an aura of mystery and impenetrability. This study will focus on their transformations and “progress.” Chinese Triad societies apparently grew out of the traditional rituals and myths of the ordinary villagers of South China, but in China, they seem to have been limited to the poor and outcast. They underwent a radical transformation, however, when they arrived in the Nanyang.2 They became larger, richer, and considerably more powerful than they ever were, or could ever become, in China. They came first with Chinese laborers, and initially dominated the mining and agricultural kongsi (companies or brotherhoods) that they established in Southeast Asia.3 They gained grudging recognition from colonial governments and were taken into partnership by the Chinese and even sometimes the European mercantile elites of the region. There has been some debate over the question of whether agricultural or mining kongsi and Triad groups like the Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society) were essentially different organizations. Some, such as Wang Tai Peng, prefer to see the kongsi as separate from the Tiandihui.4 He perhaps feels that since the mining kongsi of Borneo appeared to be public and accepted forms of political, social and economic organization, they were “legitimate.” On the other hand, the secret societies or Triads, which we find in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Singapore, were seen as predatory and thus as criminal gangs. The latter could then have no connection to the former, which to Wang represented an expression of native Chinese democracy.



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I am inclined to withhold judgment on this issue. I agree with Yuan Bing Ling in that we just do not know enough about the popular culture of different parts of rural Guangdong and Fujian provinces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make a definitive conclusion on the issue of origins.5 Again, however, since the Triads of Singapore and the kongsi of Borneo existed in different environments and at different times, it may be difficult to make a valid comparison between the two. Nonetheless, there appear to be some connections. Most of the historical sources regarding these groups are difficult to use. Those produced by the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century tend to be hostile to most aspects of Chinese social organization that they encountered in their domains. They almost invariably classed kongsi and Triads as criminal gangs or social or economic conspiracies.6 Many of their writings were, in fact generated within police agencies, which naturally led to them being viewed as “problems.” Since these sources have been the most readily available, their views of the Triads, and the kongsi, have tended to prevail. Likewise, Dutch sources, particularly those dealing with the Borneo kongsi, are similarly slanted. The kongsi were their adversaries during the mid-nineteenth century, and they fought an extended conflict in order to seize control of western Borneo from the Chinese kongsi who had occupied it and controlled long before the Dutch set foot in the area.7 On the other hand, the work of Gustav Schlegel, particularly the Thian Ti Hwui, is less judgmental, but it is largely a translation of Triad documents.8 Pre-1911 Chinese official sources have always seen such groups as heterodox and thus criminal and illegitimate. To further complicate the matter, relatively little has been written by the societies themselves, so that in most cases we have only the word of outsiders, and usually hostile ones at that. According to David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhus, the study of these groups demands a considerable amount of detailed study of local and contemporary situations.9 It also demands an understanding of Chinese social organization in a variety of settings and at different times. Their volume, which is the first to offer a comparative view of Chinese Triads both in China and Southeast Asia, shows a number of very distinct expressions of what may be the same general impulse: that is, the inclination to organize, cooperate, and to form communities, as it were, from the bottom up. This impulse, I would argue, was their greatest crime, and it was this that first earned them their “criminal” status. In situations like eighteenth-century Southeast Asia, where formal government was shown to be weak, oppressive, or nonexistent, ordinary

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Chinese (at least those from the south), whether indigenous inhabitants or settlers, showed themselves capable of creating social groupings and institutions to govern social, economic, political, and even cultural life. They also invariably developed ritual frameworks to sanctify these formations. It was these social formations that met the colonial powers and the modernizing Southeast Asian regimes at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

THE CHINESE COUNTERCULTURE I would argue that there is a deeply rooted tendency in Chinese society as a whole to harbor a belief in an alternative social and political order. We might see it as a kind of traditional “counterculture” that has maintained a perennial existence among those who found themselves beyond the cultural pale of the Confucian, imperial state and society. The vitality of this counterculture is the fundamental message of such works as the Shuihu Zhuan (variously known as the Watermargin, or The Outlaws of the Marsh, or All Men are Brothers).10 The epic and its many vignettes are the basic substance of the martial arts culture of China. This “novel” dates from the seventeenth century, but is set in the twelfth century. Both were periods of dynastic decline when the imperial government was losing legitimacy and when corrupt and oppressive officials had come to dominate the organs of the state. As a result, loyal officials, honorable warriors, generous magnates, Daoist priests, and ordinary men often found themselves pushed beyond the pale. Whether cheated by greedy underlings, exploited by corrupt officials, or simply crushed by self-absorbed ministers, they found themselves forced to commit acts of violence and in so doing were branded as criminals. Denied justice by the “legitimate” organs of their society, they bound themselves together to fight for justice. Indeed “justice” seems to be the key goal of social groupings like the Triads and the kongsi. Almost all of them have the character yi in their title. In the novel their assembly is called the juyi. The major secret society in Singapore and Malaya during the nineteenth century was locally known as the “Ghee Hin” or “Ngee Heng” which in pinyin Mandarin or guoyu is yi xing, or “justice rising.” All secret societies, Triads, or kongsi shared a core of related ritual practices and symbols. While little research has been done on the specific rituals, popular culture, and folklore of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural south China, we can identify a number of elements that were quite widespread.11 Both Triads and kongsi found their mythic and ritual frameworks in the famous Chinese epics of warfare, bravery, and the martial arts: San Guo (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and the Shuihu Zhuan.12



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In addition to the search for justice in a chaotic world where the forces of order had themselves become corrupt and oppressive, these traditions championed the ideal of sworn brotherhood. This is a significant element, since the elevation of this social relationship turned the traditional Confucian hierarchy of relationships on its head. The traditional order placed the relationship between emperor and subject at the top, followed by that between father and son, elder brother and younger brother, and husband and wife, in descending order. At the bottom was the relationship between friend and friend. Note that this final one is the only one that is voluntary and is between equals. All the rest are imposed, hierarchical, and reflect relations of inequality. The relationship between friend and friend is elevated through sworn brotherhood. And, since it is created by human beings and given the sanction of “heaven,” it has supernatural ramifications. Because of this it is more powerful than relationships based on kinship, age, and social rank. The one element that seems to be unique in the doctrines of the Triad or Tiandihui (as opposed to the kongsi) is the anti-Qing tradition. Yuan suggests that the first kongsi that appeared in Borneo were not opposed to the dynasty and there was no anti-Qing rhetoric in their ritual. This element appeared in Borneo only in later years, in the second or third decade of the nineteenth century, when the kongsi found themselves at war with the Dutch. During this period, groups calling themselves Tiandihui started to appear among the miners, and became important in rallying their forces against Dutch inroads. The basic Triad origin myth incorporates elements of the earlier traditions. The Tiandihui is said to have originated in the late seventeenth century, and involves the famous Shao Lin Monastery, an extrasocietal gathering of martial heroes who first assisted the dynasty and then were betrayed and destroyed. The few survivors escaped Fujian province, and in their flight they discovered a peachwood sword. Upon the sword was engraved the characters Fan Qing Fu Ming “Overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming.” Taking the sword, the survivors then took an oath and each went his separate way to found a branch of the Tiandihui. Thus, the Tiandihui was an anti-Qing organization from the beginning.

THE TRIADS AND KONGSI IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTHEAST ASIA In the Chinese social groupings, we see the building blocks of another state, an alternative to both the indigenous Southeast Asian political formations as well as to the colonial structures built by the Europeans. And, unlike

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Europeans, who came as agents of their respective states, or at least with the knowledge and approval of those states, the Chinese construct was also an alternative to the state from which they had come. Perhaps this is why the colonial reaction to the Chinese societies was so viscerally hostile. The kongsi/Triads represented alternative political orders that both occupied the same ecological niche that European colonial states sought to occupy and also challenged the very principles of the latter, in that they were democratic, egalitarian, and structured around the principles of economic justice. Beyond that, at least so far as Europeans were concerned, they were culturally and linguistically impenetrable. Despite their hostility, the reaction of these colonial states to the Chinese societies was actually quite ambiguous. While they were hostile to the principles of the kongsi, they were faced with a dilemma. The Triads and kongsi were not only impossible to remove; at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were also the only means by which the colonial states could exercise any measure of control over their Chinese populations. It was thus the case that most of the colonial states in Southeast Asia as well as the indigenous political powers tended to accept these Chinese institutions as expedients to be used to govern the Chinese. This was the first step in the evolution of these societies into the criminal gangs that they became in the twentieth century. As a result, if we look across colonial Southeast Asia as late as the 1870s, we find that a variety of arrangements had been struck between the colonial governments and various elements of the Chinese social and political order. Secret societies may have been abhorred and resented, but they were ultimately tolerated after a fashion. They were not illegal in most places, and even where they were, they still operated with impunity. Although they were often considered “criminal” by the colonial officials and European colonial society, they persisted. So too, did institutions such as revenue “farms.” These were monopolies that were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The holders and managers of these concessions were almost always wealthy Chinese merchants who were invariably connected (although clandestinely) to the secret societies. In effect, the colonial states had not only yielded their police powers to the societies, they had also given up their tax collecting powers. In parts of Siam, particularly the south, whole districts were under the control of individuals who were both heads of the secret societies, revenue farmers, and governors.13 Likewise, in colonial Malaya, individuals such as Yap Ah Loy founded cities and ruled entire districts.14 If the role of the state is to control coercive force, therefore there should be no room for militias, warrior classes, and other armed and organized



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groups that are not obedient to the forces of the state. Nevertheless, the state often needs to compromise with these forces, and in the earlier stages of the colonial situation in Southeast Asia there was really no alternative but to work with the structures of the Chinese society with which they were confronted. In the long run, however, there was no question that the nineteenth-century states that emerged in Southeast Asia, whether colonial or indigenous, would ultimately cease to tolerate the compromise with the Chinese social and political formations. Thus it was for the Chinese; as the colonial powers strengthened their military and legal presence, they “took back” the powers that they felt appropriately belonged to their political order and systematically marginalized and criminalized the Chinese order. The “take back” however, did not happen abruptly, but was actually a process that took several decades to accomplish. I argue that this “take-back” actually began in the 1830s and was not really completed until the beginning of the twentieth century. It is clear that as the colonial powers, particularly the British and the Dutch, began to expand their areas of influence and to consolidate their positions, they came into conflict with the Chinese secret societies. This take-back, or seizure (since they never had those powers in the first place) took place in two distinct phases. The first was from about 1830 to about 1870 when the colonial powers were primarily engaged in governing the Chinese populations with the assistance of the societies. During this period, they gradually co-opted the Chinese leadership, especially the revenue farmers and wealthy merchants. The second phase saw the rationalization of the state and the criminalization of the societies. It concluded with the assumption of police and taxation powers from the Chinese revenue-farming elites and their subjugation to the role of colonial subjects.

TAMING THE SOCIETIES Despite the growing wealth, both in production and in taxation, that came to these states from the Chinese migrants, there came a time when their skills of organization worked against them. It is of interest that reactions against the growing Chinese presence in both Siam and Vietnam as well as in the Straits Settlements and Borneo all date from the 1830s. For the first time we see violent conflicts, even outright warfare between the emerging Southeast Asian states, both colonial and indigenous, and the societies. Walter Vella follows Prince Damrong in claiming that there were no Chinese secret societies in Siam before the Third Reign (1824–1851).15 This may indeed have been the case, but it may also be possible that they were simply

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not noticed, or not perceived as a threat during the earlier period. Given the presence of Chinese kongsi or Triads in other parts of Southeast Asia and given the presence of large numbers of laborers in towns like Chantaburi and other towns in the south and southeast, it is likely that some sort of kongsi-type groups had existed in the region since the eighteenth century. On the other hand, much of the local social order would have been disrupted by the wars against Burma and the conflicts to unify the Thai state between 1768 and about 1800. One suspects, however, that the societies must have regrouped by the 1820s or so. The same questions apply to the Chinese-led settlement at Songkla, but it seems likely that there were Triads in the area by the beginning of the nineteenth century, as there were in other towns in the far south of Siam. Nevertheless, in 1824, and on several occasions during the 1840s the Thai government took actions against secret societies. It is significant that their first appearance was in the areas to the east and southeast of Bangkok where large numbers of laborers had settled. In some cases, the societies were said to be involved in opium smuggling and in other cases rioting, and outright rebellion. In1848, after killing the owner of a sugar mill in Chachoengsao (about 50 km east of Bangkok), the members of a Chinese secret society took over the town itself. In the suppression of the revolt and the reaction among Siamese that followed, thousands of Chinese were killed. Vella speculates that aside from overt crimes committed by members of these societies, “the mere existence of well-organized groups of individuals numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, may well have been viewed by the government as a threat to security.”16 Similar reactions against organized Chinese groups also provoked reactions from the Vietnamese state. In the 1830s, Minh Mang (1820–1841) decided to tighten administrative controls over Saigon and other southern cities. This led to the Le Van Duyet uprising and subsequent pacification by Hue. In the midst of this, the Siamese invaded, further disrupting the region. These events had much to do with destroying the last remnants of what remained of the Chinese character of the Water Frontier towns of southeast Siam, the Cambodian coast, and Cochinchina. Chinese continued to reside in these places, but the main centers of Chinese commercial activity were relocated, with those in Vietnam focusing on Saigon and Cholon and those in Siam centering in Bangkok, but for the Chinese of Southeast Asia as a whole, Singapore, Penang, and Hong Kong became the major centers of the Chinese diaspora in the region. At the same time, the economic power of the Chinese in the Straits Settlements and the China coast came to play an important role in both the major mainland cities. Under the French, Saigon/



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Cholon would come under the commercial domination of Chinese from Singapore and Hong Kong. The Chinese economic network that emerged around the South China Sea was joined at the hip from birth with the Triads. As the economy grew and changed, so too did the societies. They were likewise joined with the colonial state system and the emerging colonial economy. Although the Triads began as egalitarian, even democratic institutions, once their leadership and the Chinese mercantile elite grasped the fundamentals of Western capitalism, they quickly embraced it. The idea of a moral economy based on egalitarianism and justice may have persisted, but self-serving capitalism triumphed. The presence of the Chinese in the Malay world was in some ways more significant than that in the mainland states. In the first place, the power of the colonial governments was initially less extensive. The monarchs of Siam and Vietnam valued Chinese merchants and the labor forces they commanded, but those kings also commanded significant military establishments of their own peoples. Thus, when they found the Chinese presence to be a threat or an obstacle, they could effectively move to eliminate the problem. On the other hand, the societies continued to flourish in Siam, as they were necessary for the government. In Vietnam, they persisted beneath the Confucian veneer and again appeared under the French. The British in the Malay world commanded no such forces in the 1830s and 1840s. Thus, cooperation with the societies and their leaders was a more expedient path. Even in Western Borneo, where the Dutch were prepared to take up arms against the kongsi armies, it was necessary to co-opt Chinese merchants, particularly the revenue farmers, to help divide the Chinese forces.

THE CHINESE ECONOMY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA Throughout the region, in almost every case, it appears that the defeat of the communities of Chinese laborers was brought about through an alliance between the local power holders and groups of Chinese merchants, often from a different ethnic background. Thus in Siam, the larger groups of Chaozhou planters were defeated by Fujian merchants allied with the Siamese authorities. There were similar configurations in the Straits Settlements and in Western Borneo. Often the Fujianese constituted a numerical minority, but with European or Siamese backing, they were able to compensate for their smaller numbers. In Vietnam, of course, where the local Chinese leadership was more firmly established and at least partially assimilated, the defeat was much more far-reaching, and Chinese power holders

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were replaced by Vietnamese officials. Under the French, however, there was a struggle between Cantonese and Fujian merchants for commercial power.17 Europeans in the Malay world could not afford to completely suppress the Chinese even if they had the means. Their economic success in the region depended on the Chinese settlers. The Chinese laborers and their merchant affiliates had created a unique economic system in the region. Precapitalist or protocapitalist expansion in Southeast Asia took quite a different form than in other parts of the world. The economy that the Chinese had created was cash based and was founded on free labor. These were aspects lacking in the European colonies where production was based either on slave labor in plantations or else on quasi-feudal confiscatory regimes as persisted in India, the Philippines, and the VOC territories. What is more important is that this economy was largely founded on kongsi or Triad organization.18 The workers’ colonies, such as those which came into existence in Borneo, Riau, Bangka, the Malay Peninsula, and elsewhere, were, for the most part, not self-sufficient. Their economies were tied to China. They had to purchase their consumables from the market and sell their produce to the market. Crawfurd makes the point quite clearly: The goods exchanged in the intercourse between China and the Indian islands are generally such as constitute the trade between a rich and a poor country, between a country densely peopled—and one thinly inhabited, but distinguished alike by the richness and singularity of its natural products. A large portion of the investments from China, however, it is to be remarked, are intended for the supply of the emigrants or colonists of that nation in the Archipelago, and these, on the other hand, contribute greatly to collect or to create the return cargoes. The articles of importation from China may be enumerated in the order of their importance, as follow: Black tea, coarse porcelain, wrought iron, principally in the form of culinary vessels, (kwali) cotton cloths, raw silk, wrought silk, brass-ware, paper, books, paint, shoes, fans, umbrellas, and toys.19

To understand the roles and scope of the Chinese protocapitalist economy it is necessary to view it in the context of Southeast Asia and not just within the territorial boundaries of the Chinese state—particularly the Ming and Qing states. If the Western colonial powers had the Americas as their “empty acres” and “free resources,” much the same can be said for China’s relation to Southeast Asia. European estate formation flourished in a colonial context. Chinese colonial expansion flourished in the Nanyang, but the Chinese did not form landed estates. And, the Chinese state was far more hostile to overseas expansion than the European states. Instead of royal patronage and state-sponsored monopolies, Chinese expansion was in the hands of private commercial groups, or other corporate bodies. They



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formed hang (merchant guilds) and kongsi that were jointly controlled by the members. Sometimes these included workers as well as investors. Chinese colonialism was not undertaken by the leaders of the metropolitan society as was European colonialism. It was launched and controlled by the off-shore merchants or mariners in collaboration with the kongsi and Triads.20 As far as the Chinese state was concerned, almost all of these were either outlaws or suspect characters. Thus it was, in a very real sense, that the Chinese counterculture or alternative society found new life and flourished in the colonial situation. It flourished not just because it was out from under the death-grip of the Confucian state and an avaricious landed class, but because it created its own economic system that gave it the power to replicate itself and to evolve and change. The wealthy Chinese merchants and mariners, like the Zheng clan in the seventeenth century, were able to leverage their maritime position in China with their connections to Southeast Asia. It was their rear staging area.21 It was also a long-term migration zone with the establishment of Chinese mercantile colonies in most of the major ports of the region. Chinese miners and planters, mariners and merchants, were colonists in foreign lands. They created and to a great extent controlled the export economy of Southeast Asia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Where they constituted an armed force they were not “estate guards” or bandits, in the sense that they were professional thieves. The secret societies and kongsi were economic and political institutions. They were primarily engaged in agriculture or mining. They saw themselves as “democratic settlers.” When they fought, they were citizen-soldiers fighting their own battles and defending their own turf and economic resources as well as securing the fruits of their own labor. And they did fight. They fought against other Chinese, against local Malay sultans and chiefs, and against colonial regimes.22

COLONIAL POWERS AND CHINESE SOCIETY Over the course of the nineteenth century, the balance of political and economic power between the Chinese society of Southeast Asia and the various colonial and indigenous powers shifted in favor of the latter. This development has been covered in some detail in my study of Chinese society in Singapore, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1820–1920.23 I have also expanded my discussion of this thread of Chinese history throughout the region in a more recent article.24 The process was a relatively gradual one in which the colonial powers were first able to co-opt the dominant Chinese merchant class: the opium revenue farmers. The opium farms were

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not only the most lucrative concessions in the colonial fiscal system; they were also the key to the Chinese economy. Most of the laborers used opium and the opium farmers were among the major investors in the mining and planting enterprises. This, at least, was the case in British Malaya, Southern Siam, and in much of the Netherlands East Indies with the exception of Java. In places like Java, Siam, and French Indochina, indigenous peasants were the major consumers of opium. Initially, the kongsi and secret society organizations seem to have maintained a commitment to economic justice and the egalitarian principles of the brotherhoods. This ideological orientation could not withstand the temptations of wealth. By the 1840s in places like Singapore, the societies were coming under the power of the revenue farmers, or the heads of the societies were becoming revenue farmers. Either way, the military organization of the societies came to serve as the muscle to police the revenue farms and to enforce discipline over the workforce. At the same time, the revenue farmers and wealthy Chinese merchants began moving into the ambit of the developing global capitalist system. Much of their capital was now coming from European merchants and more of the products of Chinese labor were moving to Europe and the Americas rather than to China. Coolies, brought into the Straits Settlements under the “credit ticket” system, often found themselves in conditions of permanent debt slavery. Labor discipline was then maintained by the security forces of the farmers/ capitalists. Laborers were often forced to become members of the society, forced to pay dues and placed under the discipline of membership, which included refusing to testify against a “brother.” Thus, in a number of ways, the societies’ leadership sold out to the revenue farmers and ultimately to the colonial regimes. In Singapore, there is good evidence to indicate that the major secret society conflicts that erupted during the first half of the nineteenth century were actually struggles over the opium revenue farms or the control of the gambier and pepper cultivation. By the mid-1840s, the major secret societies in Singapore had already been co-opted as revenue police and had been drawn into the service of the heads of the farms. As merchant cliques led by Hokkien and Teochew taukeh (merchants) struggled for control of the opium farms, they mobilized their affiliated secret societies behind them. This allowed some society leaders to gain status and move into the merchant class. At the same time, tempted by wealth, these leaders were less reliant on the loyalties of the broader groups of the laborers. By the 1870s, the need for the revenue farmers to rely on secret society muscle had decreased with the consolidation of the farms within one great syndicate. This led to the demobilization of many of the samsengs or secret



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society thugs who had made a living as “revenue police.” The secret society disturbances that erupted in Singapore during the 1870s were of a different character from those of the 1840s and 1850s. These outbreaks appear to have been led by the dispossessed “enforcers” of the old farms or by newly arrived strongmen who found there was no more demand for their talents. They would now have to seek a livelihood outside the law and have to be content with a marginal share of the economy rather than having access to the main income stream of the society. At the same time, there had been a major shift in economic power. While Chinese were still the major producers of Southeast Asian commodities, the consumers and purchasers of those commodities had become, by the 1860s, largely European. Where once goods such as pepper, gambier, tin, gold, tapioca, and sago had been primarily shipped to China, now they went to Europe. China was now spending most of its foreign exchange on opium, and the West had not only developed a taste for Asian commodities, they now found new uses for them in expanding industries.25 All of these new conditions weakened the power of Chinese Triads and kongsi. In Singapore, the first laws against secret societies were enacted in 1869. Although initially they were merely forced to register, in time restrictions became increasingly stronger, and what were classed as “dangerous societies” in British Malaya were effectively banned by 1890.26 While the chronology of toleration and subsequent prohibition of these societies throughout Southeast Asia varied with the location, ultimately steps were taken in virtually every country to ban them. As fate would have it, the outlawing of these groups came at roughly the same time that opium revenue farms were being abolished in favor of government monopolies. By the 1920s, even these monopolies came under fire from metropolitan moralists as part of the “purity movement” in early twentieth-century Europe. As a result, it became necessary for colonial regimes to demonstrate that the imperial mission was one that benefited the indigenous society, and therefore drug monopolies and legalized gambling and prostitution also had to be banned. This created sufficient social space in the Asian colonies in which secret societies, now universally seen as criminal gangs, could flourish. They took over the illegal economy that the governments had created. In a sense, this was not a great leap. The societies had, in one way or another, always been involved in the drug economy, the prostitution economy, and the gambling economy. They had also been involved in the business of maintaining labor discipline. During the days of the farms, one group or another was almost always on the outside. There had to be at least two syndicates competing for the farms, and so when the auction was over, there

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was always a loser whose main purpose then became that of smuggling and doing their utmost to destroy the business of the rival syndicate. Operating outside the law was thus an easy transition. They had done that before, and under the government monopolies, they had already organized themselves to operate in that environment. Beyond this the societies, depending on the location, were able to recruit members of the official police forces into their own ranks. This was certainly the case in places like Singapore and Hong Kong where it was necessary to recruit local Chinese into the police force in order to have officers who were cognizant of the local culture. Such personnel were also cheaper than European officers and did not need special language training or cultural adaptations. In the case of Hong Kong, the police force, including both European and Chinese personnel, was notoriously corrupt and heavily infiltrated with secret society members. In places like the unfederated Malay states (Johor & Kedah in particular) and Siam, the government was in many cases virtually built upon secret society organizations. Here too, however, the expedient of co-opting the leadership with government positions seems to have given the government a modicum of control. So long as tax money came in and a reasonable state of public order was maintained, the central state was ready to turn a blind eye to the manner in which the area was actually governed. Thus, the societies survived and actually prospered, but now they were completely outside the law, and once again in control of an economic system, the illegal economy.

CHINESE NATIONALISM AND THE SOCIETIES With the rise of nationalism in the early twentieth century, secret societies took on a new role. Sun Yat Sen was a Cantonese who had formed his own version of a secret society with the intention of overthrowing the Qing dynasty. As an exile and refugee, he found a ready welcome among the secret society leaders when he sought support from the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. During the first decade of the century, support for Sun’s Tung Meng Hui, and later for the Guomindang (GMD) was often found among the secret societies as well as among large numbers of overseas Chinese. After 1927, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was driven out of the Nationalist Party, the secret societies became part of the Guomindang’s anticommunist militia. When he broke with the GMD left wing, Chiang Kaishek made his famous alliance with the Green Gang leader, Du Yuesheng and massacred tens of thousands of leftists and communists. From here on,



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the GMD was inextricably wedded to the Shanghai underworld. In colonial Asia, groups such as the French Sureté and Britain’s Special Branch found allies among the secret societies for their anticommunist operations. While the societies continued to carry on their criminal activities such as drug dealing, prostitution, illegal lotteries, protection, extortion, and squeezing hawkers, taxi drivers, and shopkeepers, the police reached a modus vivendi with them. It was clearly impossible to eliminate the societies, thus they became part of the furniture. Indigenous criminals did not seem to bother the agents of the Special Branch in Malaya. Rene Onraet, the architect of Special Branch policy in this period, saw “external influences” as the major problem. Ban Kah Choon, chronicler of the Special Branch in British Malaya, has noted that Onraet refused to see revolutionary acts as reactions (justified or otherwise) against the colonial regime. Rather, so far as he was concerned all such activity was the result of outside agitators. If not for them, then the people of Malaya would live happily under British rule.27 While such a policy did not necessarily provide toleration for secret societies, it meant that the most aggressive police resources would be focused on political “subversion” and tracking external agents. There was never an outright campaign to totally break and eliminate the societies. In some cases, police used informants from one society to gather intelligence on others. Raids were staged. Individuals were arrested. Certain venues were shut down. And the police could show they were doing their job. On the other hand, the raids never really caught the very big operators. And, while this gambling hall or that house of prostitution was closed, they opened up someplace else. Throughout Southeast Asia and China, the societies persisted, and so too did the illegal economy.

SOCIETIES IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD Three major developments guaranteed the survival of secret society gangsters in the post–World War II era. The first was the demise of the colonial empires in Asia. The second was the triumph of communism inside of China under the leadership of Mao Zedong. And the third was the American role in the global Cold War against communism. The Pacific War, ending as it did in relative chaos for most of Southeast Asia, meant that the colonial powers would return to oppose the rising tide of nationalism with little preparation and a need to improvise. This in turn meant that in order to oppose what they saw as the most pressing and urgent need, they had to find allies in the indigenous societies.

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In some places the alliances were not so clear cut, but the unsettled conditions that existed throughout Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the Pacific War saw a definite rise in violence between political factions. Triads, unions, parties, and postwar governments struggled for control. As T. N. Harper points out in his study of postwar Malaya, at first the Triads were split, some supporting the communists and others the Guomindang.28 During the Japanese occupation the communists had constituted the main resistance forces and had found allies among the Triads, particularly the Ang Bin Hui. Ultimately however, the Triads began to lean toward the GMD, which was supported by Chinese estate and mine owners. Many Chinese “squatters” had fled the towns and settled on the jungle fringe during the Japanese occupation. They were seen as an obstacle by estate owners who, with the forestry department workers of the colonial government, tried to force them off the land and pulled up their crops of tapioca. With the outbreak of the communist-led insurgency, the “Emergency,” the British colonial state found itself on the same side as the secret societies. The “squatters” were the main support of the insurgents and thus they had to be “resettled.” This move deprived the communists of support and also served the purposes of the mine and plantation owners and their Triad allies. Malaya was not the only place where postwar governments allied themselves with gangsters and other armed groups in order to fight against communist or grassroots uprisings. The Vietnam War was a major boon to the secret societies in a number of ways. The French actively collaborated with the Binh Xuyen (a secret society), river pirates, messianic religious cults, hill tribes, and Catholic militia forces against the Viet Minh. French military intelligence had taken control of the Indochinese opium trade, the profits of which were used to finance their war. Alfred McCoy has shown how their actions were instrumental in giving birth to the vast opium and heroin trade of the Golden Triangle.29 That was only one aspect of the overall development. The other was the work of the American CIA in its war against Chinese communists in upper Burma. The CIA launched a covert war against communist China when it linked up with Chinese warlords such as Li Mi, who had supported the GMD in China during the Chinese civil war. These warlords had sustained themselves by gathering opium and producing heroin in China before the CCP victory. When they arrived on the Shan Plateau in upper Burma, they continued this means of financing their activities by forcing local tribesmen to grow opium. McCoy argues that it was the CIA’s connections that linked the GMD’s opium supply with the demand center in Bangkok. These links included corrupt Thai military officers and members of the local Teochew (or Chiu chau) secret societies.



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Again, McCoy has noted the role of secret societies in the drug trade both in China and in Southeast Asia. One group, originally based in Shanghai, fled to Hong Kong when the Red Army marched in and established laboratories there. During the 1950s, they linked up with fellow Teochews in Bangkok and gained supplies of raw morphine base from the Golden Triangle and by the early 1970s they were in firm control of Southeast Asia’s drug trade and were ready to penetrate the international markets.30 They moved into the international heroin trade, and targeted the GI market in South Vietnam and opened up exports to Europe, the United States, and Australia. During the “Maoist” period, from 1950 to 1975, China managed to purge herself of both secret societies and the opium traffic. The Triads, however, maintained their existence in Hong Kong and Taiwan and, as we have seen, drew strength from their connections to the Triad groups in Southeast Asia, particularly those in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. There, it would appear, they waited until conditions in China changed once again. The rise of Deng Xiao-ping and the liberalization of the Chinese economy in the 1980s gradually cleared the way for a return to China. By the early 1990s, taking advantage of the endemic corruption of the Chinese state, the Triads in Taiwan and Hong Kong found a ready welcome in their homeland. Once more, the drug trade, first heroin and then the manufactured chemicals—methamphetamines, ecstasy, and various tranquilizers—has propelled the Chinese Triads into global commerce. Together with human trafficking, the sex trade, and all the other criminal enterprises that flourish today, the Triads have become corporate, capitalist concerns that dominate a major share of the global underground economy.

CONCLUSION It is of interest that opium (and later heroin), which in many ways was instrumental in transforming the Triads from egalitarian brotherhoods to quasi-legal police forces and private enforcers for revenue farmers and merchant-capitalists, was also important in their transformation from local criminal gangs to international organized crime syndicates. Although some of the ritual and mythology has remained, the Triads have eliminated most of the ideological baggage that first characterized them in the eighteenth century. These aims fell victim to the temptations of capitalism as it developed in the colonial situation. Overseas Chinese merchants and their secret society henchmen discovered, long before Deng Xiao-ping, that it is glorious to get rich. That wealth not only gave them power in their own communities, it

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also gave them status and acceptance with their European colleagues in the commerce of Asia. Moreover, it won them a certain level of acceptance from the colonial governments. Of course, the role as policemen of the revenue and policemen of the Chinese only lasted so long as it served the purposes of the European rulers. From the 1870s on, Chinese men of violence and power generally had to seek their livelihoods outside the law. There was, however, plenty of scope for that. Thousands of ignorant and exploitable Chinese coolies continued to pour into Southeast Asia and the nations around the Pacific basin during the next fifty years. The ungovernable slums and shantytowns where the Chinese immigrants settled were a perfect nursery for the Triads to flourish. Every Chinatown in the world had its tongs, its hui, or whatever the local term was for the gangs of thugs who held sway over the drug economy, the sex trade, and the gambling houses. They squeezed the small merchants and occasionally threatened the larger ones. European police forces found themselves confronted with an impenetrable wall of silence that was strengthened by their own ignorance of the Chinese, their language, and their culture. The rise of political consciousness among Chinese, both inside of China and in the diaspora, provided yet another avenue of advance for the Triads. Even though educated nationalists spurned their comradeship, when the political struggle turned violent, the Triads were there to be of assistance. This was not only true in the British, Dutch, and French colonies, it was also true within China itself, particularly when Chiang Kai-shek made his bargain with Shanghai’s Green Gang.31 As the GMD moved to the right, it increasingly came to rely on the Triads and on the opium and heroin trade to provide both muscle and finance for the movement. It was this combination of the GMD, the opium trade, and the Triads that (with some assistance from the CIA) later blossomed into the gigantic drug syndicate in the so-called Golden Triangle. Ultimately, it was the banning of opium, first by colonial states and then internationally, that provided the greatest opportunity for the expansion of Triad activity. This was enhanced with the global anticommunist struggle waged by the postwar colonial states and their postcolonial successors. Local governments were able to make common cause with the Triads against communist and other working-class movements. The long-term defense of postcolonial capitalism was firmly established by the American crusade against communism in Asia. Here, the CIA alliances, first with GMD warlords and then with Laotian princelings, Shan bandits, and Thai government officials, facilitated the growing power of the Chinese syndicates. It seems that the success of capitalism aboveground insured the success of underground capitalism. Thus the opium and heroin trade constituted a superhighway



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to success for the Triads of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, and today, for those of China itself.

NOTES 1. Or, alternatively, they have survived in the “overworld” as spiritual or ceremonial entities such as monarchies that may continue to legitimize the current states. 2. Nanyang, “Southern Ocean,” is the Chinese designation for Southeast Asia as a region. 3. The term today is generally used to refer to any small business or shop and is roughly translated as “company.” It also has the connotation of referring to a social or economic unit or union that is divided up into shares. It also has the meaning of being a “brotherhood.” A fuller explanation of the terms can be found in Wang Tai Peng’s study—Tai Peng Wang, The Origins of Chinese Kongsi (Malaysia, 1995), 1–7. 4. Wang, The Origins. 5. Bing Ling Yuan, Chinese Democracies: A Study of the Kongsis of West Borneo, 1776– 1884 (Leiden, 2000). 6. Wilfred Blythe, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Historical Study (London, 1969); Leon Comber, Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Survey of the Triad Society from 1800 to 1900 (Locust Valley, NY, 1959); Mervyn Llewelyn Wynne, Triad and Tabut: A Survey of the Origins and Diffusion of Chinese and Mohammedan Secret Societies in the Malay Peninsula 1800–1935 (Singapore, 1941). 7. It seems extraordinary that even Yuan Bing Ling (Yuan, Chinese Democracies), whose work clearly shows that the Chinese arrived in western Borneo before any Dutch claim was ever made, still describes the Dutch takeover as “the Dutch resurgence.” 8. Gustave Schlegel, Thian Ti Hwui: The Hung League or Heaven-Earth-League, A Secret Society with the Chinese in China and India (Batavia, 1866). 9. David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhues, eds., “Secret Societies” Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Modern South China and Southeast Asia (Armonk, NY, 1993). 10. Nai-an Shi and Guanzhong Luo, The Outlaws of the Marsh (Beijing, 1988). 11. Barend J. Ter Haar, “The Genesis and Spread of Temple Cults in Fukien,” in The Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Leiden, 1990); Yuan, Chinese Democracies. 12. Shi and Luo, The Outlaws of the Marsh; Kuan-chung Lo, Three Kingdoms: China’s Epic Drama, trans. Moss Roberts (New York, 1976). 13. Jennifer W. Cushman, Family and State: The Formation of a Sino-Thai Tin-Mining Dynasty, 1797–1932 (Singapore, 1991), Wong, Yee Tuan, “The Rise and Fall of the Big Five of Penang and their Regional Networks, 1800s–1900s.” PhD thesis, Australian National University (Canberra 2007).

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14. Sharon Carstens, “Chinese Culture and Polity in Nineteenth-Century Malaya: The Case of Yap Ah Loy,” in “Secret Societies” Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Modern South China and Southeast Asia, ed. David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhues, Studies on Modern China (Armonk, NY, 1993). 15. Walter F. Vella, Siam under Rama III, 1824–1851 (Locust Valley, NY, 1957). 16. Ibid., 17–18. 17. Carl A. Trocki, “The Internationalization of Chinese Revenue Farming Networks,” in Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, ed. Nola Cooke and Li Tana (Singapore, 2004). 18. I’ve laid out my case for this economic system in Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore 1800–1910 (Ithaca, NY, 1990). . 19. John Crawfurd, Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries, Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (Kuala Lumpur, 1971), 180–1. 20. Chin-keong Ng, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735 (Singapore, 1983). 21. Robert J. Anthony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China, China Research Monograph 56 (Berkeley, CA, 2003). The Zheng clan are famous for Zheng Chenggong or Koxinga, the antiQing warrior and mariner of Fujian Province who later retreated to Taiwan and held out against the Qing until 1683. 22. The arguments for the democratic nature of the kongsi and/or Triads is put forward in Wang, The Origins of Chinese Kongsi; Yuan, Chinese Democracies. 23. Trocki, Opium and Empire. 24. Trocki, “Opium as a Commodity in the Chinese Nanyang Trade,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-cin Chang (Durham, NC, 2010). 25. Trocki, Opium and Empire. 26. Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd. ed. (London, 1965), 274. 27. Kah Choon Ban, Absent History: The Untold Story of Special Branch Operations in Singapore, 1915–1842 (Singapore, 2001), 76. 28. T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge, 1999), 112–14. 29. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: Cia Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (New York, 1991), 130. 30. Ibid., 189. 31. Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8 (1976): 19.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Anthony, Robert J. Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China, China Research Monograph 56. Berkeley, CA, 2003.



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Ban, Kah Choon. Absent History: The Untold Story of Special Branch Operations in Singapore, 1915–1842. Singapore: 2001. Blussé, Leonard. Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans, The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, 2006. Cambridge, MA, 2008. Blythe, Wilfred. The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Historical Study. London, 1969. Carstens, Sharon. “Chinese Culture and Polity in Nineteenth-Century Malaya: The Case of Yap Ah Loy.” In “Secret Societies” Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Modern South China and Southeast Asia, ed. David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhues, 120–52. Armonk, NY, 1993. Comber, Leon. Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Survey of the Triad Society from 1800 to 1900, Monographs of the Association for Asian Studies. Locust Valley, NY, 1959. Crawfurd, John. Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries, Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints. Kuala Lumpur, 1971. Cushman, Jennifer W. Family and State: The Formation of a Sino-Thai Tin-Mining Dynasty, 1797–1932, ed. Craig J. Reynolds. Singapore, 1991. Gallant, Thomas W. “Brigandage, Piracy, Capitalism, and State-Formation: Transnational Crime from a Historical World-Systems Perspective.” In States and Illegal Practices, ed. Josiah McC. Heyman, 25–62. Oxford and New York, 1999. Harper, T. N. The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya. Cambridge, 1999. Harris, Robert. Political Corruption: In and Beyond the Nation State. London and New York, 2003. Li, Tana. “The Water Frontier: An Introduction.” In Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, ed. Nola Cooke and Tana Li, 1–17. Singapore, 2004. Lo, Kuan-chung. Three Kingdoms: China’s Epic Drama, trans. Moss Roberts. New York, 1976. Marshall, Jonathan. “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in Nationalist China, 1927–1945.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8, no. 3 (July–September 1976): 19–48. McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. New York, 1991. Ng, Chin-keong. Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735. Singapore, 1983. Ownby, David, and Mary Somers Heidhues, eds. “Secret Societies” Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Modern South China and Southeast Asia. Armonk, NY, 1993. Purcell, Victor. The Chinese in Southeast Asia. 2nd ed. London, 1965. Schlegel, Gustave. Thian Ti Hwui: The Hung League or Heaven-Earth-League, a Secret Society with the Chinese in China and India. Batavia, 1866. Shi, Nai-an, and Guanzhong Luo. The Outlaws of the Marsh, trans. Sidney Shapiro, vol. 1. Beijing, 1988. Singasena, Chao Phraya Bodindecha. Annam Sayam Yut. Bangkok, 1971 (BE 2514).

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Ter Haar, Barend J. “The Genesis and Spread of Temple Cults in Fukien.” In The Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 349–96. Leiden, 1990. Terwiel, B. J. Through Traveller’s Eyes: An Approach to Early Nineteenth Century Thai History, Asian History Centre, Bangkok, 1989. Trocki, Carl A. Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore 1800–1910. Ithaca, NY, 1990.     “The Internationalization of Chinese Revenue Farming Networks.” In Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, ed. Nola Cooke and Li Tana, 159–73. Singapore, 2004.     “Opium as a Commodity in the Chinese Nanyang Trade.” In Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-cin Chang, 173–204. Durham, NC, 2010. Van Dyke, Paul A. The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845. Hong Kong, 2005. Vella, Walter F. Siam under Rama III, 1824–1851, Monographs of the Association for Asian Studies. Locust Valley, NY, 1957. Wang, Tai Peng. The Origins of Chinese Kongsi. Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia, 1995. Wolters, O. W. The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History, Asia Major Library. London, 1970. Wong, Yee Tuan. “The Rise and Fall of the Big Five of Penang and their Regional Networks, 1800s–1900s.” Australian National University, 2007. Wyatt, David K. Thailand: A Short History. New Haven, CT, 1984. Wynne, Mervyn Llewelyn. Triad and Tabut: A Survey of the Origins and Diffusion of Chinese and Mohammedan Secret Societies in the Malay Peninsula 1800–1935. Released 1957 ed. Singapore, 1941. Yuan, Bing Ling. Chinese Democracies: A Study of the Kongsis of West Borneo, 1776–1884. Leiden, 2000.

Chapter 7

A Historical Perspective on State Engagement in Informal Trade on the Uganda-Congo Border

O

Kristof Titeca “Somebody who grew up on a river bank, he will learn how to fish. Somebody who grew up on a border, he will learn how to smuggle.” —Interview with smuggler, Arua, 12-02-08

From a “heart of darkness”1 to a “coming anarchy,”2 a stereotype of sub-Saharan Africa remains that of a politically, economically, and socially chaotic continent, resistant to conventional regulations. Apart from being very essentialist, this view is also utterly unhelpful: a closer look informs us of a much more complex set of arrangements among local populations of Africa that take place in a very lively and densely negotiated informal economy. This paper aims at describing these through what Janet Roitman calls an “anthropology of economic regulation.”3 A large section of economic activities in sub-Saharan Africa avoids state control and is considered part of the “informal sector.” In 1999–2000, this comprised an estimated 42 percent of the GNP in Africa.4 The East African country of Uganda is no exception: an estimated 43.1 percent of its 1999/2000 GNP belongs to the informal economy.5 According to the Ugandan national household survey of 2009–2010, about 1.2 million Ugandan households—or 21 percent of the total households in Uganda—are engaged

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in informal business. When looking at the individual level, the survey found 3.5 million people working in the informal sector. Of those not in agriculture, 2.2 million or 58 percent are employed in the informal sector.6 Whatever approach is taken, the informal economy clearly plays an important role in the Ugandan national economy; processes of economic development cannot be understood without taking it into account. One economic activity particularly prone to informality is cross-border trade. Again in Uganda, in 2008 informal exports were estimated to be US$1.35 billion, while officially recorded exports were valued at US$1.72 billion.7 In other words, formal exports were only slightly higher than informal exports. In 2009, this difference became even less pronounced, when informal exports were estimated at US$1.558 billion, while formal exports were only worth slightly more than this, US$1.567 billion.8 Moreover, these figures only include unrecorded trade at formal border points and do not involve trade that bypasses formal border crossings altogether. In other words, when looking at the informal economy in general, or at cross-border trade in particular, all of these figures show the dominant presence of informal trade in Uganda. Not taking these processes into account would miss important dynamics. Despite the prominence of the informal economy or “smuggling” activities, these are conventionally defined negatively, that is as lacking state regulation, which implies a void of any regulation at all.9 For example, Castells and Portes argue that the central feature of the informal economy is that “it is unregulated by the institutions of society in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated.”10 Another view sees it as economic activity conducted through “irregular or unregulated means.”11 In this way, the informal economy presumably defies “rational classification and theorization,” resulting in a shallow understanding of the informal sector that neglects the causes and internal dynamics at play.12 This chapter aims to analyze precisely the internal dynamics by looking at the ambiguous and changing relationship between the state, the informal economy, and processes of regulation. Far from there being a void of regulation and an absence of the state, “pluralistic regulatory arrangements” are in place in which the state plays an ambiguous role.13 This study analyzes the recent history of the informal economy in the borderlands between Uganda and Congo, and more particularly the engagement of the state in regulating informal cross-border trade in a region called “West Nile” in northwestern Uganda bordering with Congo. Arua in Uganda and Ariwara in Congo are the most important cities in this borderland (Figure 7.1).14

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Source: Kristof Titeca, Luk Joossens, M. Raw, “Blood Cigarettes: Cigarette Smuggling and War Economies in Central and Eastern Africa,” Tobacco Control 20, no. 3 (2011): 229; based on and with permission of United Nations Map No. 3862 Rev. 4 May 2003, United Nations Cartographic Section.

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THE INFORMAL ECONOMY, THE STATE, AND REGULATION The traditional “negative” approach to the informal economy relies on two premises: first, that the state is by definition absent from the informal economy and second, that as a result, the informal economy is unregulated. This section provides a critique to these two premises and instead offers a theoretical backdrop for a recent historical overview of the relationship between the state and the informal economy in the Ugandan-Congolese borderlands. A first premise of the “informal economy as unregulated” is that the state is a priori absent from the informal economy. Both the theoretical and policy literature on this subject reflect this idea, which proved to be particularly influential at first. When the informal economy concept gained prominence, it was seen as a primary example of state disengagement from society. Economically disempowered sections of the population look to informal trade for a means of survival that has become unavailable through regular formal activities due to general state neglect, corruption, and the incapacity of the state to provide basic services or decent formal wages.15 In this view, the informal economy is a parallel system supplying “alternative outlets for needs that remain unfulfilled by official channels, and they reduce dependence on those channels.”16 Moreover, not only is the state unable to provide services, but oppressive state regulations make it difficult for traders to function and therefore lead them to create an income outside of the oppressive state framework. Not surprisingly, this view was appropriated by the anti–state donor vision during the eighties and early nineties.17 The neoliberal structural adjustment policies of this era considered the state to be overdeveloped and ineffective, and wanted to promote market-based mechanisms instead of state-led economic interventionism. This view also highlights that informal practices do not necessarily equal criminal practices: although they are illegal—they occur outside of the state regulatory framework—they primarily happen for purposes of mere survival, and on an individual basis. However, this view became criticized by another vision, which argued the opposite of the above, namely, that the state actively engages in informal economies. Through its ability to sanction illegal practices, it puts its representatives (state officials) in a privileged position to participate in the informal economies: “Customs evasion or smuggling, then, cannot be considered in isolation as an activity which is simply illegal or criminal, but is better seen as one among a larger variety of techniques designed to exploit opportunities offered by the state.”18 In this interpretation, access to the informal economy is no longer free, but functions through connections with state



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officials.19 Moreover, this vision largely emphasizes the criminal character of informal economic activities, which are no longer considered to be about survival but rather about enrichment by political and economic elites. In this way, these visions reflect a “qualitative difference of scale and intent” between organized criminal activities and “the scores of micro-practices that, while often illegal in a formal sense, are not driven by a structural logic of organization and unified purpose.”20 The engagement of the state plays an important role in how this difference is explained: in both approaches, the informal economy is presented either as a manifestation of the engagement or of the disengagement of the state.21 I argue that the insights of these dichotomous approaches should be complemented with the broader state-society literature that turns such theoretical presumptions on their head and instead invokes the state and its various interactions with society as a point of a departure.22 A basic theme of this literature is that states automatically interact with and are influenced by nonstate actors. In his seminal work on state-society relations, Migdal summarizes this in the following way: States must contend with opposing groupings, some of which are quietly and indirectly subversive .  .  . others of which are openly confrontational. These multiple groupings of opposition have created coalitions to strengthen their stance, and these have cut right into the very structure of states themselves. The resulting coalitional struggles have taken their toll: state policy implementation and the outcomes in society have ended up quite different from the state’s original blueprints.23

In other words, the state is profoundly influenced by society and the powerful actors with whom it interacts. This approach allows an analysis of how the state can equally engage and disengage from the informal economy, as it necessarily interacts with a range of nonstate actors. This brings us to the second premise of the “negative” approach to the informal economy, which claims that the informal economy is unregulated because of the absence of the state and its regulatory framework.24 However, the state-society approach argues that it is necessary to leave a state-centric approach in studying governance and regulation in particular localities. Absence of the state does not mean that a void exists in its place. Local life may suffer from under-administration, but still be characterized by often latent and disguised greed, conflicts, and negotiation between various authorities, clans, and factions. This means that the study of local powers and politics must not be restricted to ‘formal’ institutions but ought also to take account of all ‘public spaces’ and positions of eminence.25

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Thus one must depart from a state-centric view and instead take into account the whole spectrum of other formal and informal actors, or the “multifocality” of regulation and the local political field in general.26 The fact that the state is absent does not mean that chaos erupts or that public services are no longer being provided.27 Governance is produced not only by the state, but is negotiated between a broad coalition of state and nonstate actors. Abandoning a state-centric vision on regulation has a number of important consequences. On the one hand, spaces considered to be strictly regulated by the state necessarily include interactions with nonstate actors. In constituting governance, nonstate actors have different levels of autonomy, or put differently, they have various degrees of interaction with the state.28 Nonstate actors do not necessarily act outside of the state; they can cooperate or compete with the state, and they can be part of the state or not.29 Regulatory frameworks are therefore by definition “hybrid political orders” that make it necessary to “focus on models of governance which draw on the strengths of social order and resilience embedded in community life.”30 Furthermore, departing from this state-centric view implies that spaces where the state is absent can still be governed through these “intermediate” social actors. For example, studies on urban Africa have shown that while the state is largely absent from areas such as work, shelter, land use, transportation, and so on, nonstate actors largely drive them.31 The above issues are particularly relevant for the informal economy: the fact that the state is absent does not mean that the informal economy is unregulated.32 Moreover, as the introduction to this volume shows, in “illegal” spaces (such as the informal economy) lawmakers and lawbreakers are closely connected and have a dialectical relationship in shaping each other, in which they mutually support each other. Regulation is therefore per definition hybrid. Here the recent history of informal trade on the Ugandan-Congolese border engages with this debate. An analysis of different sides of the border shows various modes of interaction between the state and the informal economy in which the state regulatory framework is not always the dominant framework. Instead there is a “pluralization” of regulatory authority that differs both through time and through space.

SETTING THE SCENE: PRECOLONIAL AND COLONIAL ROOTS OF THE INFORMAL CROSS-BORDER TRADE As elsewhere, informal trade in this border region does not come out of the blue.33 The recent history of the informal trade in this border region has precolonial and colonial roots. In the first place, ethnic groups in northwestern



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Uganda (Lugbara, Madi, Kakwa, and Alur) are different from other ethnic groups in (northern) Uganda. For example, apart from the Alur, the ethnic groups in West Nile speak Sudanic rather than Nilotic languages, as in the rest of Northern Uganda.34 There is a close ethnic interconnectedness across the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan: the main ethnic group of northwestern Uganda, the Lugbara, also live across the border in northeastern Congo. Other ethnic groups, such as the Kakwa, live on both sides of the Ugandan-Sudanese border.35 The most famous West Niler, Idi Amin, president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, is said to have been born over the border in Sudan or Congo.36 Second, this region has always been in close contact with surrounding ones, as witnessed by precolonial trading patterns. The Lugbara traded with Congo for iron, while Egyptian delegations from Khartoum traded with northwestern Uganda from the late 1830s onwards in guns, ivory, and people (i.e., slaves). These trading contacts between Khartoum and northern Uganda were well established by the beginning of the colonial period.37 Third, it is necessary to understand how various actors have always manipulated borders in the area, something that has been described well by the work of Mark Leopold.38 By the early 1890s, the region was known as the “Lado Enclave” and included parts of Northern Uganda as well as parts of South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Strategically important for control of the upper part of the Nile, it provoked the interest of a number of European nations, notably Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium. In 1892, Belgian forces were the first to arrive in the area and to set up bases across the Enclave. However, quite soon Belgian interest there decreased because of the large costs of the operation, the limited commercial opportunities, the difficulties of organizing supply lines, and European disputes over the region. Moreover, Britain used diplomatic pressure to gain control over the area. In 1906, the Anglo-Congolese Agreement formalized the phasing out of Belgian influence by recognizing the Lado Enclave as the personal property of King Leopold for as long as he lived. After his death, it would come under British control as part of the Sudan condominium. This agreement further reduced Belgian interest in the area, which it could no longer govern solely. Consequently, with most of the Enclave no longer controlled by a clear formal authority, activities such as poaching, game hunting (particularly elephant hunting to meet the strong demand for ivory in Europe and the United States), and small-arms trade became dominant. The impact of the ivory hunters was particularly negative on the local population, as they abducted people as porters, killed cattle, and burned villages.39 In other words, although in theory there was a “state” presence—Belgian colonial rule—it did not show major interest in governing the area.

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After the death of King Leopold in 1909, the Enclave was transferred to Sudan whose authorities acquired a piece of territory which had, for some years, been under no de facto imperial authority and had become a killing ground for European ivory hunters. Local people had become adept at manipulating the tripartite (Sudan/Congo/Uganda) borders: for example, living in the Congo but keeping their cattle in Uganda to avoid paying hut tax in the latter and tribute in kind in the former.40

Although more control was exercised than during the Belgian colonial period, it remained relative in that ivory poachers continued to operate. Soon the colonial authorities organized a boundary commission, which in 1914 decided to transfer the southern tip of the Enclave—currently West Nile—to the neighboring part of the British colonial empire, the Ugandan Protectorate.41 In sum, throughout colonial history, the borders of the West Nile region have been manipulated by various categories of people: ordinary people to avoid tax, but also poachers and hunters, who have been moving relatively freely through the region. As the next sections will show, this continued in the postcolonial period.

RECENT HISTORY OF THE INFORMAL TRADE Informal Trade and Refugee Movements A particularly important function of the borders in the West Nile region has proven to be the provision of security. All the different sides of the border (Congo, Sudan, Uganda) have, in varying degrees, been conflict ridden in the last thirty years. During different phases of conflict, refugees from the different areas always sought asylum across the respective borders. When former Ugandan president Idi Amin (a West Niler) was ousted from power in 1979, the population of West Nile feared revenge and fled to eastern Congo and southern Sudan.42 Similarly, increased violence in Southern Sudan in the early 1990s forced many Sudanese to flee to northern Uganda, where they stayed until recently. Not until the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 did the Sudanese refugees slowly return home. Lastly, eastern Congolese fled to Uganda during the successive phases of conflict in their region.43 These refugee movements increased contact between the different areas, and were essential in the development of informal trade. Their “fluidity of movement across borders made them an ideal matrix for the development of parallel trade.”44



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The refugee movement after the ousting of Idi Amin played a particularly important role in this. When Amin was removed from power, much of the population of West Nile fled to eastern Congo and southern Sudan in fear of an invasion force consisting of the Tanzanian army and the national Ugandan army. Whereas the former maintained restrained and correct behavior, the latter engaged in brutal reprisals towards the civilian population. Most of the refugees remained in exile in eastern Congo or Southern Sudan until the mid- to late 1980s.45 Although this was a time of profound conflict and crisis, it also offered particular opportunities. During the Amin regime, the informal economy had already become a dominant survival mode in light of an incapable and violent state.46 When Ugandans were pushed over the border into Congo and Sudan, the informal economy continued being the dominant survival mode, but became much more profitable because the refugee crisis and the situation of conflict created a severe shortage of goods on different sides of the border. This is when the important border market of Ariwara came into existence on the Congolese side of the border. It was started by Ugandan refugees in Congo and was central in supplying goods to the wider region. The market created a particular regional trading dynamic: in Ariwara market, Congolese traders brought gold from the mines in northeastern Congo; with the income from the gold, they purchased manufactured goods or foodstuffs brought by the Ugandan traders. The Sudanese brought dollars to buy foodstuffs, manufactured goods, and particularly coffee, which was supplied by Congolese and Ugandan farmers, who smuggled their coffee to Zaire.47 With the profits from the sale of their manufactured goods and foodstuffs originating in Kampala in Uganda, or Mombasa or Nairobi, both in Kenya, the Ugandan traders purchased the gold and dollars. The gold was in turn sold in Kampala, Mombasa, or Nairobi and the profit, together with the dollars purchased in Ariwara, was used to purchase manufactured goods. In addition, Ugandan refugees were particularly active along the Sudanese-Congolese border, buying manufactured goods and foodstuffs in the Ariwara market and selling them in southern Sudan.48 Congolese traders were not yet going to Kampala, so Ugandan traders were the main suppliers of goods. In short, Ugandan traders played a central role in this triangular cross-border trade by controlling the most profitable part of the trading network: selling Congolese gold to the international market and importing much-needed manufactured goods. All of this trade happened outside of the state regulatory framework and could be considered “informal” trade.49 Although very profitable, it also was a risky and difficult business. On the Uganda side of the border, the national Ugandan army was active, while on the Congolese side of the border, authorities seriously harassed traders. Confiscation of gold

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was one of these risks, as was the sale of fake gold by Congolese or Ugandan traders. Therefore only a rather small group of Ugandan traders operated in these difficult circumstances. They all originated from the Ugandan border town of Arua, and were therefore called the “Arua boys.” Soon, these Arua boys had established a well-functioning trade organization that made large profits. They had a de facto monopoly on the supply of these goods and on the gold trade, as the Congolese traders had not yet found their way to the international market. The trade in manufactured goods into Congo and the export of gold outside of Congo—that is, the activities of the Arua boys— remain at the heart of this trade up to today. The next sections engage with the theoretical debates about the informal economy by looking at the role of the state in regulating the informal economy on the Ugandan and Congolese sides of the border. Zooming in on this issue on the different sides of the border gives a better perspective on the different dynamics at stake and on the plurality of regulatory authority.

The Ugandan Side of the Border: From “Arua Boys” to “Tycoons” When President Museveni came to power in 1986, a period of relative peace broke out in West Nile, and most of the refugees came back into Uganda.50 Although a number of rebel groups remained active in West Nile for a while, their activities were quite limited, certainly compared to the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the rest of Northern Uganda.51 The state also increased its presence in the area, which changed the nature of the regional trade, although in a different way than one could expect. The Arua boys— and informal trade in general—had started their activities because of the absence of the state in providing basic goods and services. After the state and economy collapsed under President Amin, informal trade had been boosted, entrenched, and made much more profitable through the refugee movements towards Congo. During this period of exile, no institutionalized state control existed at the border points, only individual harassment by Congolese or Ugandan state actors. Arguably, therefore, the disengagement of the state in the area formed the basis of regional informal trade. However, the reengagement of the national state, while structurally changing the organization of informal trade, did not lead to an increased importance of the state regulatory framework. Rather, the increased state presence in the area played an important role in the development of the current informal trade regime.52 First, the national revenue agency, the Uganda Revenue Authorities (URA), arrived in West Nile in 1996—more particularly in Arua, its regional



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headquarters. Before their arrival, border control was not systematic, and the arrival of the URA increased state presence and the risk of smuggling. This pushed a lot of actors out of the trade, including many Arua boys. As one of them complained: “The arrival of the URA marked the end of a lot of Arua boys. You suddenly had to pay revenue! Of course, you had to do this before, but it was easy to escape. At this point, times became hard for many.”53 Second, the continuous and increased militarization of the region played an important role in the development of the trade. During the first years of the Museveni regime (in the second half of the 1980s), this militarization had a rather dubious effect on trade: on the one hand, soldiers easily confiscated the goods of the traders, who suffered major losses through this. On the other hand, much of the gold that was bought was delivered directly to military actors themselves—according to the traders involved, a number of generals based in Arua and in Kampala were their biggest clients. While the gradual pacification of the area led to a reduced importance of military actors in the area, these again became prominent through the involvement of the Ugandan army in the Congolese conflict from 1998 onwards. As described elsewhere in detail, Uganda had strong economic interests in this conflict, which again brought a higher involvement of state (military) officials in the cross-border trade.54 For example, a number of rebel groups in Eastern Congo—just across the border from Arua—were supported by the Ugandan officials, who increasingly engaged in the informal trade of Congo and West Nile.55 This increased state engagement in the area—the arrival of military actors and revenue authorities—did not necessarily mean an overall increased importance of the state regulatory framework or “formalization” of the trade. Rather, it led to an increased direct engagement of state officials in informal trade. Concretely, state officials started collaborating with a number of Arua boys. While on the one hand a number of Arua boys were pushed out of the trade through increased state control, others were boosted by its presence; protected by government officials, they got preferential treatment (as was happening with the gold trade in the beginning of the Museveni regime). Through this cooperation and protection, these traders smuggle large consignments of contraband in the wider region. “Friendly” state officials help them to cross their goods through the border points, and intervene when necessary at the different border points. Interviews with customs officials at the different border points reveal that they are often ordered to permit the free passage of certain trucks. Through such cooperation, a small number of traders emerged who receive protection and engagement. Locally called “tycoons,” they naturally enjoy a market advantage over other contraband traders and therefore have a de facto monopoly

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of the contraband trade, especially of minerals, cigarettes, batteries, and fuel. Of course, state officials receive part of the profits; traders testify that certain amounts have to be paid for safe passage of the goods. Other traders testify that particular state officials directly participate in the trade, for example by owning/selling part of the contraband.56 The next section discusses these issues on the Congolese side of the border, specifically by focusing on the important border market of Ariwara, and the way in which the state tried to implement its control after a period of “rebel governance.”

The Congolese Side of the Border The State and Informal Trade In order to analyze the Congolese side of the border, this section will focus on the informal trade taking place during and after the regime of a rebel group called the Armed Forces of the Congolese People (Forces Armées du People Congolais) or FAPC. From 2003 to 2005, this rebel group of 2,000 to 3,000 combatants took charge of a small area in northwestern Congo bordering Uganda, and more particularly of the important border market of Ariwara.57 The rebel movement was created with support from Uganda, which wanted to protect its interests in the area.58 The movement never had an outspoken political agenda, but had a very clear economic agenda: having settled in economically important areas, it showed a direct interest in profiting from the available resources.59 First, the rebel movement took control over the customs points and greatly reduced taxes. This succeeded in attracting more traders to the area, which in turn led to a steady income from taxation. Particularly the border market of Ariwara became a very popular trading destination. Second, rebel officers actively participated in the regional smuggling networks and reinvested part of their profits in the local traders, who then multiplied the investments of the rebel officers. For example, the rebel officers profited hugely from smuggling manufactured products such as batteries or cigarettes to Uganda, where taxes were much higher.60 They also participated in smuggling gold.61 Coordination of smuggling practices relied on a variety of actors: Congolese traders cooperated closely with the Ugandan traders described as tycoons. Traders received unprecedented protection in this smuggling arrangement: while the Congolese rebel officers offered protection on the Congolese side of the border, the Ugandan officials offered protection on the Ugandan side of the border. The latter even helped to finance this trade. This “tightly knit smuggling



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system” was a win-win situation for all those involved—FAPC, Ugandan and Congolese traders, and Ugandan state officials—who enriched themselves quickly in this arrangement.62 In April 2005, the rebel group surrendered to the United Nations. Part of the rebel force was integrated into the government army and stationed in another area; its leaders were transferred to Kinshasa, and some former rebels remained in the area. From the moment the rebel movement ceased to exist, the Congolese state tried to regain control of the region, that is, to (re‑) implement its regulatory framework by setting taxation policies. However, this proved to be very difficult as the FAPC regime had kept taxes very low, while the Congolese state tried to restore higher national tax laws. Resistance came from the local trading community which had experienced rapid upward mobility and had become well organized during the FAPC regime that cooperated with it. The organization of traders, the Fédération des enterprises du Congo or FEC, had become not only economically strong but also remained powerful even after FAPC disappeared. As a result, every tax introduced by the central government has to be negotiated with the FEC; if the FEC does not agree with certain taxes, it reacts by organizing a strike, which blocks all imports through the border. This can last from several days up to several weeks, not only depriving the customs of taxes, but also creating major shortages in the area.63 The FEC also continuously lobbies higher-level governmental institutions, and uses its influence to pressure the customs agencies, with the result that de facto tax rates in the area are lower than official tax rates.64 For example, the customs agency Office Congolais de Contrôle (Congolese Control Office) charges a tax of $1,300 for a truckload of motorcycles, while the official government tax is $2,400. (At the time of the FAPC, it was $500.) A truckload of sugar normally should pay $1,400, but currently pays $900. (During the FAPC regime, it was $350.) Other taxes are simply not paid because the FEC refuses to do so.65 The general population also creates problems for state officials. During the FAPC regime, the low taxation rates generated lower prices in the market of Ariwara; hence, the higher taxation rates are highly contested. Officers who try too strictly to follow the new state regulations complain about intimidation in town; they claim they cannot simply go to the market or other places without being harassed.66 With pressure from both FEC and the population, it becomes impossible to implement the state regulatory framework. Not only does the state have problems enforcing taxation. Unsurprisingly, it also has difficulty regulating smuggling activities, especially in the most profitable commodities previously dominated by the FAPC. After the end of the FAPC regime, illegal regional trade became more difficult, for the simple reason that it could no longer be conducted in the open; overt

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protection of the contraband trade by the authorities on both sides of the border vanished. Yet this trading network remains very much functional. The war period served as a “capacity-building” or “matchmaking” exercise for the actors involved, particularly between Ugandan and Congolese traders. Before the rebellion, cooperation between both sides had been limited and both Congolese and Ugandan traders would smuggle goods from Congo into Uganda individually, which involved bigger risks.67 This changed during and after the rebellion, when there developed—and remains—a close cooperation between Ugandan and Congolese traders, making their illegal trading practices more efficient.68 In other words, trading practices that were in place during the war economy have not disappeared. The “tightly knit smuggling system” is therefore still in place: a regional complex, consisting of Congolese traders (FEC members), Ugandan businessmen, Ugandan officials, and ex-FAPC officers, still deals in highly profitable illegal commodities.69 A practical manifestation of this is the fact that all the major traders who were identified as being at the heart of the FAPC’s war economy by different international reports are still the principal players of the regional smuggling economy.70

THE STATE, LEGALITY AND LEGITIMACY Charles Tilly’s work has shown how law and crime emerged out of an historical and ongoing struggle over legitimacy, in which a particular group succeeded in delegitimizing and criminalizing particular practices.71 In theory, the winner—the state—then holds absolute power in regulating practices on the formerly disputed territory. However, in establishing itself as the dominant and final regulatory authority, the state has not necessarily managed to erase all other regulatory authorities or other actors involved in regulation.72 Both the Ugandan and Congolese sides of the border illustrate how the state regulatory framework is not strictly and universally implemented, but is instead “negotiated” with nonstate actors.73 Analyzing the relation between another rebel group on the Ugandan-Congolese border (RCD-ML) and the local trading community, Raeymaekers highlights how traders do not necessarily operate on “the margins of the law,” that is, disengaged from the state, but instead “increasingly became makers of the law itself, which included a fundamental reinterpretation of the state’s role in (trans)national regulatory practices and epistemologies.”74 Similarly in Ariwara, state officials cannot implement the state regulatory framework of national taxation, as they must negotiate with nonstate actors—the local trading community and wider population—which



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leads to lower levels of taxation. Thus, regulatory practices and governance in general are not the purview of the state alone, but are profoundly influenced by nonstate actors. The failed attempts of the Congolese state to introduce uniform levels of taxation shows that the state is not even necessarily the strongest actor in this negotiation. An important factor in this negotiation process consists of perceptions of “legitimate” governmental practices. Since the traders and general population in Ariwara considered the new taxation rates to be illegitimate, the government representatives could not succeed in implementing them. To return to the theoretical debate: issues of legality and illegality should not take the state as a point of departure, but should instead differentiate between “what states consider to be legitimate (“legal”) and what people involved in transnational networks consider to be legitimate (“licit”).”75 In other words, there is a profound difference between norms and rules of formal political authority and how the participants in these transactions perceive such acts. This became particularly clear with regard to the informal cross-border trade on the Congolese side of the border where “legal” trade (which follows the state regulatory framework by paying the necessary taxes) is strongly held to be illegitimate by the local population. Although the activities of the FAPC rebels were illegal (they were smuggling goods in and out of the country and were using their monopoly of violence to protect their activities), their taxation measures were considered to be legitimate because their low taxation rates reduced market prices. Moreover, the FAPC invested some of its profits into the area through its “development fund,” for example by constructing a football stadium and helping to finance the local university. Although relatively minimal, these investments were perceived to be better than those of the national state. According to a local taxi driver: “During Jérome’s time, the border was finally profiting us!”76 On the Ugandan side of the border, these “intermediate” social actors have a long history of participating in the informal trade and in manipulating borders. At first, the informal economy was clearly a sign of disengagement of the state (particularly under Idi Amin). The increased presence of the state in this area and its efforts to regulate informal trade had a double effect. On the one hand, the informal economy had flourished in response to an absent and violent state during the 1970s and 1980s. Afterward, increased state engagement during the 1990s and from 2000 onwards made conditions much more difficult for many traders and pushed out a considerable number of them. And yet, the increased state presence did not necessarily lead to an increased institutionalization of law and order, but has instead led to a deepening of informal trade practices for the remaining powerful traders (tycoons) having the necessary connections to state

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officials. This cooperation has led to a different regulatory authority, which allows these tycoons to monopolize large-scale informal trade. Depending on which regulatory framework a commodity is in, it risks being confiscated or not. For example, commodities smuggled by the tycoons across borders receive protection from a number of state officials and therefore acquire de facto legality. In other words, legality and illegality are blurred concepts when one analyzes “real governance” on the ground, since they only refer to the state regulatory framework and do not take into account other regulatory mechanisms at play.77 From a historical perspective, a similar reasoning can be made, as similar commodities smuggled at different periods in time achieve a different status. For example, because of the weakness of the state regulatory framework until the 1990s, it was much easier to smuggle contraband commodities across borders. Although they were illegal, the risk of confiscation was relatively limited. A similar situation is in place on the Congolese side of the border, where regional smuggling networks persist. These “tightly knit” smuggling networks came into existence during the war, but relied strongly on preexisting regional trading networks. The war served further to entrench these trading networks, which continued after the formal end of the conflict. This not only shows the large continuity of peace-war-peace economies; it also shows the multitude of actors involved in regulating informal trade. The fact that the rebels left the territory and were replaced by the state did not automatically mean that the state became the final regulatory authority. Instead, the alternative regulatory framework continued to exist with the involvement of a multitude of actors, including the state and former rebels.

CONCLUSION The informal economy plays an important role in sub-Saharan Africa, also in the country of Uganda. The collapse of the state and “formal” economy under the regime of Idi Amin, combined with the economic crisis of the 1970s, led to the emergence of the informal economy. In this general context, the population organized a system of economic development outside of formal institutions. The informal economy then gained more visibility in the 1980s, and became consolidated in the 1990s.78 This does not mean that the informal economy is a “recent” phenomenon. Looking at the Ugandan-Congolese border region showed how informal economic activities have clear precolonial and colonial rules: the population along these borders has always manipulated the border. The informal economy plays an important



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role in the survival of the population; as stated in the introduction, 43.1 percent of the Ugandan GDP is estimated to belong to the informal economy.79 With regard to Congo, the work of Janet MacGaffey has shown how the informal economy at the same time allowed the survival of large parts of the population who had no formal employment or income, and the development of a middle class outside of the state system.80 Notwithstanding the importance of the informal economy, it is often approached negatively: because it avoids state control, it is considered to be unregulated. This chapter has shown how the informal economy is not necessarily unregulated, characterized by the absence of the state. Instead, it has shown a plurality of regulatory frameworks at play, in which the state and intermediate actors play different roles. The pluralization of regulatory frameworks is particularly prominent in borderlands and is not static: instead, it is product of ongoing power struggles between these different actors. The result of these power struggles is never final, and may ultimately alter the balance of forces and even reverse them.81 In conclusion, the informal economy cannot be seen as a manifestation of an a priori disengagement from or engagement with the state. Instead, it is a constantly fluctuating and evolving process in which various forms of state engagement and disengagement are possible. This leads to different figurations in which the state and its representatives play different roles. Sometimes these perform as powerful actors, who on the one hand implement a state regulatory framework that regulates (cross-border) trade, but who may on the other hand create exceptions to this, by determining access to the most profitable parts of the informal economy from which they themselves directly profit. The Congolese side of the border shows a different situation, as that state is not powerful enough to impose its regulatory framework, but instead must negotiate with intermediate actors, that is, the trading networks. At the same time, a number of smuggling networks that were in place during the war continue in place and state officials play only a peripheral role in regulating this trade. In other words, the Uganda-Congo borderlands show how the state and its representatives can play different roles in different regulatory frameworks, but how they are not always the most powerful actors to regulate the trading activities at stake. In sum, there is a difference between the construction of law, which is a reflection of the power relationships at stake and in which “ruling elites label, reify and punish as criminal those interactions that counter their interest,” and the actual implementation of the law, which is a different matter because power to make laws does not necessarily translate into power to implement them.82

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NOTES 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Pennsylvania, 2000). 2. Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic (February 1994). 3. Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ, 2004). 4. Kate Meagher, Identity Economics: Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria (Suffolk, 2010), 14. 5. Friedrich Schneider, “Size and Measurement of the Informal Economy in 110 Countries around the World.” Paper presented at a Workshop of Australian National Tax Centre, ANU, Canberra, Australia, 17 July 2002: 6. 6. Uganda Bureau of Statistics, National Household Survey 2009/10 (Kampala, 2010). 7. Uganda Bureau of Statistics, The Informal Cross Border Trade Survey Report 2008 (Kampala, 2009). 8. Simon Musasizi, “New Plan for Informal Cross-border Trade,” The Observer, 17 February 2011. 9. Kate Meagher, “Informality Matters: Popular Economic Governance and Institutional Exclusion in Nigeria.” Presentation in St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 11–12 January 2008. Unpublished paper. 10. Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, “World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy,” in The Informal Economy, ed. Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren A. Benton (Baltimore MD, 1989), 12. 11. Martha Alter Chen, “Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Working Paper, no. 46 (2007), 5. 12. Kate Meagher, Identity Economics, 6. M. A. Centeno and Alejandro Portes “The Informal Economy in the Shadow of the State,” in Out of the Shadows, ed. Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Jon Schefner (University Park, PA, 2006), 24. 13. Timothy Raeymaekers, “Protection for Sale? War and the Transformation of Regulation on the Congo-Ugandan Border,” Development and Change 41, no. 4 (2010): 563–87. 14. Field research was conducted in the borderlands between Uganda and Congo from 2005 up to 2011. During this period, interviews were conducted with a wide variety of actors, such as traders, government officials (such as customs officials, security agencies and others), former rebels, the general population (consumers), and so on. The primary site of research was northwestern Uganda or “West Nile” and its most important town, Arua; but research was also conducted in northeastern Congo, and more particularly the border market of Ariwara. 15. Aili Mari Tripp, Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 111; Janet MacGaffey, Entrepreneurs and Parasites. The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire (Cambridge,



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1987); Janet MacGaffey, ed., The Real Economy of Zaire. The Contribution of Smuggling and other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth (London, 1991). 16. Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, “Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no 1 (1987): 121. 17. Kate Meagher, “A Back Door to Globalisation? Structural Adjustment, Globalisation and Transborder Trade in West Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 95 (2003): 57–75. 18. Béatrice Hibou, “The ‘Social Capital’ of the State as an Agent of Deception,” in The Criminalization of the State in Africa, ed. Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou (Oxford, 1999), 81. 19. In the words of Béatrice Hibou: “Every study based on fieldwork shows that, if many commercial networks have in fact prospered since independence, it is partly because of the traders’ relationship with states which have the tangled, complex social roots so characteristic of postcolonial Africa.” Ibid., 80–81. 20. Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, “Introduction: The Making of Illicitness,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things, ed. I. Abraham and W. van Schendel (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 4. 21. Kristof Titeca, “Tycoons and Contraband: Informal Cross-border Trade in North-Western Uganda,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 6 (2012): 47–63. 22. Joel Migdal, State in Society (New York, 2001); Joel Migdal and Klaus Schlichte, “Re-thinking the State” in The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination, ed. K. Schlichte (Burlington, VT, 2005). 23. Migdal, State in Society, 12. 24. According to this approach, the absence of the state is presumed to lead to a “vacuum of authority’ in which the state is nothing more than “a mere geographical expression, a black hole into which a failed polity has fallen.” Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators” in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 21. Cited in: Pierre Englebert and Dennis Tull, “Post-conflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States,” International Security 32, no. 4 (2008): 125. 25. Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier De Sardan, “Local Powers and a Distant State in Rural Central African Republic,” Journal of Modern African Studies 35, no. 3 (1997): 441. 26. Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier De Sardan, “Powers in the Village: Rural Benin between Democratization and Decentralization,” Africa 73, no. 2 (2003): 145–73; Kristof Titeca and Tom De Herdt, “Real Governance beyond the ‘Failed State’: Negotiating the Education Sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),” African Affairs 110, no. 439 (2011): 213–31. 27. Crawford Young, “The End of the Post-colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political Dynamics,” African Affairs 103, no. 410 (2004). 28. Ibid.

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29. Karel Arnaut and Christian Højbjerg, ”Gouvernance et ethnographie en temps de crise,” Politique Africaine 111 (2008): 20. 30. Kevin Clements, Volker Boege, Anne Brown, Wendy Foley, and Anna Nolan, “State Building Reconsidered: The Role of Hybridity in the Formation of Political Order,” Political Science 59, no. 1 (2007): 48. 31. Richard Stren and Mohamed Halfani, “The Cities of Sub-Saharan Africa: From Dependency to Marginality,” in Handbook of Urban Studies, ed. Ronan Paddison (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001), 474, cited in Karen Tranberg Hansen and Mariken Vaa, “Introduction,” in Reconsidering Informality. Perspectives from Urban Africa, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen and Marika Vaa (Uppsala, 2004), 7. 32. Kristof Titeca and Tom De Herdt, ”Regulation, Cross-border Trade and Practical Norms in West Nile, North-western Uganda,” Africa 80, no. 4 (2010): 573–94. 33. Agnès Lambert, “Les commerçants et l’intégration régionale,” in Le Sénégal et ses voisons, ed. Momar-Coumba Diop (Dakar, 1994); Jerôme Coste and Johny Egg, “Commerces frontalier, Politiques Agricoles et Espaces Régionaux en Afrique de l’Ouest,” Les politiques agricoles et leur maîtrise par les acteurs nationaux, ed. Institut de recherches et d’applications des méthodes de développement (Paris, 1992), 111–97. 34. Mark Leopold, “Crossing the Line: 100 Years of the North-West Uganda/South Sudan Border,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 3, no 3 (2009): 464. 35. Kristof Titeca, “The Changing Cross-border Trade Dynamics between North-Western Uganda, North-Eastern Congo and Southern Sudan,” Crisis States Working Paper Series 2 (London, 2009). 36. Mark Leopold, Inside West Nile (Oxford, 2005), 58. 37. Kate Meagher, “The Hidden Economy: Informal and Parallel Trade in Northwestern Uganda,” Review of African Political Economy 47 (1990): 65–66. 38. Leopold, Inside West Nile; Leopold, “Crossing the Line.” 39. Leopold, Inside West Nile, 108–18; Leopold, “Crossing the Line,” 464–68. 40. Robert O. Collins, “Sudan-Uganda Boundary Rectification and the Sudanese Occupation of Madial, 1914,” Uganda Journal 26, no 2 (1962): 140, cited in Leopold, Inside West Nile. 41. Leopold, Inside West Nile. 42. Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid. Emergency Assistance to Refugees (Oxford, 1996). 43. Titeca, “Changing Cross-border Trade Dynamics.” 44. Meagher, “The Hidden Economy,” 66; Titeca, “Changing Cross-border Trade Dynamics.” 45. Robert Gersony, “The Anguish of Northern Uganda,” report submitted to the US Embassy, Kampala, and USAID Mission (Kampala, 1997). 46. Reginald Green, “Magendo in the Political Economy of Uganda,” IDS discussion paper, no. 164 (Brighton, 1981). Gérard Prunier, “Le magendo. Essai sur quelques aspects marginaux des échanges commerciaux en Afrique orientale,” Politique Africaine 9 (1983): 53–62.



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47. Mukohya Vwakyanakazi, “Import and Export in the Second Economy in North Kivu,” in The Real Economy of Zaire, ed. Janet MacGaffey (London/Philadelphia, 1991). 48. Meagher, “The Hidden Economy,” 74–75. 49. Titeca, “Tycoons and Contraband,” 52. 50. Gersony, “The Anguish of Northern Uganda.” 51. Ibid; Jeroen Adam, Bruno de Cordier, Kristof Titeca, and Koen Vlassenroot, “In the Name of the Father? Christian Militantism in Tripura, Northern Uganda, and Ambon,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 11 (2007): 963–83. 52. Titeca, “Tycoons and Contraband.” 53. Interview with ex-Arua boy, Arua, 27 January 2008. 54. Such as the various reports of the United Nations Group of Experts: United Nations, “Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo” (New York: 2001); United Nations Security Council, “Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo” (New York: 2002); Leopold, Inside West Nile, 41. 55. This has been highlighted by several NGO and UN reports. See for example Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold (Human Rights Watch: 1 June 2005). UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 1552 (2004) of 27 July 2004,” 25 January 2005. UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 22 of Security Council Resolution 1596 (2005),” 26 July 2005. 56. Interviews with data traders, government officials, researchers, and journalists, Arua, Ariwara, and Kampala, 2006–2011. For a detailed analysis of these dynamics, cf. Titeca, “Tycoons and Contraband.” 57. Kristof Titeca, “Access to Resources and Predictability in Armed Rebellion: The FAPC’s Short-Lived ‘Monaco’ in Eastern Congo,” Africa Spectrum, no. 2 (2011): 43–70. 58. Alex Veit, “Intervention as Indirect Rule. The Politics of Civil War and Statebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Unpublished PhD dissertation (Humboldt, 2010), 130; Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold, 10. 59. Veit describes FAPC leader Jerome Kakwavu as a “rebel-businessman.” Trade was at the center of the FAPC’s activities. Veit, “Intervention as Indirect Rule,” 130. 60. This “regional complex” was not unique: the RCD-ML, another Congolese rebel group that operated near the Ugandan border, operated similarly. This is described in detail by Timothy Raeymaekers, The Power of Protection. Governance and Transborder Trade on the Congo-Ugandan Frontier, unpublished PhD dissertation (Ghent, 2007). Timothy Raeymaekers, “Protection for Sale? War and the Transformation of Regulation on the Congo-Ugandan Border,” Development and Change 41, no. 4 (2010): 563–87.

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61. Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold. 62. UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 1552 (2004) of 27 July 2004,” § 70; Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold; UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 22 of Security Council Resolution 1596 (2005).” For a more detailed analysis of this rebel movement, cf. Titeca, “Access to Resources.” 63. Interviews with customs officials, Ariwara, 29–31 July 2009; interviews with FEC representatives, Aru and Ariwara, 31 July 2009 and 2 August 2009; and interviews with various traders, Aru/Ariwara, 26 July 2009, 28 July 2009, and 30 July 2009. 64. Interviews with customs officials, Ariwara, 29–31 July 2009 and interview with FEC representatives, 31 July 2009 and 2 August 2009. 65. This was the situation in July 2008. Before, taxes were even lower. Interviews with customs officials, Ariwara, 29–31 July 2009; interview with representatives FEC, 31 July 2009 and 2 August 2009; and interviews with various traders, Aru/Ariwara, 26 July 2009, 28 July 2009, and 30 July 2009. 66. Interviews with government officials, Aru and Ariwara, 27 July 2009, 31 July 2009, and 3 August 2010. 67. Ugandan traders import export goods into the DRC with papers of Congolese (Aru/Ariwara) traders, so that no Ugandan taxes would have to be paid. Ugandan traders then “buy” the goods from these Congolese traders and bring them back into Uganda. However, in reality, these goods are owned by the Ugandan traders; the involvement of the Congolese traders only serves as a cover-up for the smuggling practices of the Ugandan traders, who receive most of the profits. As a Congolese trader summarizes, “The Congolese traders are the form, the Ugandan traders are the content!” (“Les Congolais, c’est la forme; les Ougandais, c’est le fond.”) Interview with Congolese trader, Ariwara, 29 July 2009. 68. Field research, 2005–2010, Arua (Uganda)—Ariwara/Aru (DRC): interviews with Ugandan and Congolese traders, government officials, ex-rebels, civil society representatives, and so on. 69. UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 1552 (2004) of 27 July 2004,” § 70. 70. Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold. UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 1552 (2004) of 27 July 2004.” UN Group of Experts, “Report of the Group of Experts in Accordance with Paragraph 22 of Security Council Resolution 1596 (2005).” Interviews with data traders, government officials, researchers, and journalists, Arua, Ariwara, and Kampala, 2006–2011. 71. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), 169–91. 72. Abraham and Van Schendel, “Introduction.”



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73. Kenneth John Menkhaus “Governance without Government in Somalia: Spoilers, State Building and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31, no. 3 (2006): 74–106. Timothy Raeymaekers, Kenneth John Menkhaus, and Koen Vlassenroot, “State and Non-state Regulation in African Protracted Crises: Governance without Government?” Afrika Focus 21, no. 2 (2008): 9. 74. Raeymaekers, “Protection for Sale?” 576. Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris. Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Oxford/ Bloomington, 2000). 75. Abraham and Van Schendel, “Introduction,” 4. 76. Interview with taxi driver, Ariwara, 2 August 2009. 77. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, “Researching the Practical Norms of Real Governance in Africa,” Discussion Paper 5, Africa, Power, and Politics Programme (London, 2008). 78. Robert Ikoja-Odongo, “A Study of the Information Needs and Uses of the Informal Sector in Uganda: Preliminary Findings,” Library and Information Science Research 1 (2001). 79. Schneider, “Size and Measurement,” 6. 80. Janet MacGaffey, Entrepreneurs and Parasites. The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire (Cambridge, 1987). Janet MacGaffey, ed., The Real Economy of Zaire. The Contribution of Smuggling and Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth (London, 1991). 81. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, eds., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 7. 82. Renate Bridenthal, “Introduction” to this volume.

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Van Schendel, Willem, and Itty Abraham, eds. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington, IN, 2005). Veit, Alex. “Intervention as Indirect Rule. The Politics of Civil War and Statebuilding in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Unpublished PhD dissertation (Humboldt, 2010).

Chapter 8

The Narcobourgeoisie and State Making in Colombia More Coercion, Less Democratic Governance

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This chapter contrasts with Charles Tilly’s (1985) widely cited thesis in which he presented an analogy between state making and organized crime based on his analysis of European history.1 While Tilly’s concern was to explore parallels between the use of violence in the growth of nation-states and in organized crime, this chapter focuses on the direct role of the narcobourgeoisie in the consolidation of the Colombian state itself during the 2000s. I have coined the term narcobourgeoisie to differentiate this faction from the rest of its class, based on the following criteria: (1) the mode by which it extracts surplus value from coca growers and the labor that is involved in the processing of coca into cocaine; (2) the profits that it draws from the commercialization and marketing of its commodity; (3) its peculiar position between legality and illegality; and finally (4) the centrality of violence to organizing its business: from the extraction of surplus value to the enforcement of contracts and state co-optation.2 I trace the historical trajectory of the relationship between organized crime and the state and the conditions and causes that led to their coexistence, conflict, alliance, and finally symbiosis. My goal is to construct core aspects of Colombia’s historical processes of state making that culminated in the 2000s in the emergence of a consolidated state unequaled in the country’s history. However, the regime type of this consolidated state has been determined by a host of social class forces including organized criminal 196



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groups that played a pivotal role, chiefly the narcobourgeoisie and its private armies. The nature of the emerging regime can be understood by asking two important questions: why did the state facilitate the legitimization of the incipient narcobourgoisie’s money, that is, accept its incorporation into the dominant classes, and how did this legitimization contribute to the state’s cooptation by the legitimated narcobourgeoisie? The answer to the second question will also shed light on the evolution of the class consciousness of the narcobourgoisie and the historical conditions that allowed it to exercise hegemony—in the Gramscian sense—within its class group.3 This chapter is organized into five main sections. The first provides a brief history of the context that allowed the onset of the illegal economy. It sheds some light on contraband activities since colonial times and how some of the same routes were used in more recent times. The second section discusses the changing political economy of crime and the class ascendance of the narcobourgeoisie. This section is composed of three subsections. The first subsection explores the economic crisis of the 1970s during which narcotrafficking surged. The second subsection discusses how state policies wittingly and unwittingly contributed to such ascendance. The third subsection analyzes the narcobourgeoisie’s articulation of their role, agency, and class interests. Section three sheds light on the evolution of the relationship between the narcobourgeoisie and the paramilitary groups housed under a federation of right-wing militias known as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC). Section four tackles the bottom-up co-optation strategy that the AUC has followed since the 1990s and evaluates its success. It is divided into two subsections. The first draws a distinction between the old and the new caudillos (regional feudal-like bosses) represented by the narcobourgeoisie. The second focuses on the AUC co-optation of the state security sector. Finally, the fifth and last section assesses the police state that emerged from the private armies of organized crime and its impact on governance during Uribe’s regime (2002–2010). Under the rubric of organized crime two groups are identified: smugglers and narcotraffickers. The smugglers were dominant during colonial times and for most of the postcolonial period until the 1970s, when marijuana emerged to dominate the political economy of crime and ushered in the rise of narcotrafficking. This new era of narcotrafficking known as “la Bonanza Marimbera” was supplanted in the 1980s by cocaine, which had a higher return value based on weight and volume and which has since dominated the political economy of crime and violence. Hence narcotraffickers have come to dominate the political economy of crime while other smugglers and marijuana traders either merged into the same network or into parallel and competing networks all run by narcotraffickers. Narcotrafficking has

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become dominant as an economic activity due to lucrative profits estimated at $4 billion per year in the early 2000s, the equivalent of about 4 percent of the late-1990s GNP.4 A brief historical background provides the wider context and conditions that facilitated the emergence of criminal organizations in Colombia.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Spanish colonial mercantile policies developed since the sixteenth century restricted trade between the colonies and international markets. Spain attempted to monopolize trade with its colonies by enforcing itself as a conduit through which all trade must be conducted although its goods were of inferior quality and more expensive than those of its Dutch, French, and English competitors.5 This policy and the poorer quality of commodities had a number of unintended and intended consequences. One limited the development of intraregional markets and the second—most relevant to this article—provided a market and incentive for contraband with commodities from Spain’s competitors since Spain was unable to meet increasing demand in its colonies.6 This situation was compounded by the inability of the Spanish colonial administration to control trade contraband. Combined with increasing market demand in the seventeenth century, this allowed smugglers to take hold of the Caribbean coast of Colombia, particularly the ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta. The most striking aspect of this history is that the indigenous population of Santa Marta-Cartagena and La Guajira, which had resisted Spanish colonial rule and whose territories had not been conquered, benefited from this activity and became safe havens for contrabandists. Sanders captures the essence of the relationship: “Not the native hindered Spanish counter-contraband measures by his presence, but he took active part in the commerce himself, serving as a spy, guard, and escort for the trader.”7 The inhospitable terrain and insufficient military resources at the disposal of the colonial authorities in Cartagena and Santa Marta made it easier for contrabandists and their Indian collaborators to escape without detection. The dilemma of colonial rule in the eighteenth century was that “counter-contraband was merely one of the many essential expenditures and suffered like all the others from economic measures which colonial administrators were forced to exercise.”8 For the colonial administrators this problem was compounded when Spanish America, the main supplier of capital, suffered a crippling financial deficit. These deficiencies of colonial rule not only exacerbated the contraband problem and encouraged Indian groups



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to challenge colonial power. They also enticed runaway slaves to join forces with the indigenous in illegal trade along the Cartagena coast.9 La Guajira, where state authority has been nonexistent since colonial times, became a territory of contrabandists and adventurers, thus winning the title of “Colombian Sicily.”10 Ironically, three centuries later these same areas and some of the indigenous population particularly in Santa Marta and La Guajira furnish the same services to a host of new mutations of illicit trade ranging from marijuana and cocaine alongside electronics, tobacco, firearms, and munitions. The political economy of crime shaped by smuggling built an internal market that reached the interior through the so-called San Andresitos, a euphemism for San Andres, one of the entry ports on the coast. In San Andresitos smugglers market their products and consolidate their enterprises to this day. The flourishing and further development of smuggling from colonial times up to the present has been due the inability and/or the complicity of the colonial and postcolonial state’s control mechanisms and the ease of circumventing and corrupting these controls.

THE CHANGING POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CRIME AND THE ASCENDANCE OF THE NARCOBOURGEOISIE Besides the long history of contraband and lack of policing on Colombia’s coast, three additional factors contributed to the emergence and eventual consolidation of the narco economy of the late twentieth century. One was the severe crisis that hit traditional cash crops in regions that then became centers of narco-crops and narcotrafficking organizations. The second was the 1967 government policy of Lleras Restrepo in restricting imports and controlling the exchange markets, which created more incentives for contraband. The third was the open policy of the Ventanilla Siniestra (Evil Window) of the governments of Alfonso Lopez Michelsen (1974–1978) and Cesar Turbay Ayala (1978–1982) to allow the repatriation of dollars without proof of their origin or source. Amnesty laws introduced during Verigilio Barco’s government (1986–1990) complemented the Ventanilla Siniestra.

The 1970s Economic Crisis The 1970s economic crisis, or what some economist called the “crisis of basic products,” and ascendance of the marijuana economy and other contrabands created a new bourgeois faction made up of individuals associated

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with the illegal economy chiefly in regions most affected by the crisis, namely, the Caribbean Coast, Antioquia, and the Valle del Cauca.11 Plantations of marijuana for local consumption had existed in some regions in Colombia such as Santa Marta since the 1920s and had expanded into several other departments years before the surge of the Santa Marta golden variant. Its international commercialization did not start until the 1960s and early 1970s when the mafias from the United States discovered the commercial value of the Santa Marta golden. Consequently, US narcotraffickers helped to mechanize and control the export, providing an incentive for its commercial expansion into the departments of La Guajira, Magdalena, and Cesar.12 However, this marijuana expansion came in the wake of a severe economic crisis that hit the traditional cash crops of cotton in La Guajira, Cesar, and Magdalena; sugar in the Valle del Cauca; the textile industries in Antioquia; and the emerald mining industry in Boyacá. The crisis of the cotton and textile industries was due to the increased contraband of cheaper synthetic products, while that of sugar was due to an international quota system that circumscribed its exportation. The emerald crisis of Boyacá was largely caused by a combination of technical extraction problems and violent competition among entrepreneurs that led to militarization of the area, a decline in production, and a significant loss of income and jobs. In the Bucaramanga-Cucuta region the devaluation of Venezuela’s currency affected the bordering departments’ trade, thus exacerbating the contrabanding of cheaper products.13 As a result of these combined crises, all these regions became important centers for the development and consolidation of the illegal economy and narcotrafficking. By 1974, according to José Ignacio Lara, the chief of intelligence in the Guajira, circa 80 percent of farmers cultivated marijuana, which raised rural wages sixfold.14 Such a dramatic increase ushered in the so-called Bonanza Marimbera, which lasted from 1974 until 1980. During this phase US narcotraffickers controlled trafficking and distribution while Colombians were mainly producers. A few years later, in the mid-1980s, this division of labor changed with the inception of coca, which local organized narcotraffickers commanded and commercialized for global markets.15 The short-lived Bonanza Marimbera created a new faction within the bourgeois class that accumulated fortunes through the exploitation and commercialization of marijuana. This sudden ascendance of individuals from poor or petty bourgeois class backgrounds changed the social structure in a number of municipalities of La Guajira, Cesar, and Middle Magdalena. The resulting social tensions led a number of the traditional bourgeois families to migrate to



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Bogota, Barranquilla, and Valledupar to avoid mingling with their newly rich former drivers, peons, and workers.16 The bonanza also created inflationary pressures due to the sudden influx of $1.6 billion out of a total $2.4 billion illegal economy that consisted of other narcotics and contraband, and made up 8.5 percent of the $28 billion GDP in 1979.17 The inflation in turn increased demand for luxury goods and put local production, priced in pesos, at a disadvantage. These are typical problems stemming from the so-called Dutch Disease.18 This extra flow of liquid assets led to a burgeoning of illegal exchange houses including in-home garages (bancos de garajes). I believe this period marked the beginning of a transformative process by which inflation shifted the country’s patterns of investment away from the production sectors into services, extraction of raw materials, and real estate, that is, geared the economy toward an extractive-speculative-rentier mode. This is shown by Kalmanovitz, a leading Colombian economist, who estimated that in 1979 foreign capital investments in the amount of $600 million were attracted to local banks by high interest rates, yet were withdrawn in 1980 after devaluation of the peso created a deficit in the legal balance of payments. These moneys, along with the proceeds of marijuana, cocaine (then incipient), contraband, and the cash returns of coffee, helped to finance a significant increase in the imports of manufactured goods.19 This in turn undermined national production (manufacturing and agriculture except coffee) and propelled a neoliberal economic model of development that rested on rentier capital along with the export of a few cash crops and the extraction of oil and minerals. In the 1990s, this model was further consolidated to become the dominant economic mode for investment and accumulation that it is now.

Restricting Imports and the Ventanilla Seniestra Carlos Lleras Restrepo, president of Colombia 1966–1970, had introduced policies to restrict imports as well as to control the influx of dollars by decreeing a raise in the exchange rate in 1967. These policies led to unforeseen but important consequences like an increase in the contrabanding of products subjected to new restrictions and tariffs such as textiles, electronics, alcohol, and tobacco. The weakness of state policing gave contrabandists in Cartagena, Santa Marta, and Barranquilla alongside Turbo and Medellín the opportunity to expand their trade. During 1968–1970 the contrabandists of La Guajira seem to have established contact with US narcotraffickers in

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Colón, Panama, where they probably furnished the logistics and network for what was to come.20 After Carlos Lleras, Colombia entered a new phase with the legalization of illegal proceeds beginning with the Ventanilla Siniestra. Inaugurated by the government of Alfonso Lopez Michelsen (1974–1978) the Evil Window allowed the deposit of US dollars in Colombia’s central bank without declaration of their origin or source, thus legalizing the proceeds of contrabanding—including those of coffee beans—along with narcodollars. In 1980 a former banker, Umana de Brigard, noted that the economic imbalance created by the $2.4 billion “illegal economy” was further exacerbated by the central bank that had bought about $800 million and emitted the equivalent of $17.5 billion (35 billion pesos), thus distorting the allocation of resources through increased inflation. This banking policy was maintained throughout the following governments of Turbay (1978–1982) and Barco (1986–1990). By 1978, the fast growth of cocaine trafficking had given the illegal economy a wider impact on overall monetary policy of the state and on the country’s macroeconomy. The state’s facilitation may be explained by three main factors. First, it lacked the capacity to control and police the increase in narcotrafficking; second and more importantly, it lacked a financial regulatory system to control and monitor money laundering operations; and third, policy makers opted to incorporate illegal dollars into the financial system in order to exercise some control over exchange rates and to mitigate the distortion of a parallel exchange system of underpriced dollars. These measures contributed to strengthening the emerging narcobourgeoisie as a class faction in economic terms, but the articulation of its interests was neither unilinear nor mechanical. Rather, it took a dialectical form in which several factors and contradictory social forces interacted. The nuances of this complex process go beyond this discussion, but the major contributing factors that shaped a new consciousness can be described.

From a Class Faction “of Itself” to “for Itself” The articulation of class interests that ultimately transcended the diverse, narrow, and conflicting interests of the particular leaderships of narcotraffickers developed through a complex and violent process involving three main groups: the Medellín Cartel, the Cali Cartel, and the Gacha group. However, these followed the same oligopolistic impulse as free market capitalism in which competition among many business enterprises ends with just a few controlling the market. The coca economy supplanted marijuana,



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absorbed some of its capital and trafficking routes, and further advanced the business by controlling the international market. Finally three groups dominated, each articulated along different socioeconomic conditions, social class configurations, investment patterns, and political tactics. They were the Medellín Cartel, the Cali Cartel, and the Rodriguez Gacha Cartel centered in the country’s central regions of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Putumayo. The Medellín Cartel drew its leadership and power base from the lower sectors of the urban petty bourgeoisie and the “lumpen” poor mostly of recent peasant origins of Medellín’s shanty towns. The Cali Cartel’s leadership came mainly from the urban middle and upper middle class and its support base from an urban petty bourgeoisie. Rodriguez Gacha’s group also drew on rural areas and peasants such as himself. These class affinities between the Medellín Cartel and the Gacha group may have facilitated their eventual fusion while maintaining their bloody competitive relationship with the Cali Cartel. From the outset, the Medellín and Gacha groups held similar political views about conservatism, rural cultural traits, and economic interests. When it came to co-opting the state’s security and judicial institutions, all employed similar methods of coercion and corruption but differed in political tactics. The tactics of the Medellín Cartel may explain the violent confrontation between it and sectors of the dominant classes and their supporters within the political elite. Pablo Escobar, with the support of Gacha and others, sought to enter the political arena by launching a political movement, Civismo en Marcha (Civic-Mindedness on the March), which enabled him in 1982 to gain a congressional seat as a deputy representative to Jairo Ortega Ramirez. However, Escobar’s political ambitions were frustrated when his relationship with the political elite deteriorated in the wake of the 1986 assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. The open war that followed between the Medellín Cartel and sectors of the dominant classes and segments of the state (chiefly its judicial branch) ended only in 1993 with Escobar’s death. Many causes led to the fallout. One was the increasing pressure of the United States on the Colombian government and its political elite to fight drug trafficking and to extradite those under investigation. Another was that sectors of the dominant classes, particularly in Antioquia, viewed the political ambitions and ascendance of the Medellín Cartel as a menace to their political hegemony. In contrast, the Cali Cartel followed a more subtle strategy of buying political influence instead of directly acquiring office. This strategy culminated in its funding the presidential campaign of Ernesto Samper Pisano, elected in 1994. The investigation of the Cali Cartel’s funding led to the

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indictment of Samper’s campaign manager and then of Defense Minister Fernando Botero. The resulting “8000 Process,” which implicated several members of parliament, revealed widespread corruption. In fact, Samper himself had been accused before of receiving narcodollars when he was the campaign manager of presidential candidate Lopez Michelsen in his unsuccessful 1982 second bid for the presidency. In his turn, Carlos Lehder Rivas, a main narcotrafficker and partner of the Medellín Cartel operating in the coffee region of Risaralda, launched the Movimiento Latino Nacional (MLN) (Latin National Movement). At its peak, the MLN claimed ten thousand sympathizers in the coffee regions, especially in Quindío.21 The MLN’s major objective was to repeal the extradition treaty with the United States signed in 1979, but within a few years Lehder Rivas was extradited to the United States under its terms and convicted on drug trafficking charges in 1988. As early as 1983, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, then minister of justice (assassinated in April 1984 by the Medellín Cartel), denounced various members of congress for receiving financial support from narcotraffickers. Representatives singled out included two from La Guajira, two from the Magdalena, one from the Atlantic, one from Córdoba, and one from Antioquia.22 Most of these departments were historically linked with contrabanding activities and so also had become hotbeds of the narcobourgeoisie’s investments and political activity. These political attempts to break into the political establishment were further developed by the Castaños brothers (Fidel, Vicente, and Carlos), at first close associates of Escobar and then his bitter rivals and founders of the PEPES (Persecuted by Pablo Escobar). The Castaños, with the help of the army, state intelligence services, narcotraffickers, and cattle ranchers, founded the paramilitary United Autodefences of Córdoba and Uraba. In 1997 this organization allied with a host of other armed militias belonging to narcotraffickers, cattle ranchers, and large landowners to expand into most of Colombia. In sum: the process of political articulation of the narcobourgeoisie took place in two main phases on a continuum of alternating leaders. During the first phase, 1978–1993, their political demands focused on rejecting the treaty of extradition to the United States and participating in local and national power structures.23 The death and capture of the main leaders ushered in the second phase, in the late 1990s, when new leadership expanded the groups’ political objectives with a matching expansive army. The new leaders envisaged a more encompassing political role by supporting the neoliberal political economy and its power structures and by constituting itself as a countervailing political, ideological, and military force against that of the leftist armed insurgency and other democratic forces.24



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THE NARCOBOURGEOISIE AND THE AUC The narcobourgeoisie played an important role in founding the paramilitaries, which it used as an instrument for its own political articulation and to aggregate the interests of the dominant classes, the political elite, and foreign actors. Since the inception of paramilitaries in the 1980s, the interest articulation of the narcobourgeoisie and its course of action—with its organizational vehicle, the paramilitaries—has taken several turns and involved multiple actors including state’s agents and members of the dominant classes, chiefly cattle ranchers, large landowners, agribusiness groups, regional political elites, and multinational corporations. Here I focus on the synthesis of the dialectical relationship that allowed the narcobourgeoisie to articulate a national political program and to form an organizational instrument, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), to realize it. The relationship between the first paramilitary group and the narcotraffickers can be traced to Puerto Boyacá in the Middle Magdalena in a region where the insurgencies Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN, National Liberation Army) had an active and strong presence. Circa 1983, ACDEGAM (a cattle ranching interest group)25 and the commanders of the Barbula battalion of the Colombian army along with right-wing politicians decided to build a private army as a counterinsurgency measure against FARC, which had imposed protection rents on cattle ranchers and large landowners.26 In 1985 this group was joined by Gacha who by then had become part of the Medellín Cartel and whose interests also were affected by the taxes that FARC imposed on his trafficking and properties. By 1985, Gacha had acquired thousands of hectares of land in the Middle Magdalena, the Eastern Plains, and Rionegro, all of which were areas of guerrilla influence. The control by the Medellín Cartel of the Puerto Boyacá paramilitary had allowed the latter group to tap into vast financial resources and thus to expand its opportunities, which included hiring international mercenaries like the Israeli security company Spearhead, run by retired Israeli Defense Force colonel Yair Klein, to train the Boyacá paramilitaries in counterinsurgency tactics.27 This led to a higher level of professionalization and lethal power of the right-wing paramilitaries and also marked the beginning of a relationship between the narcobourgoisie and the incipient paramilitaries in Puerto Boyacá. In the early 1980s another paramilitary group was formed in Uraba with the name of Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba and Urabá (Peasant

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Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá, ACCU) established by the Castaños brothers with the support of the Colombian Army and cattle ranches. By 1986, the ACCU fighting force did not exceed 100 men acting mostly as scouts to military units and carrying out assassinations of leftist activists. These two nuclei in Puerto Boyacá and Uraba formed the foundation of what later became the most formidable counterinsurgent force in Latin America’s history. The process of forming this reactionary force outlived some of its initial protagonists such as Gacha and Escobar, and in a few years the narcobourgeoisie succeeded in assuming the helm of the leadership of this expansive war machine. This was noted after 1997 when a confederation of the different right-wing and narcotrafficking militias joined forces under the organizational umbrella of the AUC. Cases in point: Carlos Mario Jiménez, alias Javier Montañez and known as Macaco; Diego Murillo (Don Berna); los Mellizos; Ramiro “Cuco” Vanoy; and El Tuso were all effectively remnants of the old cartels who went on to join forces with the AUC. In a few years Macaco, who joined the AUC in 1998, had become the strongest man in the AUC’s organizational structure, commanding more than 5,500 fighters, or 50 percent of the effective combat force of the AUC. Vanoy, commander of the Bloque Minero, joined the paramilitaries in 1990 and had about 2,575 fighters, which was the second largest contingent, followed by the Bloque Norte commanded by Jorge 40, who had about 2,040 fighters under his command.28 However, in the case of the latter there is no evidence that he was involved in narcotrafficking before becoming involved with the AUC, only afterward. Don Berna, the chief of the Bloque Cacique Nutibara, commanded about 1,000 fighters. More important, however, is his crucial financial role within the AUC. Within the ranks of the AUC, leaders like Carlos Castaño and Rodrigo Franco wanted the narcobourgeoisie’s money while maintaining political autonomy. Both were killed by the narcobourgeoisie once it had secured the leadership of the AUC. Thus the symbiotic relationship that had started in Puerto Boyacá ended in co-optation by the late 1990s with the emergence of the AUC. The ACCU force by the mid-1990s, a couple of years before the nationwide AUC was formed, had an army of 4,000 to 5,000 fighters; by the end of the decade that figure had reached 8,000 combatants. In 2005 it had increased its fighting power to 11,000 fighters supported by 18,000 logistics personnel. Sustaining such a war machine required significant resources, around $12 million a month just for salaries.29 What has helped the AUC’s exponential expansion is its appropriation of more than 40 percent of the drug economy made possible by the power vacuum that



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attended the dismantling of the Medellín Cartel in 1993, followed by the capture of the Rodriguez brothers, which brought the Cali Cartel to an end in 1995. 30 The AUC, alongside a host of small cartels, stepped in to fill the vacuum. The narcobourgeoisie, in commanding leadership of the AUC, then spearheaded a coalition of class and political forces at the national level— with the tacit or unwitting support of the United States—strong enough to create a right-wing counterrevolution, which not only helped to bring its representative Alvaro Uribe to power in 2002, but also was momentous enough to amend the constitution that allowed him a successful run for a second term. This was coupled with a relentless effort to co-opt other state institutions. Consequently, the narcobourgeoisie as a class faction proved its leadership and ability to capitalize on a host of factors: acts committed by the insurgency (such the killing of civilians in crossfire operation and kidnapping) and the general malaise of the urban middle classes about the protracted armed conflict. This condition was in part generated by the relative weakness of the working-class organizations (due to the overall decline of industrialization and the increasing importance of services, which absorbed 57 percent of labor) and by the inability of leftist political groups to present a viable alternative that could transcend the dominant neoliberal dogmas and find solid grounds to resolve the armed conflict. The 2002 and 2010 parliamentary elections reflected the emergence of a social and political configuration based on the formidable force of the AUC in addition to the economic and political weight of the narcobourgeoisie in various municipalities and departments on the Caribbean coast, on the plains, and in the center. More important, the narcobourgeoisie through its deployment of violence and capital brought about a profound transformation in the rural economy. It cemented a rentier mode of capital accumulation by facilitating and protecting the investments of multinational corporations such as Chiquita, BP (formerly British Petroleum), OXY (Occidental Petroleum Corporation), Anglo Gold Ashanti, and Drummond as well as land speculation and agribusinesses.31 These transformations in the political economy that the narcobourgeoisie helped to realize were in tune with neoliberal dogmas embraced by the state since the 1980s. More importantly, foreign investments in their areas of operation led to skyrocketing land prices that offered new, lucrative opportunities for the narcobourgeoisie and other investors.32 Hence, the narcobourgeoisie’s role transcended its narrow factional interests to benefit other sectors of the dominant classes alongside foreign capital, thus satisfying the Gramscian concept of hegemony, that is, leadership of its class group.33

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THE AUC BOTTOM-UP CO-OPTATION: FROM LOCAL POWERS TO THE STATE Old and New Caudillos The narcobourgeoisie in its areas of influence co-opted the leadership of both the liberal and conservative parties and created new leaders as well. By arranging local political coups in municipalities and departments, they moved to control the national congress through a logical bottom-up progression of cooptation. For example in Sucre, 35 politicians were implicated in connection with the narcobourgeoisie: 8 former mayors, 7 ex-council members, 1 ex-deputy, 3 ex-governors, 3 ex-representatives, 3 representatives in the House, and 3 senators elected for the 2006–2010, plus 2 mayors and 5 council members elected in 2007. Sucre stands out because prominent political bosses such as Alvaro Garcia (ex-senator) and Salvador Arana (ex-governor) and other members of the political elite formed part of the narco-paramilitary command structures whereas in other departments of heavy narco-paramilitary influence the political elite became subservient because it either owed its political ascendance to or remained in power due to the political and financial support provided by the narcobourgeoisie.34 The latest tally indicates that at least 166 mayors and 12 governors plus 58 council members, 13 departmental deputies, and more than 90 senators and representatives of the 2006 congress (about 30 percent of the total) were implicated in the so called para-politica, that is, of having links with the AUC and other narco-paramilitary organizations. An estimated one in three politicians, from the municipal level to the congress, has some connection to the narcobourgeoisie.35 These advances made by the narcobourgeoisie in co-opting state institutions soon were reflected in policy making in critical areas such as land laws, including lands usurped by extralegal and violent means. Thus, Law 1152 of Rural Development promulgated in 2007 and Law 1182 of 2008 on Land Titling were designed by politicians later investigated for their links to the narco-paramilitaries. Both laws legalized usurped lands that had been transferred to third parties, leaving in legal limbo the future of more than three million peasants who were dispossessed of about 5.5 million hectares of their farmlands in the previous two decades.36

The AUC and the Security Establishment Another important level is the relationship between law enforcement agencies and organized crime in general including narcotraffickers. The social



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base of Colombia’s military (police and armed forces) derives predominantly from rural and small cities, and its leaders, like those of La Violencia and in colonial times, were granted land for their allegiance to the political bosses—mostly large landowners—of the warring parties. This in effect has created a class affinity between segments of the military hierarchy and large landowners. A sector within the high brass became “middle” hacendados.37 This relationship between large landowners and the military has generated a “social constellation of supportive latifundia” that characterizes many departments such as Antioquia, Meta, Caquetá, Magdalena, Bolivar, Sucre, Córdoba, and Cesar.38 It provided the social foundation for the ties that bind the military and the narcobourgeoisie, which became one of the main landowners in these departments and others.39 By the end of the 1990s, that is, in ten years, the narcobourgeoisie as a class faction may have become the largest landholding group with circa 4 to 6 million hectares of the country’s most fertile land, representing roughly 8 percent to 11 percent of the total agricultural land.40 By now, knowing that narcodollars are continuously flowing and the purchase of land continues to be a favorite for money-laundering operations, these land acquisitions may plausibly have doubled to about 20 percent of the total agricultural land. These sizable possessions were largely obtained by massacres and intimidation of tens of thousands (there is no accurate figure yet) and the displacement of circa three million of mostly poor and subsistence peasants. This class-based genocide gave the narcobourgeoisie a leading role in the consolidation of a rural political economy largely based on rentier capitalism, that is land speculation; cattle ranching; the export of a few crops such as palm oil, cut flowers, and the traditional coffee exports; and finally minerals such as oil, coal, gold, and emeralds. All this has been at the expense of food production, which has declined in the last two decades. Even more important, military officers and commanders operating in these areas of economic activity and expansion remain, for the most part, supportive of agribusiness.41 While no accurate assessment can yet be made as to the extent and number of individuals in the armed forces compromised by ties to the narcobourgeoisie, a plausible estimate counts thousands of officers at different ranks including a confirmed dozen generals. According to the national police inspector, José Roberto León Riaño, about 8,000 members of the police force are being investigated for corruption, abuse of authority, and, of course, collaboration with paramilitary groups. He added that in 2006 alone 30,000 members of the police force or roughly one out of five police were under investigation.42 The Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the administrative security apparatus, is not any better. Its new director, Felipe Muñoz,

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called for its dissolution because of the high degree of penetration by the narco-paramilitaries. It is almost entirely corrupted from within, including by “Cuchillo,” one of the commanders of the emerging groups of paramilitaries. According to Muňoz, about 116 agents at all levels of the DAS are being investigated for links to narco-paramilitaries, in addition to 38 agents already convicted.43 DAS activities in several departments have been suspended because most of their officials were allegedly connected to paramilitary groups.44

THE CONSOLIDATION OF WHAT STATE? WHAT REGIME? I have shown that the narcobourgeoisie followed a two-pronged strategy. One was a concerted effort to co-opt state institutions such as the army, intelligence service, and last but not least, the congress, where about ninety of its members are currently being investigated by the Supreme Court for alleged links to narcotraffickers. The Supreme Court is the only state institution that so far shows no signs of narcobourgeois penetration. Lower courts and prosecutors have been more susceptible to intimidation and co-optation since they were on the front lines of narcotrafficking organizations that directly affected their modus operandi, investments, and registration of usurped properties. The second strategy targeted the social base of the insurgency and led to the murder of tens of thousands civilians and the displacement of millions of mostly poor peasants. These strategies resulted in a weaker insurgency and a state stronger than ever, but compromised by the salient representation of criminal organizations in almost all its institutions. Even more important is the regime type that has emerged, namely, a police state. The alarming growth of the military—from a force of 170,000 in the late 1990s to circa 429,000 soldiers and policemen in 2010 as well as thousands of informants’ networks, forest guards, and peasant-soldiers—generated a series of institutional and political changes that have affected power relations between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. In Colombia, as in most of Latin America, the executive has been the most powerful branch of government due to the colonial legacy and the power structures engendered in the aftermath of the civil wars of the nineteenth century. Consequently, strengthening the executive only exacerbated the imbalance and aggravated institutional erosion. Of particular importance is the so-called trains’ collision between the executive and the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, when the congress rubber-stamped executive actions under President Uribe’s regime (2002–2010)



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many of whose party had been supported, funded, and handpicked by the narcobourgeoisie. It is premature to assess the full damage, but the political scars are evident and certainly will require a rigorous revisit in the near future. For now, suffice it to say that the Supreme Court has struggled to maintain the appearance of electoral democracy. But that has not hindered the creation of an inflated security apparatus (networks of informants, forest guards) some of which is administered by the executive with no civilian oversight. That is to say, Colombia may have thousands of individuals on the payroll of discretionary funds managed by the president and his defense minister without transparency and accountability. This lack of transparency and accountability in managing the security sector has become one of the main legacies of Uribe’s regime, moving Colombia further away from good governing practices. The case of the DAS wiretapping members of the Supreme Court, politicians, and human rights activists barely represents the tip of the iceberg of institutional degradation and increasing authoritarian tendencies of the regime. The AUC has been instrumental in establishing and consolidating the political economy of a police state consistent with the class interests of core sectors of the dominant classes and state technocrats who espouse a neoliberal orthodoxy favoring agribusiness, the extractive sector, land speculation, and finance capital. The realization of such a political economy and mode of capital and wealth accumulation was the product of an incessant, brutal campaign sustained since the 1980s. Last but not least has been the US role in supporting and consolidating the security sector of the state at the expense of other sectors, thus further weakening the instruments of good governance. The $6 billion in mostly military aid that the United States has pumped in since 2002 has been instrumental in the creation of a bloated security apparatus that overlooks penetration by narcotraffickers and contributes to the colossal institutional erosion of the last decade. The real dilemma of Colombia is that the enhancement of such a leviathan continues while the insurgency has been weakened. The military with its expanded constituency and political economy has generated its own dynamic and lobbying power, which is difficult to dismantle even years after the end of the conflict. The empirical evidence drawn from a large sample of postconflict experiences suggests that the termination of a conflict does not necessarily translate into a decrease in military budgets.45 This means that the distortion in the economic allocation of resources is another far-reaching consequence of the emerging authoritarian and consolidated but co-opted state. In this mode, Colombian criminal groups,

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like most of their global counterparts, attempt to co-opt the entire state, particularly its military-judicial-political complex. However, Colombian criminal groups are in the vanguard because of their central role in building the conditions for a police state to the detriment of good governance. This distinctive feature stems from the power of organized crime and its core role via the AUC in the civil war and its ability to construct a power base from the bottom up with very few parallels in the world of the twenty-first century.

NOTES 1. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York, 1985). 2. Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia (Albany, NY, 2002), introduces the term narcobourgeoisie to distinguish this wealthy faction from the remaining bourgeoisie in terms of its social class origins, source of capital accumulation (drug trafficking), illegal activities, and exploitation of labor nationally (production cycle) and internationally (distribution and marketing). The narcobourgeoisie shares with its counterparts a commitment to the capitalist system; its members are neoliberals par excellence. See also Francisco Thoumi, Economía Política y Narcotráfico (Bogotá, 1994). In 1988 the weekly magazine Semana conducted interviews with twenty drug-trafficking bosses from Medellín and discovered that four (20 percent) favored cattle ranching; nine (45 percent), real estate (urban and rural); three (15 percent), commerce; two (10 percent), services; and two (10 percent), construction (http:// www.semana.com/noticias-nacion/capos/24769.aspx). Most drug traffickers opted to invest their laundered money in rentier capitalism, particularly cattle ranching and real estate, which together accounted for 65 percent of their total investments. 3. Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York, 2000), 284–85. 4. Francisco Thoumi, Illegal Drugs, Economy, and Society in the Andes (Washington, DC, 2003), 150. 5. G. Earl Sanders, “Contraband in Spanish America: Handicaps of the Governors in the Indies,” The Americas 34, no. 1 (July 1977): 59–80. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 66. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 68. 10. Dario Betancourt and Martha García, Contrabandistas, Marimberos y Mafiosos: Historia Social de La Mafia Colombiana 1965–1992 (Bogota, 1994), 53.



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11. Jose Antonio Ocampo, Historia Económica de Colombia (Bogota, 1994), 284–86. 12. Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, “Agencia de Noticias,” Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 3 May 2010, 19. 13. Betancourt and García, Contrabandistas, Marimberos y Mafiosos, 45. 14. http://www.verdadabierta.com/narcotrafico-periodo1. 15. Betancourt and García, Contrabandistas, Marimberos y Mafiosos, 45. 16. Ibid., 53. 17. http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/colombia/libros/jinetes/cap7.html. 18. Dutch Disease is a term coined in the 1970s to describe the economic experience of the Netherlands in the wake of its discovery and export of gas in the late 1950s, which led to an appreciation of its currency and damage to its export economy. The Dutch Disease causes inflation due to the sudden influx of hard currency, leading to deindustrialization and deagriculturalization. 19. Salomón Kalmanovitz, Economía y Nación: Una Breve Historia de Colombia (Bogotá, 2003), 479. 20. Betancourt and García, Contrabandistas, Marimberos y Mafiosos, 48. 21. Ibid., 158. 22. Ibid., 162. 23. The beginning of this phase in 1978 is marked by the boom of the marijuana economy ending in 1993 with the death of Pablo Escobar. Gacha was killed in 1989, and Lehder was extradited to the United States in 1987, where he is still serving his sentence. 24. See Carlos Castaño, Mi Confesión (Bogotá, 2001). 25. A group of 250 cattle ranchers met in Antioquia and formed the Asociación de Ganaderos del Magdalena Medio (ACDEGAM) in 1982. Two years later this organization played a major role in the establishment of the first paramilitary group in Puerto Boyacá. See Castaño, Mi Confesión, 96; Carlos Medina G., Autodefensas, Paramilitares y Narcotráfico en Colombia: el caso de Puerto Boyacá (Bogotá, 1990); for the history and development of the paramilitaries see also Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence, chapter 5, and Javier Montanez, Julian Bolivar, Pablo Sevillano, and Ernesto Baez, Pensamiento Social y Politico del Bloque Central Bolivar De las AUC (Santa Fe Ralito, Córdoba 2005). 26. Medina, Autodefensas, Paramilitares y Narcotráfico en Colombia: el caso de Puerto Boyacá, 170–86. 27. At least two main leaders of the AUC were also trained by Israelis. Carlos Castaño claims that in 1983 he took a military training course in Israel as did Salvatore Mancuso, but the year in which he received his training is not available to this author. The relationship between the narcobourgeoisie and Israel continued until an arms deal of 2001 for 3,000 rifles and ammunition via GIRSA, a subsidiary of the Israeli military industry through Israeli dealers in Panama and Guatemala. The Israelis also made several lucrative arms sales to the Colombian government. More recently, retired Israeli Defense Force general Israel Zivi, the former head of the Givati Brigade, reportedly signed a $10 million contract with former defense minister Juan Manuel Santos now elected

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29. 30.

31.

3 2. 33. 34. 35.

3 6. 37. 38.

3 9. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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president. It is alleged that Zivi was one of the planners of the 2008 raid against the FARC commander Raúl Reyes camp in Ecuador. Nazih Richani, “Caudillos and the Crisis of the Colombian State: Fragmented Sovereignty, the War System and the Privatization of Counterinsurgency in Colombia,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2007): 403–17. Ernesto Baez, AUC commander, interview with author, Cupacabana, Medellín, 2005. Nazih Richani, “Third Parties, War Systems’ Inertia and Conflict Termination: The Doomed Peace Process in Colombia 1998–2002,” Journal of Conflict Studies 25, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 75–103; Nazih Richani, “The Political Economy of Colombia’s Protracted Civil War and the Crisis of War System,” Journal of Conflict Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 50–77. See also Castaño, Mi Confesión. Richani, “Caudillos and the Crisis of the Colombian State”; Richani, “Fragmentation of Sovereignty and Violent Non-State Actors in Colombia,” in Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics, ed. Klejda Mulaj (New York, 2010). Richani, “Third Parties, War Systems’ Inertia and Conflict Termination.” Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 204–9. Semana, 21 July 2010. http://www.nuevoarcoiris.org.co/sac/?q=node/887; see also Claudia Lopez, ed., Y Refundaron La Patria: De Como Mafiosos y Políticos Reconfiguraron el Estado Colombiano (Bogotá, 2010) and Claudia Lopez, “Uno de Cada Tres Políticos Ha Tenido Nexos con Grupos Ilegales,” Semana, 20 August 2010; Luis Jorge Garay, a prominent Colombian economist, presented an argument on state co-optation similar to the one advanced in this chapter in Luis Jorge Garay, “La reconfiguración cooptada del Estado: Más allá de la concepción tradicional de Captura Económica del Estado” (Mimeo, 2010); see also León Valencia, ed., Para Política: La Ruta de la Expansión Paramilitar y Los Acuerdos Políticos (Bogotá, 2007). Perfil de Ponentes, Congressional Records (Bogotá, 2010). Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, Revertir el Destierro Forzado: Protección Y Restitución de Los Territorios Usurpados (Bogotá, 2006). Dario Fajardo, “Tierra y el Poder Militar en Colombia: La relación histórica entre el poder militar y el latifundio en Colombia,” (2002) http://www.nuovacolombia.net/cartelle/questione_agraria/tierraypoder.htm. See also Dario Fajardo, “El desplazamiento forzado: una lectura desde la economía política,” lecture presented at the Colombian Academy for Economics on admission as a permanent member. Mimeo. (Bogotá, November 2005). Human Rights Watch, 2000. Ricardo Rocha, La Economía Colombiana tras 25 años de Narcotráfico (Bogotá, 2000), 146. Comisión de Juristas, 25. http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/7382-thousands-of-colombian-police-officers-investigated-for-corruption.html. El Tiempo, 4 May 2010. Cuchillo died drowning while escaping police arrest in December 2010.



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44. DAS was dissolved by the end of 2011 and replaced by the National Intelligence Agency. http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/20173-dissolution-of-das-inevitable-former-intelligence-chief.html. 45. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Military Expenditure in Post-Conflict Societies.” Mimeo, 2004.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Betancourt, Dario, and Martha Garcia. Contrabandistas, Marimberos Y Mafiosos: Historia Social de La Mafia Colombiana 1965–1992. Bogotá, 1994. Castaño, Carlos. Mi Confesión. Bogotá, 2001. Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. “Military Expenditure in Post-Conflict Societies.” Mimeo, 2004. Fajardo, Dario. “Tierra y el Poder Militar en Colombia: La Relación Histórica entre el Poder Militar y el Latifundio en Colombia.” Bogotá, 2002. http://www.nuovacolombia.net/cartelle/questione_agraria/tierraypoder.htm. Garay, Luis Jorge. 2010. “La reconfiguración cooptada del Estado: Más allá de la concepción tradicional de Captura Económica del Estado.” Mimeo, 2010. Gramsci, Antonio. The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935. New York, 2000. Kalmanovitz, Salomón. Economía Y Nación: Una Breve Historia de Colombia. Bogotá, 2003. Ocampo, José Antonio. Historia Económica de Colombia. Bogotá, 1994. Richani, Nazih. “Fragmentation of Sovereignty and Violent Non-State Actors in Colombia.” In Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics, ed. Klejda Mulaj. New York, 2010.    . “The Political Economy of Colombia’s Protracted Civil War and the Crisis of War System. “Journal of Conflict Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 50–77.    . Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. New York, 2002.    . “Third Parties, War Systems’ Inertia and Conflict Termination: The Doomed Peace Process in Colombia 1998–2002.” Journal of Conflict Studies 25, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 75–103. Rocha, Ricardo. La Economía Colombiana tras 25 años de Narcotráfico. Bogotá, 2000. Rovner, Eduardo Sáenz. “Agencia de Noticias.” Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 3 May 2010. Sanders, G. Earl. “Contraband in Spanish America: Handicaps of the Governors in the Indies.” The Americas 34, no. 1 (July 1977): 59–80. Valencia, León, ed. Para Política: La Ruta de la Expansión Paramilitar y Los Acuerdos Políticos. Bogotá, 2007.

Chapter 9

Russia’s Gangster Capitalism Portent for Contemporary States?

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Patricia Rawlinson

Most of the Western world watched the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the final demise of Soviet communism in 1991 with a sense of triumphalism and relief as the first and hitherto most historically powerful experiment in Marxist-style governance painfully imploded. Two major reasons given for this collapse were ubiquitous political corruption and the fusion of licit and illicit economic activity, both seen as inevitable outcomes of a system of political economy that afforded the state almost total control of the economy. Hence, by implication, the ideological antithesis to communism—the free market—would provide the natural foundations for a more egalitarian distribution of wealth through greater opportunity, the establishment of rule of law, and a sense of justice where formerly there had been none. Nor was this promised simply to the transition states of Eastern and Asian Europe but to motley failed states and developing countries across the globe that were prepared to (or forced to) adopt the free market. Yet, in the relatively short historical period between these seismic events that signaled the end of the Cold War, the “end of history,” and the dawn of a new era of freedom and wealth, the pathologies that marked Soviet communism as a failed experiment are evident in the very heartlands of liberal democracy and the free market. Corruption and crime are increasingly seen as being intrinsic to the dominant global ethos of neoliberalism as they were to Soviet communism, manifesting in what might be described as “systemic violence,” Zizek’s term for “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.”1 216



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This chapter presents a critical analysis of Russia’s turbulent transition from communism to state capitalism, a phase popularly referred to as “gangster” or “wild” capitalism. The terminology describes the period of lawlessness (bespredel) that had gripped the country in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when the economic and political levers of power were said to be vulnerable to, or in the hands of, organized crime. Indeed, the then president himself, Boris Yeltsin, in addressing the publication of Russia’s first open commission on crime in 1993, declared that the country had become “a mafia state on a world scale.” In our understanding of the impact of “organized crime” and “corruption” in the development of the Russian state, we need to acknowledge the constructionist nature of these terms, the narratives they weave, and the agendas behind such narratives. In the same way that the language of “risk” has been described as “a rhetorical device deployed in arguments about what harms should be given priority, how they should be dealt with, and who is blameworthy,” the discourse around organized crime and corruption similarly defines and proscribes harmful acts according to agenda-driven selectivity.2 In the turbulent and often violent process of transition, Russia has been beset by competing and often contradictory agendas in which the application of these terms to particular acts and actors at specific times has served to detract from or obfuscate some of the more deep-seated and complex issues of the transition process, the tools that served it, and the aspirations of those who led or opposed it. By unraveling the narratives around corruption and organized crime in Russia and the impact these discourses have had on the emergence of the Russian state as a market economy, we can more easily interrogate the conventional historical memory of this turbulent era.

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER? Defining corruption and organized crime, especially in a comparative context, is clearly problematic, as too is assessing their impact. In common with the various and often contradictory definitions and taxonomies of these ambiguous phenomena, the agendas that shape our approach to organized crime and corruption, for example whether we focus on the “who” rather than the “how” or “what,” will determine the inevitable selectivity of understanding and usage. Explaining generic terms, often culturally or ideologically bound such as these, “is partly a function of the kind of questions analysts pose and what it is they wish to understand.”3 The question that concerns us here—the impact of corruption and organized crime on state formation in postcommunist Russia—brings with it a

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series of subissues concerning the role of the state, and in particular, the state in transition from communism to capitalism, and how, in a legal vacuum or hiatus, it is even possible or desirable to sit with a static sense of what corruption and organized crime entail. Clearly this changes according to the historical, social, and even individual contexts in which certain activities occur and how they impact on various actors. These differing contexts can have an impact on agency, on the ability to act according to individual values, to make rational choices, and so on. An authoritarian regime leaves less room for acting out of individual moral conscience than does a liberal democracy, which affects how criminal motivation and immoral acts are perceived. As Zinoviev notes in defense of the “unacceptable” acts of Soviet man as seen through Western eyes: “It is easy to be moral if you live in conditions which do not force you into morally reprehensible actions.”4 The problem of defining corruption will be the main focus of this section; organized crime, its natural offspring, will be looked at as a terminological issue further on. A general definition used by Transparency International (a global, independent organization whose stated task is to raise the profile of the problem of corruption) is “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”5 This abuse can take many forms, from nepotism to collusion or operational participation in criminal acts such as smuggling and racketeering. So as to bring a degree of specificity to this somewhat amorphous description, Holmes’s suggestion that we regard corruption as involving a hierarchy of acts, “something that the communists [sic] themselves often overtly recognise,” provides a framework for discernment in terms of the external manifestations of corruption.6 A further clarification relates to the motivating factors or quality of agency behind who engages in corrupt activities. The categorization of corruption in the Knapp Commission’s investigation into the activities of the New York Police Department identified three types of actors: meat eaters, grass eaters, and birds (this latter group does not concern us here as it relates to noncorrupt individuals). Meat eaters actively sought out private benefits whether from pecuniary or other forms of bribe taking and favors of all manner and means, whereas grass eaters “did not look for graft or kickbacks but passively accepted them as the natural perks that were spontaneously on offer.”7 These classifications, Punch explains, are not rigid and often involve an overlap between the two as individuals move from being grass eaters to meat eaters, and vice versa, as institutional or personal situations change. These types describe bribe receivers, those in positions of power, but they constitute only one half of the corruption relationship. The other half, those who give bribes or, if it is within their gift, feel the need to confer favors for personal motives, constitute another population. In the context of



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Russia, and especially the Soviet Union, this population was sprawled across ages, ethnic identities, professions, and geographies. For the most part individuals were motivated by problems of economic shortages, bureaucratic incompetencies, and arbitrary forms of justice administered by the state that they had to “pay” their way for and through. From this perspective too, the boundaries of definition can become easily blurred. In her study of “favors” and informal networks, Ledeneva warns against confusing blat, a nonproscribed (but officially muted) system of unofficial relationships, with “misleading” Western definitions of corruption. Blat, generally speaking, is “a distinctive form of non-monetary exchange, a kind of barter based on personal relationship” (emphasis added), which “as opposed to corruption . . . is related to mundane (and legitimate) favours.”8 Yet to the uninitiated Western eye (as in the author’s) these distinctions are sometimes opaque. Indeed, as Ledeneva herself notes, they also retain a subjectivity in relation to their indigenous actors who, in her interviews, often labeled their own actions as mutual support and those of others as blat. The impossibility of finding a clear definition for corruption, (and, subsequently, organized crime) does, however, allow a more critical and hopefully realistic contribution to the story behind Russia’s road to market as well as more pragmatic understanding of where the country is today.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD The law is not honoured in Russia! Before the eyes of everyone, openly, the law is violated, lawlessness flourishes, and this embarrasses nobody, no-one thinks about it.9

These words spoken by the defense lawyer V. A. Maklakov at the beginning of the twentieth century resonate as an enduring formative feature of Russian history. The dominance of autocratic forms of governance within a largely patrimonial state structure under the tsars, and their subsequent transformation to Soviet style authoritarianism, inculcated a distrust in the law that largely served to protect those who had least need of it, and, in its arbitrary application, became a tool of social control rather than legal administration. Despite numerous attempts to modernize the state along the lines of rational bureaucratic systems that emerged in western European states, Russia remained entrenched in political and juridical networks based on personal loyalties and hierarchical dependencies, nurturing bribery and other forms of corruption as an integral part of these patron-client relationships. That these relationships have persisted throughout the Soviet period

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and into the postcommunist era raises questions not just about the nature of corruption and crime, but also about the processes of modernization that have taken place in Russia over the past two centuries. Fear, greed, and the capricious nature of law and justice, as noted by Maklakov, nurtured a sustained disregard for law and authority. Naïve duplicity became a trademark of the beleaguered peasantry; imaginative means of avoiding responsibility for their actions became an act of survival for bureaucrats. Yet, where the tsar’s authority was concerned, the peasants, at least, had unfailing respect. Even in times of rebellious ferment the status of the “Little Father,” the peasants’ affectionate term for Russia’s anointed ruler, went unchallenged. Instead, they directed their anger and hostility against the aristocracy and bureaucrats who, they believed, were undermining the intentions of the tsar through their cruelties and injustices towards the people. This respect for the head rather than the organs of state continued into Soviet Russia as the cult of personality, nurtured an almost irrational sense of loyalty towards Stalin (and more recently towards Putin), and in doing so, an acceptance by many of the brutalizing effects of authoritarianism. In such an environment crime and corruption become more easily entwined in the banalities of existence, and if not totally approved of, certainly tolerated. In a society infected by endemic corruption, it was hardly surprising that relationships between the criminal world and those tasked with maintaining law and order were common. For example, and presaging the Soviet and post-Soviet shape of underworld things to come, Vanka Kain, an eighteenth-century racketeer, could conduct his successful career in Moscow largely thanks to the protection he received from the local police.10 Despite the heinous nature of the crimes he and others of his ilk committed, they were not regarded as the most dangerous of offenders. Autocratic regimes fear most of all the very thing they are likely to provoke: organized political resistance. The punitive gaze of the tsarist state focused largely on political crimes, leaving as a secondary concern law breaking connected with interpersonal violence or property crimes. The Soviet regime later intensified this gaze both in its scope and the brutality of its punitive nature. Volkov contends that corruption and similar forms of deviancy and law breaking regarded as “normalized” in Russian society are “the legacy not of Russian traditional culture but rather of its historically specific patterns of rapid modernization” (emphasis added).11 Reforms in Russia, he argues, as in the Westernization program of Peter the Great, have tended to be draconian in nature, imposed from above with an authoritarian hand. This has resulted in an adaptation rather than transformation of those practices deemed archaic, and irrelevant. Hence, in Peter the Great’s



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bid to replace the patrimonial system by a state bureaucracy, the rapidity of reform instead produced a hybrid— ‘new’ structures which remained tacitly entrenched in traditional values. The patron-client relationship, which makes no distinction between the private and public spheres but rather encourages the pursuit of personal interest through hierarchical dependency, in a modern bureaucracy translates into the pathological manifestations of nepotism and/or bribery as commodified patronage. In other words, in the absence of those values and behaviors which should correspond to the new structures, old practices are adapted and in their now distorted form become subtly but even further embedded in the modernized system. The reproduction and intensification of tradition was clearly manifest in the analogous behaviors and practices of tsarist and Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks, who set out to destroy the tsarist legacy, found themselves replicating “by force of circumstance” the very practices they abjured.12 Radical change meant that they had no option but “to build the new order with human material molded by the past,” material of which they themselves were composed. However, Bolshevism engendered something more than the continuity of corrupt forms of administration and the violent application of state justice, more widely and severely executed than in almost any period of tsarist history (to name but a few of the practices the Bolsheviks had railed against in their revolutionary manifesto). The demographic composition of its revolutionaries and the ideological drive of state transformation for the first time brought the political elite into close proximity with Russia’s underworld, which had burgeoned in response to rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth century.13 Motivated by their dedication to the Bolshevik cause, they stood shoulder to shoulder with their underworld contemporaries, including Stalin himself who as a member of an armed gang robbed the main post office in Georgia to fundraise for the revolution.14 One of the first acts of the revolutionary government had been to free those imprisoned under the tsarist regime, by implication interpreting offences against the bourgeois state as support for the Bolsheviks. Some of those released were given high-level posts, or were employed in the Cheka (the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage), the security police whose remit and ruthlessness dwarfed that of the dreaded Okhrana in imperialist Russia. The violence perpetrated during the Red terror also permeated every aspect of governance, driven by the Bolsheviks’ “hatred and indifference to human suffering,” which as Figes notes “was no doubt in part a legacy of their prison years.”15 Given the shifting and porous borders of legality that occur during revolutions and times of great change, when an individual is labeled a criminal one day and

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a powerful politician the next, behaviors and values inculcated into a former status are carried over into the new. Hardened by their resistance to the old regime and the punitive response by the state, the Bolsheviks’ survival strategies, often translated into violent and “criminal” forms of governance, set a precedent that would continue in varying degrees of ruthless authoritarianism for much of the twentieth century. However critical one might be about the use of the phrase “criminal state” as a descriptor for the mindset and violent consequences of Soviet power on its people, it aptly invokes the sense of brutality that marked what Yakovlev has described as “the most terrible, the bloodiest century, shot through with hatred and intolerance.”16 Nor is it, as a concept, confined to the political. In more subtle and complex forms, the economy in particular became infused with a range of behaviors and attitudes that sit within the broad semantics of the term criminal. It is to this we now turn.

CRIME, CORRUPTION, AND THE ECONOMY Russia’s modernization program, as managed under the leadership of Stalin, was undoubtedly a feat of colossal scientific and technological progress hitherto unparalleled. Economic achievement, the engine and body of the Soviet machine that lurched its way, in theory, towards a promised utopia, was not simply a guiding principle but the very essence of political identity, embodied in the Communist Party, the sole representative of the people. With the abolition of the private, the whole of society was now “public,” as in property and services. Where under the traditional patriarchal system there had only been the “personal,” now there existed only the state. Stalin actively encouraged patronage and hierarchical dependencies in his creation of the nomenklatura, administrative posts that included a scale of privileges in return for loyalty to the leadership. This was both a figurative form of corruption, a distortion of the egalitarianism Soviet communism allegedly espoused, and a positive promotion of corrupt practices. Replacing ideologues with careerists attracted to their positions for personal, usually material, gain, laid the foundations for the burgeoning of a bribery-driven political system. Government posts became commodities to be bought and sold, which meant the corrupting process began at the front door of politics.17 With the majority of those in power detached both from the principles of communism and the people at large, economic problems, such as shortages, the shoddy quality of civilian goods, and poor housing (from which most of the elite were cushioned) remained either inadequately addressed or simply neglected. Pilfering from work and resorting to illicit sources of



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goods and services became part of the daily struggle for survival for the nonprivileged. Compared to the draconian crackdowns on political dissent, the authorities were generally lenient with economic crimes of this nature, their tolerance based largely on expediency. Economic failure pointed to political incompetence; hence tacitly allowing a second economy to supplement the failings of its dominant counterpart obviated any serious collective confrontation with the authorities. The second economy in its myriad forms and levels of legality also provided a growing niche for what can loosely be described as “organized crime,” groups of illegal entrepreneurs whose activities spanned a range of activities from the production of counterfeit goods to protection rackets.18 For any criminal group to operate successfully in an authoritarian regime requires some form of official patronage or protection, known in contemporary Russia as krysha, a roof. By the 1970s, during the period of economic stagnation, members of the nomenklatura increasingly steeped in rampant corruption formed strategic alliances with operators in the illegal economy either to avail themselves of the products and services on offer or, as in the case of some Central Asian republics, run their own criminal businesses.19 Despite the burgeoning of the second economy, which rapidly superseded its legal counterpart, “organized crime,” or from the Soviet perspective unsanctioned private enterprise, remained little more than an arm of the state. Many of those who operated in the illegal economy did so only with the tacit sanction of the authorities. Even during the Gorbachev era (1985–1991) with the ill-judged anti-alcohol policy and the attempt to introduce restrained forms of private enterprise such as cooperatives and joint ventures, there was no real question of the organs of power “losing out” to organized crime either before or after the official collapse of communism in 1991.20 What did occur was an unraveling of the legitimacy of the Communist Party and a redefining of the constitution and location of power into the grey area of economic activity, an area already occupied and, to a large degree, controlled or manipulated by the state. The subsequent legal vacuum opened up by these reforms confounded attempts to distinguish “organized crime” from private enterprise. Despite the growth of racketeering during the late 1980s and into the following decade—a defining activity of the “mafia,” according to some academics— the “who” and “what” of organized crime became increasingly ambiguous.21 The term has consistently presented definitional problems in rule of law states, so it is hardly surprising that identifying it in the amorphous world of legality of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s Russia would be even more challenging.22 However, this allowed an ideologically driven selectivity in the application of the “mafia” label by warring factions against their opponents. For

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the so-called hard-line communists, it represented exploitative speculation, the excesses of self-interest as realized through economic individualism, that is, capitalism. The pro–market reform groups used it to symbolize the inevitable consequences of a centralized economy, that is, falling standards and levels of production that created shortages and consequently a burgeoning black economy. This battle of words amounted to “gangster communism” versus “gangster capitalism.” As comforting as they might have been for each ideological camp, in essence, these were spurious distinctions. Vaksberg’s less than perspicacious declaration that “the mafia will only collapse when the whole edifice, i.e. the system itself, collapses,” a reference to the criminal behavior and connections of the Soviet nomenklatura, assumed as did many that if only Russia would fully embrace the market and democracy (which were seen as inextricably linked) then the “mafia,” whatever that might mean, would disintegrate.23 By implication, it further understood a capitalist economy as being “mafia-free,” or at least saw organized crime as an aberration of, rather than intrinsic to, this generic economic model. Ironically, it was the very clan-based, nepotistic structures that had encouraged systemic corruption and endemic criminality in the Soviet Union that would facilitate the establishment of the free market and exacerbate the explosion of violent business, referred to as “organized crime,” the Russian mafiya, or gangster capitalism in postcommunist Russia. Mirroring the deceptive break of bolshevism from “bourgeois” tsarist imperialism (with the significant exception of the transference of property ownership from private to state), the putative rupture with the Soviet past would prove to be equally tenuous. More worryingly, the West perceived and responded to it as a clean break from the past, most significantly those in Washington under whose influence lay the vital purse strings of international funding.

GANGSTER CAPITALISM OR THE REAL MCCOY? Russia’s “transition” to a market economy followed the rapid modernization pattern typical to its history. Shock therapy, advocated by a number of influential Western economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Shleifer from Harvard and Anders Aslund from the Stockholm School of Economics, was the name given to the draconian reform package implemented two years previously in Poland. Its sweeping changes involved price liberalization and the privatization of small and medium state enterprises. Those in favor of rapid economic transformation argued that “piecemeal changes cannot work, since each part of the overall reform has a role in strengthening the



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other parts.”24 As with many Western-centric models, the principles behind shock therapy were based on concepts of an advanced capitalist state, and hence inappropriate for the crumbling remnants of a centralized economy.25 More importantly, they assumed a belief in the free market as the only viable alternative to those anticompetitive “creeds” against private property which “claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.”26 How then to explain the intensification of legal nihilism, the burgeoning of crime and corruption, within a society ostensibly fast-tracking towards the establishment of a free market and democracy? One popular response was to blame the enduring presence of “corrupt and powerful insiders” who remained in control of the country’s most important industries, energy and minerals, until the mid-1990s.27 Yet this was only a temporary obstruction that, once this crucial part of the economy had been privatized and the so-called Red Directors ousted, should have put the reform program firmly on track. However, a glaring absence in the culpability game, at least from an outsider’s stance, is the extent to which the free market cure offered to a sick Russian society was poison rather than panacea. In other words, alongside the historical and cultural phenomena that obstructed the smooth transition from communism to capitalism, the proposed solution was itself highly problematic. Hence Russia’s experience of capitalism is not merely a distortion of capitalism but rather a high-definition reflection of its intrinsic pathologies. The criminogenic environment of postcommunism was a product both of the previous regime and the postcommunist reform package, a meeting of two systems that in their different ways create conditions conducive to corruption and organized crime. Rather than rolling back the “mafia state,” the market legitimized many of the practices that had been integral to sustaining the disintegrating centrally planned economy. In contrast to the usual mode of adaptation from the traditional to the new during rapid change, where “what had formerly been open, usual, normal and sanctioned by tradition tended to become covert, illegal and pathological,” the erstwhile covert and illegal now became normal and sanctioned.28 Those most able to exploit a deregulated economy, who had the skills, connections, and expertise required to run with the free market, were for the most part corrupt politicians and their associates in the Soviet underworld and the one-person wheelers and dealers who made up the myriad population of the shadow economy.29 Nor were only skills successfully adapted to the new economic conditions, but also a set of values that, despite their often ruthless and lawless nature, appeared to fit into the ethos of laissez-faire. The overwhelming rhetoric from foreign business and governments that condemned the infiltration

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of the Russian economy by organized crime and that supported Yeltsin’s statement (clearly with an eye to garnering further funded support for the “war on crime”) that his country was a mafia state did not always accord with their actions. One journalist described the symbiotic relationship that existed between a number of Western businesses and the mafia state as follows: “Their [Western firms’] willingness to lie on their backs and be abused by Russia’s organized criminal networks must rank as one of the least resisted rapes in history.”30 In fact, however, for numerous foreign businesses it was the very absence of rule of law that, in the initial stages, made operating in Russia an attractive as well as dangerous proposition. Exploiting the Russian willingness to bypass the law, bribe giving by Western firms as a means of getting around the frustrating and ponderous levels of red tape devolved to locals who were instructed to ensure the “ignorance” of their employers in illegal working arrangements. “That’s their problem,” as one foreign businessman noted.31 So too was employing the protection services of known organized crime groups, a not infrequent practice albeit wrapped up in denials, euphemisms, and calculated unawareness, “a problem” for the locals rather than their bosses. Expedient concessions by the West to “negative” practices in Russia were also employed with dramatic and destructive effect at the highest level. The clan-based structures deemed culpable for the worst excesses of crime and corruption in the Soviet state reemerged, some with new faces, to become integral to the implementation of shock therapy by the reformers in Russia and neoliberal camps out west. Operating as what Wedel terms “flex organizations,” they comprised networked personnel able to “switch their status situationally, from state to private spheres and back, thereby enabling their members to selectively bypass the constraints governing both spheres.”32 In an environment growing hostile to the draconian reforms that pushed hundreds of thousands into poverty, these structures provided a convenient method for channeling vast sums of foreign aid into approved networks whose proximity to the growing power base of the president ensured a more favorable outcome to the proposed reforms. This was especially evident in the ability of the influential Chubais clan, which had direct links to foreign aid through its connections with the Institute for International Development at Harvard, to bypass the parliamentary process and ensure the establishment of privatization policies through presidential decree.33 Out of these clan-based, nepotistic structures emerged the oligarchy that effectively ran Russia during the mid-1990s until the ruble crash of 1998. This new economic nomenklatura strengthened its hold on the country’s energy and mineral industries, the media, and the president himself, in return for the injection of their capital into the depleted treasury under the “loans for



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shares” scheme. This consisted of low interest loans from private banks to the government in return for shareholder control over the management of these industries, what in effect turned out to be a rigged auction. By the end of the decade Yeltsin and his country were staggering under the burden of ill health, both literally and metaphorically. The collapse of the ruble not only weakened the oligarchy, many members losing fortunes overnight, but made severe financial waves in the global economy as Russia defaulted on its debt repayment. From being perceived as the engine of Russia’s reform, the “fresh thinking” required to offset the corruption and greed of the Red Directors, the oligarchs found themselves excoriated as the very same. Observing the subjective, ideologically driven reasoning behind this labeling volte face, the sociologist and former political dissident Boris Kagarlitski noted with irony that “the Western press discovered corruption in Russia, only after the collapse of the ruble and the onset of financial crisis in 1998.”34 In other words, the criminalizing of certain actors and activities was based on the pragmatic nature of business relations between those applying the labels of “criminal,” “mafia,” “corrupt,” etc. and those so labeled, a process that bore little reality to the tangible harmful consequences of shock therapy on the Russian people. The narratives of corruption and organized crime in Russia, articulated most vociferously in the West, were constructed not according to an ontological reality of such phenomena but rather as a response to their impact on a prioritized population (those in advanced capitalist states) and the extent to which such narratives upheld a particular (positive) version of free market ideology.

NEW MILLENNIUM—OLD VICES In his 2004 speech at the First Session of the Council for the Fight against Corruption, Putin declared “The scale of this problem [corruption] will only be reduced when the country sees the law, its institutions of democracy and the civilized market strengthened.”35 Despite a number of initiatives to combat corruption, and the adoption of anticorruption legislation in December 2008, Russia remains steeped in bribe-taking and giving and similar forms of corrupt activities. Paradoxically, some of the most prolific offending institutions are those tasked with the implementation of the legislation, especially the police, signaling an almost inevitable failure to tackle the problem even at the most basic level.36 However, the systemic nature of corruption in the criminal justice system does not always reflect a willingness by its workers to comply in bribe-taking. In 2009, Alexei Dymovsky, a police major in Novorossiysk, posted a series of videos on the Internet addressed primarily

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to the then Prime Minister Putin, describing the conditions of police service that encourage corruption, including low salaries and the pressure of being forced to meet targets that include “imprisoning innocent people.” His dismissal from the police and subsequent arrest on charges of fraud and corruption only served to validate his accusations and further highlight the lack of political will in combating corruption. There appears to be an implicit acknowledgement that state bureaucracy prioritizes the self-interest of its employees over civic responsibility, a continuation of the Soviet mindset, albeit more overtly expressed, and has evidently become an inducement for recruitment. In a recent survey conducted in-house by United Russia (the political party most closely aligned with Medvedev and Putin), 40 percent of interviewees claimed that they were attracted to working for the state because it offered the opportunity for acquiring “shady revenues.”37 Facilitated by the often nonchalant acquiescence of a public that has had little respite over the decades from paying a “second tax” for the provision of public services, the state has become effectively privatized from bottom up as well as top down. Unlike the communist era, however, the commodification of the bureaucracy is now overtly executed, in tune with the ethos of ruthless self-interest that many Russians regard as one of the cornerstones of capitalism. A growing symbiosis between the public and private sectors has become especially apparent in the post-Yeltsin crackdown on maverick oligarchs such as Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky. Both failed to toe the Kremlin line only to see their vast assets (the most treasured prize being the energy industry) clawed back by the state in a punitive and economically expedient move. While not entirely immobilized, the remaining oligarchs appear to “have embedded themselves in the structures of bureaucratic capitalism through individual deals. For all that, they can be crushed at any time and they definitely understand this.”38 The second guilty verdict against Khodorkovsky passed in December 2010, this time for embezzlement (in 2005 he was sentenced to eight years for fraud and tax evasion), and the dismissal in October of the same year of the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, whose wife runs multi-million-ruble businesses including construction and real estate, were clear indications that the Kremlin has the potential to oust the economically powerful who do not serve its interests. Perhaps selective prosecution as opposed to a consistent and impartial strategy is as far as the fight against corruption can go. So embedded in the state structures has corruption become that if political will were to become more than empty rhetoric the changes required to effectively combat it would threaten the structures themselves. This might suggest, as Holmes argues, that the Russian state, as in the figure of an autocrat such as Putin, is weaker



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than many of its Western critics believe.39 But the implication here is that the eradication of corruption and by extension organized crime will lead to a stronger, more capable state accommodating a healthier competitive economic climate and a more democratically accountable political system operating within the rule of law, something that one might expect its leaders of state to desire. However, state or bureaucratic capitalism, the prevailing economic system in Russia, which is described as “building interconnected bureaucratically organized and directed markets, rather than fostering true competition and de-monopolization,” thrives on corruption.40 Indeed the symbiosis between politics and the economy seems to be almost complete but in a reversed juxtaposition to that under communism. Where under Soviet rule party politics defined the powerful, now it is economic ownership and resource management by the state. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s excoriating analysis of contemporary Russia (which she tellingly paid for with her life), brands it as “a government riddled with corruption, which already spent a good proportion of its working week taking care of its personal commercial interests” in her exposé of the complex networks of politics, crime and business facilitated, and even endorsed, by the executive.41 Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s warning that his own treatment by the state “is merely the most vivid example of the Russian practice of extortion, unlawful redistribution of property and persecution of undesirables with the help of fictitious justice” might ring of sour grapes in the light of his recent conviction, but it nonetheless encapsulates the extent to which arbitrary justice once again drives the economic and political life of the Russian state and its rulers.42 The ethos of self-interest, central to the neoliberal economic model gifted by the West, has provided some legitimacy for gross excesses in the pursuit of personal gain. Unlike the furtive, rampant pillaging of state wealth under communism, the rapacity of the market nomenklatura is overtly displayed. However, while the ignominious ubiquitous figure of the rent-seeking bureaucrat in twenty-first-century Russian politics might provoke moral outrage internationally, contributing to Russia’s image as a mafia state, it appears not to have deterred foreign investment by many of its critics.43 Which raises the questions: do similar conditions prevail to a lesser degree in advanced market economies, and if so, how might we explain this in relation to Russia’s gangster capitalism?

FOREVER AND EVERYWHERE GANGSTER CAPITALISM? “The reduction of corruption is often used as a rationale for the shift from state to a market economy: yet, unless one makes it tautological, actual

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market economies seem quite prone to corruption, as the ideology shifts from one of public service to self-interest maximization.”44 Despite the semantic fog around definitions of corruption and organized crime, it would appear that the former according to perception indices and the latter from law enforcement data are on the increase in advanced as well as emerging market economies. Recent corruption cases in various member states of the European Union (including the “MP cash for honors” scandal that broke in 2006–2007 in the United Kingdom, where political donations led to the recommendation that donors be granted life peerages, effectively buying a seat in the House of Lords), as well as within the European Parliament itself, have increased the level of distrust towards politicians by their citizenries (with the caveat that “perception” will be affected by media exposure of power abuse). The Enron scandal in the United States and more current revelations about corporate and banking misdemeanors in relation to the global economic crisis have severely dented the image of the West as a beacon of rule of law, and in doing so have weakened the moral ground from which other states such as Russia can be criticized. Organized crime, including counterfeiting, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and cyber-crime is also said to be on the rise within all jurisdictions and not just in those of “weak” states, according to the 2010 UNODC report “The Globalization of Crime.”45 Yet, unlike the conclusions drawn from the Russian context—that these negative phenomena reflect the pathological condition of its economy (as an aberration of capitalism) and political structures—the discourse on corruption and organized crime occurring in Western states turns away from structural problems and seeks instead to blame the “other,” those regarded as outside the system and hence threatening to the values that are supposed to drive civil society, values we convince ourselves are inculcated into the systems we assiduously defend against the Russian Mafia, Islamic terrorists, and other “alien” species. “Gangster capitalism,” as used by advocates of the free market, serves to distance particular actors, a people and its culture, from the uncomfortable proximity of legal and illegal that pervades advanced capitalism, and in doing so preserves the illusion that “advanced” has an evolutionary quality of greater adherence to rule of law, to democracy and social justice. During Russia’s early transition, the era of “primitive accumulation,” comparisons were made between the “robber baron” stage of capitalism in nineteenth-century America and its gangster equivalent in Russia. This comparison implied the notion that, as Olsen wrote, it behooves the bandit or baron eventually to seek stable governance and an effective legislative process that protects everyone’s property, not just his own, thus ensuring



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greater economic productivity.46 How then should we read Sebastian’s observation (above) that there was a rapid descent into atavistic behavior by many Western companies who seemed all too ready to take advantage of the absence of rule of law in Russia in so far as it advanced their interests? Their justification for this “out of character” behavior generally ascribes the fault to the Russians and the corrupt system in which they are forced to operate. In contrast, Carolyn Nordstrom’s anthropological study of illegal global trade provides a barrage of evidence to show that corruption and violence remain integral to legitimate corporate business across the globe. Nor is this confined to lawless states. As one US customs officer anonymously revealed to her: “You want to know who we most commonly catch breaking the law? The big-name corporations whose products we buy every day. We bust them and they just call their ‘friends’ in DC. We then get a call telling us to drop the case.”47 Even more telling is the statement from the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime that evidence exists to show that illegal money from organized crime shored up parts of the banking system when legal liquid capital was in short supply. As with the concept of organized crime, the notion of what constitutes “dirty money” is contingent upon the role it is perceived to play within the dominant economy. All of this is not a million miles away from the cases of crime, corruption, and politics Politkovskaya exposed in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg. Of course there is one huge difference: Nordstrom is unlikely to be murdered for her exposés. Perhaps, however, it is not so much question of substance that separates Russia’s gangster capitalism from that of advanced capitalist states, but rather of degree. When the balance between the modern state and economy tilts in favor of one over the other, there occurs a dysfunctionality. Historically, staterun economies have been tragic failures, none so dramatically as the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. But the same pertains to the hegemonic status of the economy over the state. The intrusion of business into politics is becoming increasingly apparent, as too are the dire consequences.48 With the global burgeoning of consumer society the power of economic elites has grown exponentially, in many cases silencing politicians or at least compelling them to serve the interests of the corporations before that of the electorate. The end point of this trend is arguably close to where Russia is currently moving: a symbiosis between politics and the economy in which the politician as businessman sits opposite the businessman as politician, rendering each indistinguishable from the other. In such company self-interest will always trump the law and a Darwinian mentality of ruthless survival will stretch across the dystopian reality in which violence becomes the

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dominant mode of social control. For the Russians, back to the past—for the West, forward to the future? CONCLUSION State capitalism might represent a return to the past, thus reinforcing Volkov’s continuity paradigm, but even if it is a form of traditional patrimonialism and its attendant abuses of power, the stage on which it operates and is given support is no longer confined to Russia. While it is easy to label the more exaggerated and brutal manifestations of the absence of rule of law in Russia as corruption, organized crime, gangster capitalism, and so on, the interconnectivity of states in a global economy belies efforts by those outside of Russia to disengage with the activities they define as such. In reality, much of what provokes criticism of Russia’s behavior from those outside (backed up by little or no action for change) differs little from the behavior of both politicians and the economic elite in those countries deemed inferior to advanced capitalist states. That Russia could so easily adapt and reinforce those negative practices which define its elite and continue to inflict harm on the narod (people) should serve as a warning that the quality of what the West has advocated as the only alternative to communism contains within it the propensity for exacting the same injustices and divisions in society that Russia is once again undergoing. An honest consideration of the current state of many countries in the West hints that that propensity is already emerging as reality. If, as Bridenthal notes in this volume, the ethical underpinning of the historian is better served “in confronting the full dimension of the past” (emphasis added), no matter how challenging this might be, historical consciousness may provide a vehicle for undermining tragic repetitions of events and their even more tragic consequences. This consciousness not only allows us more critically to interrogate the present, which is less visible than the past, but provides a sharper tool to interrogate the politically constructed narratives that aspire to historical amnesia. Attributed to an anonymous commentator on the Enclosure Acts, the following rhyme is as relevant to political economy in twenty-first-century Russia, America, Britain, China, India, etc. as it was to eighteenth-century rural England: “They hang the man and beat the woman who steals the goose from off the common; but let the greater felon loose, who steals the common from the goose.” History cannot repeat itself literally, but it can show us that injustice has a cruel continuity in and beyond the boundaries of the state, time, and geography—a lesson well worth learning.



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NOTES 1. Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, 2009), 1. 2. Richard V. Ericson, Crime in an Insecure World (Cambridge, 2007), 14. 3. Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power: Anti-corruption Campaigns and Legitimation Crisis (Cambridge, 1993), 89. 4. Alexander Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus (London, 1986), 68. 5. http:// www.transparency.org/news_room. 6. Holmes, The End of Communist Power, 66. 7. Maurice Punch, Police Corruption: Deviance, Accountability and Reform in Policing (Cullompton, UK, 2009), 21. 8. Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998), 34, 44. 9. Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (New York, 1953), 238. 10. Malcolm Dixelius and Andrei Konstantinov, Prestunpny Mir v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1995), 44. 11. Vadim Volkov, “Patrimonialism versus Rational Bureaucracy: On the Historical Relativity of Corruption,” in Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s, ed. S. Lovell, A. Ledeneva, and A. Rogachevskii (Basingstoke, UK, 2000), 47. 12. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime: 1919–1924 (London, 1994), 506. 13. Dmitri Golinikov, Krakh vrazheskovo podpol’ya (Moscow, 1971). 14. Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973). 15. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London, 1997), 646. 16. Alexander Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, CT, 2002), 25. 17. Michael Voslenski, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class (London, 1984). 18. Aron Katsenelinboigen, “Colored Markets in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies 29 (1987): 62–85; Patricia Rawlinson, From Fear to Fraternity: A Russian Tale of Crime, Economy and Modernity (London, 2010). 19. Arkady Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia (London, 1991). 20. Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge, 1996); Anthony Jones and William Moskoff, Koops: The Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Patricia Rawlinson, “Russian Organized Crime: A Brief History,” in Russian Organized Crime: The New Threat, ed. Phil Williams (London, 1997). 21. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA, 1993); for Gambetta the Mafia is a business operation that, responding to the absence of trust in the state to provide legitimate forms of protection, seeks to profitably redress that absence through the supply of private protection

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

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where violence becomes its defining commodity; Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford, 2001). Debates concerning the definition of organized crime have been ongoing since the 1960s, especially in America. The most influential understanding as far as crime control policy has been concerned (until recently) had its origins in alien conspiracy theory, as articulated by Donald Cressey in Theft of the Nation: The Structure and Operations of Organized Crime in America (Glencoe, IL, 1969). This flagged up the foreignness and conspiratorial nature of organized crime in the United States, a view that has been sharply criticized by numerous academics. For a concise discussion on definitional issues around organized crime see Alan Wright, Organized Crime (Cullompton, UK, 2006). Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia, 19. Jeffrey Sachs, “What Is to Be Done?” The Economist, 13 January 1990. John Marangos, “Was Shock Therapy Really a Shock?” Journal of Economic Issues 37, no. 4 (December 2003): 943–66. http://www.montpelerin.org/montpelerin. Anders Aslund, “Let’s Get Privatization Right This Time Around,” Moscow Times, 18 August 2010. Volkov, “Patrimonialism versus Rational Bureaucracy: On the Historical Relativity of Corruption,” 46. Konstantin Simis, USSR: Secrets of a Corrupt Society (London, 1982). Tim Sebastian, Sunday Express, Night and Day, 5 March 1995. Richard Poe, How to Profit from the Coming Russian Boom: The Insider’s Guide to Business Opportunities and Survival on the Frontiers of Capitalism (New York, 1993), 237. Janine Wedel, “Flex Organizing and the Clan-State: Perspectives on Crime and Corruption in the New Russia,” in Ruling Russia: Law, Crime and Justice in a Changing Society, ed. W. A. Pridemore (Lanham, MD, 2005), 106. Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989–1998 (New York, 1998). Boris Kargalitski, “‘Political Capitalism’ and Corruption in Russia,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, http://links.org.au/node/86 (no date). http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/8014–9.cfm. Adrian Beck and Ruth Lee, “Attitudes to Corruption Amongst Russian Police Officers and Trainees: Research Findings,” Journal of Crime, Law and Social Change 38, no. 4 (2002): 357–72; Niels Uildriks and N. Piet van Reenan, Policing Post-Communist Societies: Police-Public Violence, Democratic Policing and Human Rights (Antwerp, 2003); Theodore Gerber and Sarah Mendelson, “Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?” Law and Society Review Journal 42, no. 1 (2008): 1–14. Mikhail Delyagin, “The Kleptocracy Class—The Thieving Part of the Bureaucracy—Is the True Ruling Class of Contemporary Russia,” http://archive. constantcontact.com/fs053/1102820649387/archive/1103583810417.htm.



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38. Lilya Shevtsova, Russia Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington, DC, 2007), 110. 39. Leslie Holmes, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Putin’s Russia,” EuropeAsia Studies 60, no. 6 (2008): 1011–31. 40. Nicolas Spulber, Russia’s Economic Transitions: From Late Tsarism to the New Millennium (Cambridge, 2003), 327. 41. Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London, 2007), 274. 42. Tony Halpin, “Restore Law and End Corruption or Russia Will Fall, Warns Jailed Tycoon,” The Times, 31 January 2011; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-russia-mafia-kleptocracyr. 43. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11829634. 44. David Nelken and Mike Levi, “The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption: An Overview,” Journal of Law and Society 23, no. 1 (1996): 1–17. 45. http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/tocta/TOCTA_Report_ 2010_low_res.pdf. 46. Mancur Olsen, “The Devolution of Power in Post-Communist Societies,” in Russia’s Stormy Path to Reform, ed. R. Skidelsky (London, 1995). 47. Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money and Power in the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 205. 48. Noreen Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (London, 2001); Martin Large, Common Wealth: For a Free, Equal, Mutual and Sustainable Society (Stroud, UK, 2010); George Monbiot, The Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (London, 2000); Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (London, 2003).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Ericson, Richard V. Crime in an Insecure World. Cambridge, 2007. Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. London, 1997. Gambetta, Diego. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Cambridge, MA, 1993. Hertz, Noreen. The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. London, 2001. Holmes, Leslie. The End of Communist Power: Anti-corruption Campaigns and Legitimation Crisis. Cambridge, 1993. Monbiot, George. The Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. London, 2000. Ledeneva, Alena. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge, 1998. Nordstrom, Carolyn. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley, CA, 2007. Palast, Greg. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. London, 2003. Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime: 1919–1924. London, 1994.

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Poe, Richard. How to Profit from the Coming Russian Boom: The Insider’s Guide to Business Opportunities and Survival on the Frontiers of Capitalism. New York, 1993. Punch, Maurice. Police Corruption: Deviance, Accountability and Reform in Policing. Cullompton, UK, 2009. Rawlinson, Patricia. From Fear to Fraternity: A Russian Tale of Crime, Economy and Modernity. London, 2010. Shevtsova, Lilya. Russia Lost in Transition: The Yelstin and Putin Legacies. Washington, DC, 2007. Simis, Konstantin. USSR: Secrets of a Corrupt Society. London, 1982. Spulber, Nicholas. Russia’s Economic Transitions: From Late Tsarism to the New Millennium. Cambridge, 2003. Vaksberg, Arkady. The Soviet Mafia. London, 1991. Varese, Federico. The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy. Oxford, 2001. Wedel, Janine. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989–1998. New York, 1998. Yakovlev, Alexander. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. New Haven, CT, 2002. Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London, 2009.

Chapter 10

Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government The Example of the Mediterranean

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Everyone has heard about the problem of rubbish in Naples and Campania since, in December 2008, Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of emergency in the region and handed the problem over to the army. As is well known, the Camorra organizes the traffic of toxic wastes on open-air sites, organizes their transportation from the whole of Italy or indeed Europe, and manages the quarries and the dumping operations, while household waste in the region simply remains untreated. But can we be satisfied with this version of the story, which depicts a wicked mafia and a powerless state? Certainly not. For the 2008 crisis was merely one episode in a much more complicated “vicious circle,” which began in 1994 (at the latest) with the first declaration of a state of emergency in the region and the setting up of a commission dedicated to the question.1 At the origin of the disaster there lay, on the one hand, an enterprise that does not belong to the Camorra but is linked to the very “clean” and legitimate company Fiat. It took quick and easy advantage of the emergency policies to offer extremely dubious benefits and real industrial negligence. It proposed a quite unviable technical project, deceiving the state as to its services; it selected obsolete equipment, which made it necessary to resort to dumping; it was forever behind schedule in setting up waste disposal factories; it resorted to unscrupulous subcontracting. On the other hand, local managers and administrators who managed the extraordinary commission reinforced their powers and extended their networks of friends 237

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and clients. As a result of the state of emergency, they accepted various exemptions such as the use of subcontracting or the choice, in the course of the invitation to tender, of the enterprise that no doubt offered the lowest level of services, but in a shorter time frame, and they used their extraordinary powers to evade the traditional circuits and mechanisms of public management. The Camorra was in no way behind this situation: it neither set up the operation nor oversaw it. By means of subcontracting and invitations to tender for waste transportation and the management of dumping, the Camorra was simply responding to a demand, taking advantage of an extra opportunity to do business, and making the most of the historical inability of public institutions to control the situation. This is an excellent example of the thesis I wish to develop here. Starting with an illusory representation of reality (an omnipotent Camorra at the root of the evil), it shows that the condemnation of organized crime allows new state interventions (such as the use of state emergency powers and the development of public-private partnerships) and obscures mechanisms and practices (such as subcontracting and badly managed invitations to tender) that are much more problematic, albeit difficult to condemn precisely because they are part and parcel of the neoliberal order. My aim, more specifically, is to show that the denunciation of economic crime is part of this new order insofar as such a denunciation helps the state to redeploy its interventions and enables simultaneous—but not necessarily compatible—configurations of neoliberalism to coexist, if we understand the latter not just as an economic order (a phase of capitalism), but also as a political order. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been characterized by the end of the welfare state in European countries, the establishment of structural adjustment programs in developing countries, and the transition to a market economy in the former socialist countries. There has also been a challenge to the economic sovereignty of states that seem reduced to impotence in the globalised economic scene. But beyond common appearances and received ideas on the supremacy of markets, the rise of transnational actors, the supposed inefficiency of states in regulating capitalism, and the domination of economic and financial considerations, one can see the development of other forms and qualities of the state and its regulatory capacities and changes in the relationship between economic and political arenas, between public and private, licit and illicit. In this new order, far from becoming impotent, the state redeploys itself in a new direction, starting with a critique of direct interventionism and operating instead by “delegation,” or “government at a distance.” In other words, states resort to partnerships with private bodies, renewing bureaucratization in the guise of the “new public management” based on



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norms, discipline imposed by rules, quantified evaluation, self-supervision, and so on. But this redeployment also takes the form of a completely direct interventionism when it comes to whatever is problematized in terms of security, thanks to the development of mechanisms of surveillance in spaces both public and private. These discipline people by continuous monitoring of their movements, evaluate their activities closely and in the greatest detail, and get subjects to supervise themselves in accordance with the norms and regulations of the moment. Resorting to the criminalization and reification of the figures of “evil” (the terrorist, the smuggler, the mafia member, organized crime) becomes an opportunity to organize the field of possible state interventions, the condition of new state actions, an opportunity, thus, to strengthen political domination through intermediaries and private actors.

ECONOMIC CRIME AS A MAJOR PERIL Since the 1990s, economic crime has been the subject of a worldwide alarmist discourse: the spread of criminal activities, it is claimed, imperils democracy, development, and citizens’ participation, and constitutes the main danger facing contemporary globalization.2 Like big business, crime seems to reinforce its power by its capacity to seal transnational alliances, and permits the existence of ever larger unregulated spaces that are partly tolerated by individual states and by the international system.3 It contributes, or so it is said, to transforming the state into an ordinary actor.4 In Europe, this discourse emphasizes organized crime in trafficking and money laundering and dubiously melds together migration, terrorism, and economic crime. Gradually, a rhetoric of the danger threatening Europe has evolved into a kind of siege mentality, an obsession by a Union that defines itself as virtuous and has set itself up as a fortress.5 Danger is seen as coming both from the East—from the former socialist countries that have become destabilized since the fall of the Berlin Wall and are now the prey of mafia groups— and from the South—in a skewed reformulation of the European myth of the Mediterranean that highlights whatever is Other (i.e., the Muslim) and rejected (drugs, illegal migrants, terrorism). European intellectuals have named this “the pirate obsession,”6 in which drugs, organized crime, dirty money, terrorism, environmental crime, and human trafficking all “pirate” the serene order of a puritanical Europe. This discourse arouses unease. In order to construct an image of economic crime as “the plague of the twenty-first century,” various elements have been fused together, relations invented or exaggerated, figures

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extrapolated, relations from cause to effect posited, all without any proof and without hypotheses or doubts being clearly stated. Mafias and other criminals, even economic criminals, are reified, and a strict division/separation between legal, licit, and legitimate actors and illegal, illicit, and illegitimate actors is defined. However, the data on money laundering, fakes, drug trafficking, and contraband are by nature estimates, few and far between, constructed largely by the security services whose raison d’être consists precisely in drawing attention to this phenomenon.7 And as Eiko Siniawer reminds us in her article, we cannot simplify the relations between state and criminal organizations: neither the first nor the second are monolithic entities; other actors enter also the game, such as businessmen, bankers, politicians, legal and accounting experts, and so on. Finally, the nature of their relations is extremely complex and ambiguous, going from protection to opposition, from alliance to conflict, from tolerance to intolerance, from delegation to containment in very fluid and unstable situations. We need to investigate how this happens, and why state actors, independent observers, and even academic researchers fall into this trap and construct external dangers threatening states and society. Three types of research have influenced me as I defined this thesis and attempted to support its claims. The first source is the literature showing that criminal activities formed an integral part of the official economy and of contemporary neoliberalism.8 A second corpus comes from research suggesting that there is an apparent paradox in neoliberalism: an unprecedented moralization of economic and political life, a reification of the rule of law and of the legitimate state, and yet, simultaneously, the denunciation of the “persistence” of illegalities at the very heart of states, and of the significant and increasing economic crimes that pose a danger for society as a whole.9 My third source of inspiration is the classical work of historical sociology, such as the pioneering work of Charles Tilly on Europe,10 and that on current situations throughout the world. They show that law and crime are part of the same history of state formation and that crime is not the opposite of state legitimacy.11 Through the notions of risk, of pervasive danger, and of security, the problematic of economic crime plays a fundamental role in this redeployment in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is implemented through the moral construction of what is criminal, illegal or illicit, and what is not.12 On the other hand, the definition of what is criminal, illegal, and illicit stems from tensions, struggles, conflicts, and compromises—in other words, from the exercise of power and domination.13 The stigmatization of certain actors and activities is part of the political meaning of neoliberalism, and the label “organized crime” plays a fundamental role in this exercise.14 My essay suggests, as does Eiko Siniawer’s in a different



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context, that the nature of relations between state and criminality, or rather the way state apprehends economic criminality, allows us better to grasp and understand current modes of government. I posit that such construction of economic criminality conceals a basic reality of the current transformation of European states. Far from being weakened by outside threats of organized crime, states are redeploying their powers via new modes of regulation and new relationships between public and private, between licit and illicit.15 The construction of economic crime and the stigmatization of alleged perpetrators stems from underlying power conflicts, implicit negotiations, and compromises of a developing neoliberalism that is a political as well as an economic order. An analysis of illegal migrations, money laundering, fakes, and trafficking shows that the struggle against “organized crime” ultimately legitimizes renewed state intervention on a broad political scale. By promoting neoliberal principles of deregulation, economic flexibility, competition, profitability, and competitiveness at any price, and yet criminalizing some economic actors operating in this environment, states are assuming evergreater political power over their populations.

THE CRIMINALIZATION OF ILLEGAL MIGRATIONS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, OR THE REHABILITATION OF AN OUTDATED CONCEPTION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE NAME OF A NEW VISION OF THE STATE These days, the illegal character of migration in the Mediterranean is often seen as the result of contradictory European policies of on the one hand, liberalization, globalization, and the disappearance of borders, and, on the other hand, the controlling and closing of borders to the movements of persons. The closing of borders to persons was decided on in Europe between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s, at the very time when the opening of economic borders was becoming a worldwide credo. It is commonly explained as a response to a sense of insecurity: insecurity felt by a population demanding protection, but also insecurity among states fearing a loss of influence over economic flows and activities. In this view, European legislation and directives express the public will and effective control by state actors. This is a superficial explanation, but its persistence is intriguing considering that migrants continue to arrive without being systematically prosecuted and expelled. Another element must be factored into the equation: employers who use this workforce are not criminalized or even harassed, and they thus foster a form of immigration whose very illegality serves the neoliberal agenda.

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Both shores of the Mediterranean are historically characterized by large, informal economies. However, the sheer extent of illegal migration cannot be understood without an analysis of a complementary evolution in the European productive sector, namely, the drive to increase profitability by outsourcing labor.16 This takes three main forms. The first and best known is the chain of subcontracting, in which several levels of businesses hide behind the official subcontractor. The second, more important form is the use of temporary employment agencies, allowing subcontracting businesses to offer an absolutely flexible workforce in the quickest, most roughand-ready way. Such companies typically trim bonuses, deduct fees from the payslip, make fraudulent contributions to national health and insurance, and, above all, leave contracts unsigned. This last procedure is essential because it makes it easier to dismiss the worker at any time and to legalize his or her situation a posteriori by making him or her sign a contract for the actual duration of the job. Thus temporary work encourages outsourcing and with it, the outsourcing of illegalities.17 Temporary assignments carried out by companies providing transnational manpower are the most recent form of outsourcing.18 Since the 1990s, “fake” companies from countries with low wages and little social protection (Portugal first, and now the countries of Eastern Europe) send their employees to other European countries. Having only workers for export, the façade of such an apparently transnational company conceals the illegality of its contracts.19 While immigrants holding a false identification or none at all are obviously the most vulnerable workers, subject to deportation at any time, legal immigrants are also affected because the border between legal and illegal is often fuzzy. For example, in France, one-year permits do not ensure renewal, and in Italy the status of unemployed immigrants is tolerated for only two years, after which many of them become illegal.20 In almost all European countries, discretionary legalization can create permanent illegal immigrants by redefining the status of the legal ones.21 There are at least four channels through which European legislation has contributed to the profitable precariousness of migrant labor. Labor legislation constitutes the first of these. Everywhere in Europe since the mid-1970s, various laws have authorized the use of very short-term contracts. This promotes an alternation between declared and undeclared work and facilitates the use of an intermediate subcontracted and temporary labor force. Second, states accept inconsistencies in the application of legal rules. Thus, illegal immigrants who work in factories or on legal construction sites may pay taxes and even contribute to Social Security.22 Third, in spite of the principles of free movement within the EU, Europeanization has resulted in increased monitoring of non-European workers.23 States construct illegal immigrants



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by not allowing commuting even though it is economically functional, thus creating a situation in which entire populations live under the threat of expulsion.24 Finally, in collusion with employers, judiciaries indirectly promote illegal immigration through their quasi-official acceptance of employer practices. The directors of temporary employment agencies as well as the businesses that use them know that they employ illegal immigrants, but can play the victim in case of an investigation.25 At most they pay a fine, but often courts simply discharge the case. In sum, states’ practices of impunity show that far from “losing control,”26 they collude in creating illegal workers. The discourse of criminalization has constructed a “danger” of illegal migration that renders an important work force invisible.27 They are statistically and socially invisible, as are their working conditions. Yet they are criminalized by a political emphasis on the role of organized crime and a purported link with terrorism.28 Such criminalization obscures the fact that it is a state-created discrepancy between the demand for labor and closed borders that creates opportunities to be exploited by some actors who are then named criminal. The discrepancy makes possible “reconciliation of the irreconcilable,”29 reconciling on the one hand flexibility, competition, and competitiveness based in part on cheap, disciplined, and illegal labor, and on the other hand, the management of security, based on monitoring and disciplining the population. The criminalization of illegal immigrants legitimizes coercive measures and allows the sovereignty of the state to be exercised in a quite different way. It justifies the surveillance of public and private spaces and repression by detention, expulsion, and raids even in places that are symbols of protection, asylum, and immunity, such as churches and schools. Criminalization legitimizes discretionary interventions such as judicial decisions, evictions, and arbitrary and selective legalization.30 Powers of control and exclusion are reinvented by delegation to private bodies like airlines, rail and maritime companies, private security firms, employers, and third countries.31 This extends surveillance but in so doing transforms the nature of what is being pursued and what is not. Criminalization has resulted in a public/private exercise of domination, perfectly reflecting the neoliberal world order by its power to redefine the boundaries between the permissible, the tolerable, and the reprehensible.

THE FIGHT AGAINST MONEY LAUNDERING, OR THE EXERCISE OF INDIRECT PRIVATE GOVERNMENT Money laundering is always the result of other crimes—tax evasion, fraud, trafficking. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms by which laundering

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has been constructed as the great danger of contemporary globalization helps us to understand the fight against money laundering in political terms. According to official discourse, financial globalization and the decline in regulation have enabled the amount of dirty money in circulation to increase since the 1970s. The control mechanisms of the financial system that were designed to cope with this “evil” did not call into question the very principle of free movement of capital; in any case, they were largely purely decorative, a mere façade, until the early 2000s. Only recently has the denunciation of laundering taken organizational form. September 11 has played a crucial role in constructing a link between money laundering and terrorism, the financing of criminal networks, and attacks on state security. The pretext of terrorism has been critical in giving antilaundering a political dimension. . For years, laundering has been tolerated because it was partly constructed by the dominant actors in the system: states, financial actors, and big businesses. The offshore sector was simultaneously the product of, and an integral part of, state systems. Tax and finance havens were to be found less on islands, even though these were stigmatized, than in the major financial centers, legal spaces created to attract financial flows and to optimize investments from the tax point of view.32 The goal of large merchant banks has always been tax optimization, or, in less polite terms, the more or less legal organization of tax evasion. In the Mediterranean as elsewhere, states have played a major role in the construction of offshore centers and havens following the familiar pattern of the couple vice/virtue: Madeira and the Azores/Portugal and Great Britain; Cyprus/Greece; Malta/the Mediterranean zone; Gibraltar/Spain; Andorra/France and Spain; Monaco/ France and Italy; Nador/Morocco; Benguardanne/Tunisia and Libya. States have turned a blind eye to the creation of fictitious companies; they have promoted offshore companies first in the name of development of ultraperipheral areas (1970s–1980s) and later of the core country’s financial health (1990s–2000s). States have amnestied banks behaving suspiciously (despite categorical inspection reports), and have even encouraged the practice of laundering by allowing stocks and bonds to make anonymous investments that are nondeclarable and nontaxable.33 But September 11 transformed the fight against laundering into a veritable machine of bureaucratic interventionism.34 From that date on, a new emphasis on traceability of capital flows has led to a public/private partnership that empowers bankers, insurers, notaries, lawyers, estate agents, trust managers, casino managers, and traders to oversee the ethics of their profession. Thus, banks have actually transformed previous limitations of the fight against money laundering into commercial and industrial opportunities.35 They have interpreted these rules in terms of the social responsibility of



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enterprise and offered customers the best products for their needs. They have interpreted laundering in terms of managing penal risks and risks to reputation.36 They have integrated antilaundering mechanisms into a larger system for the continual surveillance of operations. The security objective has been interpreted in terms of “auditability,” that is, formal proofs of compliance with legal obligations.37 It has thus been primarily a matter, for the banks, of reducing the uncertainties arising from “operational risks.”38 In this context, “traceability” is fundamental; it makes it possible to follow the flows, to retrace the sequence of transactions, and to identify not crimes themselves but suspicious signs that might track the individual criminal, terrorist, or mafia member.39 One result has been the commodification and marketing of fear and security, through the dissemination of IT tools and norms set by commercial companies (mainly American) and implemented by specialized firms that promote kits and software packages and by sellers of “lists”: lists of people (terrorists, “politically exposed persons,” persons involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction), lists of types of behavior, lists of relations to scrutinize. Thus, the fight against money laundering is undergoing a process in which ethics is commercialized: ethics has become a trade, a market, a technique, and a profession, of which the compliance officer is the emblematic figure.40 Thus, antilaundering policy is not measured by a reduction in the circulation of dirty money or in the number of detections of illegal flows or of sentences handed down, but by the existence within financial institutions of mechanisms and procedures for monitoring. The objective is self-protection from professional and penal sanctions, and from any damage to reputations. The practices involved in the fight against laundering clearly show the limits, not of the legal and illegal, but of the licit and the tolerable. Tax havens and offshore centers are not harassed once they have adopted the antilaundering kit. In other words, what is legal is what is visible in terms of procedures, compliance with formal rules, and the politics of blame avoidance.41 The transformation of antilaundering into the “management of illegalisms”42 is made possible by the leeway offered to bankers and business firms to select their targets for scrutiny. This role of private actors in the concrete definition of crime not only creates business opportunities; it also suggests their hegemonic ability to decide which are the legitimate targets of state-imposed penalties.43 This is an international domination, of course, but above all, it is a matter of internal domination: the ultimate targets are petty criminals and the most vulnerable populations.44 In Europe, since September 11 informal funds transfers, migrants who use cash, and Islamic charitable foundations are carefully scrutinized.45 By and large,

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criminal charges are diverted from the powerful and dominant actors of globalization. Thus, the denunciation of laundering and the claim of an urgent need to detect it serve state action in a sector that symbolizes neoliberal globalization. If direct intervention is no longer appropriate, the use of surveillance technologies and lists, disciplinary measures, internalization of control, and enforced collaboration reveal indirect modes of government passing mainly through private intermediaries but conforming to procedures and concerns defined largely by states.

THE FIGHT AGAINST FAKES, OR THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE NEW BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL Fakes are the third of those “plagues” deemed to pose a threat to the Mediterranean economies. The official discourse highlights the dangers that fake goods represent both for consumer safety and for society as a whole.46 The recent significant surge in fakes, it seems, is detrimental to European companies, who thus lose market shares and therefore jobs, and suffer deterioration in their image and reputation. Morally speaking, it is claimed that faking is reprehensible because it is based on the pillaging of property rights and the national heritage by criminal, even terrorist organizations—a crime encouraged by the unconscious behavior of consumers. Any serious analysis of these texts and factual research show the constructed character of this discourse, which rests primarily on quantitative data whose sources and construction are rarely made explicit, and which circulate as certainties, like the 10 percent of commerce that faking is said to represent in Europe or 200,000 jobs lost in Europe. However, these data are partly contradicted when one and the same text claims that fake goods are increasing in the region while showing a statistical decrease in seizures.47 The dangerous nature of faking is also constructed from a few repeated examples, like Spain’s adulterated cooking oil in the 1980s, the Peugeot car bonnets marketed in 1999, a few toys put into circulation in England in the early 2000s, or various drugs from Africa. More importantly, fakes cannot be reduced to pillage and theft. The diversity of fakes is actually huge and involves very different logics. We can distinguish at least five major groups:48 (1) products that appear similar but are deliberately nonidentical with the goods they simulate such as the perfume Cannel No. 5 or the brand Kalvin Klain; (2) products that use the same designs, colors, or labels as famous products in order to create a family resemblance, such as the “bargain” products of various well-known brands; (3) products that display some sign



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pretending an economic or legal relationship with a prestigious original; (4) outright imitation without the brand name of an exclusive model; (5) actual fake, all of whose external aspects mimic those of the copied product, including name and brand. These multiple logics of the fake are a response to diverse economic logics: one that seeks to save money by demanding cheaper and lower-quality goods;49 one of mimicry, apprenticeship, and late industrialization in a logic of catching-up that does less to undermine property rights than to protect techniques and markets of more developed countries;50 a logic of market segmentation and marketing techniques that allows the duplication and distribution of products through differentiated networks;51 and a logic of improvisation, with the purchase of lots whose contents cannot be known with any precision.52 The consequences are obviously not the same: they depend on the category of “fakes” to which these goods belong, in terms of illegality and “crime,” either in moral terms, or in economic and financial terms. . In all this, the close relationship between fakes and relocation is totally obscured. The fakes come not only from Asia (China) and Eastern Europe, but also from the Mediterranean, from its southern shores (Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey) as well as from its northern shores (Italy, Spain, Portugal), both of which include countries of delocalization on a vast scale. Most importantly, the companies that produce “fakes” are rarely specialized in falsification. Most often, the same companies make “authentic” and “fake” things, producing goods of different qualities. They sometimes do so intentionally by voluntarily restricting the market and creating, more or less deliberately, secondary markets. With the permission of the principals in foreign trade, they create a given volume of production beyond the quota; or else they decide to produce different goods of lesser quality for specific market segments—for example, during sales periods. They often do so in a way not provided for by the central purchasing department: the latter can refuse, on the grounds of defective goods or damaged packaging, certain lots that are then marketed by relocated workshops. Finally, the “fake” may arise from the very logic of relocation and lower-cost purchases in a race for profitability that sometimes fails to check on the origin and quality of producers and intermediaries.53 So a fake is often less deliberately produced to mislead customers than to push profitability to its maximum. Finally, the discourse of the dangers posed by fake goods charges “mafiatype” organized crime and even terrorist networks with producing and marketing these without proof. One example: Islamic extremists raised money for the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York by selling fake T-shirts; one of the leaders of the gang of Vietnamese

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origin Born to Kill has acknowledged that it earned more than 13 million dollars by trading in fake watches; and it is estimated that, in the United Kingdom, criminal networks handle 600 million pounds through the trade of pirated DVDs—an activity that generates income for illegal immigrants. These gangs also operate in other areas of illicit activities like drug trafficking or people trafficking, pornography, illegal betting, or racketeering!54

While it is true that the Mafia and the Camorra in particular are involved with fakes in Italy, or even in countries in which they invest and outsource, such as Tunisia,55 this depends on very particular circumstances. More importantly, fakes are the province of relocated businesses and small entrepreneurs who produce them on the margins of legality but who are not necessarily members of criminal networks, although they may be forced to pay protection when located in territories dominated by the mafia.56 Institutions involved in the fight against fakes greatly overstate the role of organized crime in economic offences by adopting a stereotypical, exaggerated, and systematic definition of what “organized crime” is.57 In fact, economic offences are also found in lawful and legitimate business circles. Legality is problematic given fluid, fuzzy, and porous boundaries; alliances that change with circumstances; ill-defined careers; and relationships often characterized by tolerance, complicity, hybridization, and collusion—whether legal or not—between business and politics. In faking, as in trafficking, targeting criminal organizations and perpetrators means finding scapegoats on the cheap. It hides the true nature of these transgressions by reducing the question to mere violations of rules. The construction of a “plague” and the fight against faking has assumed forms that are consistent with neoliberal modes of government like public/ private partnerships of enforcement. Norms, controls, authentication, and sanctions are measures defined together with the “pillaged” companies who help to set up technical and operational centers established for that purpose. An antifake “governance” is thus set up, aimed at sharing powers between the state and all economic actors in the sector including producers, distributors, and consumers. As with money laundering, it becomes a question of tracking suspicious flows, patterns, or activities, monitoring and tracing transactions so as to detect the criminal. Vigilance is handed over to peers and clients.58 What remains unquestioned and untouched is the economic imperative of flexibility and competitiveness that sponsors the tendency to relocation in the search for low costs of production. Also unquestioned are the implicit policies of protection by norms and quality, at a time when traditional protectionist policies are being delegitimized. These silences leave



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untouched a nonegalitarian economic order in which the developed and industrialized countries always enjoy a comparative advantage thanks to the rules they manage to impose on the international level. Stigmatizing specific actors like organized crime (for example, the Camorra) creates a myth of collective danger while removing suspicion from the instigators of relocation and profitability, and enabling a covert form of protection through indirect interventions in the markets. THE FIGHT AGAINST SMUGGLING AND TRAFFICKING OF GOODS, OR THE LOGIC OF SECURE EXCHANGE Finally, in the case of trafficking and smuggling, the construction of danger goes well beyond any real loss of revenue alone. In addition, arguments of security, morality, and legality are marshaled for a public staging of trafficking: “The illegal sales of contraband tobacco, alcohol and beer contribute to a global underground economy. In the tobacco sector alone, organized crime has become the ‘fourth producer worldwide.’”59 From this base, it is asserted, criminal networks establish themselves permanently in the heart of a country and build bridgeheads from which to organize other illicit trades, in particular drugs. The story is much more complex here too: it mostly involves legitimate and dominant actors in the global economic system—first and foremost, firms. For example, tobacco companies have a significant interest in increasing the market for cigarettes. Thus, they turn a blind eye to the practice of overselling, exceeding the estimated consumption by a country. In a market dominated by a very small number of actors, no criminal organizations have ever been detected.60 Overall, on both sides of the Mediterranean, legitimate businesses play an important role in smuggling by underestimating their imports, making false statements, and “forgetting” to declare goods to customs.61 The majority of goods that illegally enter do so through ports and actors identified as legal and legitimate. The denunciation of organized crime ignores the involvement of these enterprises and obscures the fact that free zones and free points are often less tightly sealed than previously believed. Furthermore, relocated businesses also engage in smuggling, as in the case of “fakes,” with or without the consent of the entrepreneur and the principal.62 Here again, the official discourse of trafficking and smuggling is based on a false dichotomy of legal and illegal economic actors. States are also heavily involved in smuggling and trafficking. In this, enclaves play an important role, as in the case of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish

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presidios on Moroccan soil. Free ports since 1863, their status actually has been strengthened by emergency legislation and visa exemption for cross-border commuters from Tetuan and Nador.63 Ceuta receives about 10,000 Moroccans every day without a visa.64 Tangier, an international city in the 1920s and then a free port after independence, owed its development to the use of free zones in the 1970s and especially 1980–1990—a policy intensified today with the construction of Tangier Mediterranean, soon to be one of the largest trans-shipment and dispersal ports in the western Mediterranean. Similarly, Mediterranean ports of Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria facilitate trafficking often with state collusion.65 Nor are the northern shores exempt, as in the case of Andorra and Gibraltar, whose membership in the European Union does not require them to join its customs territory,66 or in the case of free zones, preferential tax regimes, or places of bank secrecy in the British Islands, Luxembourg, or Switzerland. Thus, in trafficking as in the case of fakes, the role of organized crime is largely overestimated. Targeting and reifying this actor obscures other actors. Other mechanisms make such trafficking possible: financial arrangements to minimize taxes, passage through companies acting as fronts based in countries with intensive bank secrecy, and transit through tax havens or countries deemed to have a low degree of judicial cooperation.67 Similarly, the fact that some ports happen to be located in territories controlled in part by criminal organizations (Naples, Gioia Tauro, Istanbul) does not mean that they organize and control this traffic. Rather, what we see in Campania, Calabria, and Turkey is an in-between situation whose status is difficult to determine: the borders between legal and illegal, between official and “mafia member,” between “clean” and “dirty,” are extremely unclear and are marked only when judicial action is taken.68 Generally, economic actors, whoever they are, take advantage of these borders. As Eiko Siniawer reminds us for the beginning of the twentieth century, research into mafias shows that they are restructured according to the globalization and internationalization of business, though they do not take the place of states and legitimate actors. This research suggests that there is a subtle interplay between actors that the stigmatization of “organized crime” or the “mafia state” tends to conceal.69 In reality, the “grip” of the “mafias” differs greatly from one country to another, from one history to another, from one moment to another. Business ties appear much more fluid than a description in terms of organized crime would suggest, and much weaker and more fleeting too, committing people to little, and perpetually renegotiated.70 The regulation of shipping provides us with another illustration of this blinkered outlook. Through the interplay between merchant shipping,



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terminal port operators, and state and regional governments, this mode of transport has undergone radical transformations over the past thirty years. Now a small number of trans-shipment hubs concentrate all the flows of merchandise transported in ever-bigger standardized containers. In this context, the Mediterranean Sea fulfills an increasingly important role, representing 30 percent of merchant traffic and 25 percent of oil traffic.71 Algeciras in Spain, Marsaxlokk in Malta, Gioia Tauro in Italy, Damietta in Egypt, and soon Tangier Mediterranean in Morocco, are the main ports. Distance is no longer expensive in a logic of competitiveness, concentration, and speed-up. What matters are the physical possibilities and techniques for massing.72 Competitiveness also requires reductions in costs achieved more or less legally, through flags of convenience and tax evasion, and through improved techniques of containerization.73 But this concentration makes it physically impossible to control merchandise. There is in fact an “illusion of inspection”:74 ports possess sophisticated machines, scanners, tools for inspection and control capable, in principle, of inspecting anything and everything. However, it is impossible to monitor all goods systematically and concretely, given the vast size of the flows and the speed constraints for routing, trans-shipment, and delivery. Smuggling is thus facilitated, yet this concentration itself is never questioned— nor is the extent to which the quality of control can be assessed. On the other hand, the fight against trafficking focuses on the ever-increasing sophistication of safety standards and techniques. A whole system of authentication, of secure traceability, of well-protected unit markings, and of the standardization and harmonization of legal rules is being implemented to locate perpetrators of crimes. Yet “technology is more than a tool for authentication. It is a judicial tool capable of providing the evidence that is indispensable for the fight against new profiles conducive to crimes.”75 As with the “perils” analyzed above, such intervention is delegated to private actors like companies that market protection systems and automated monitoring, companies that manage port terminals, security firms, ship owners, and bankers. Such commodified security is exercised arbitrarily, alternating tolerance and prohibition. Trafficking is generally known, accepted, and even tolerated until, at some point, a oneoff intervention creates an example, to show that the state knows what is happening and is in control, and to put an overambitious actor back in his place—a place that must remain marginal. The denunciation of criminals can then enable wrongdoers to be stigmatized without the very architecture of globalization, its mechanisms, and its practices being called into question.

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ECONOMIC CRIME AS NEOLIBERAL WITCHES’ SABBATH The fundamental question is thus not one of legality or illegality, or even of what is permissible and what is not, of the moral and the immoral—even if the logic of moralization is often mobilized. Many types of behavior are tolerated while the most consensual moral principles are violated, and many activities are not prosecuted when laws are violated. The fight against crime appears more like the province of the imaginaire, where fear reigns and the search for scapegoats catalyzes this fear. It is also the province of a commitment to state action in a context that actually limits such commitment. The image of the witches’ Sabbath in sixteenth-century Italy helps us to deepen this analysis: like criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and mafias today, the description of the sects of sorcerers then was based less on real events than on social and moral representations and on an imaginaire.76 The denunciation of the witches’ Sabbath was based on an ideology that highlighted conspiracies and presumed occult powers willing and able to do evil, thus transforming the present into a permanent threat. Complex problems were condemned and exorcised by a single and relatively simple causal relationship.77 The denunciation of an evil constructed in this way allowed the political authorities to demonstrate their ability to protect people and respond to security demands. Economic, political, and social transformations and insecurities were thus transferred onto scapegoats; identifying these scapegoats depended on current power relations. The stereotypes by which the terrorist, the mafia member, the smuggler, or organized crime as a whole are highlighted as primary economic lawbreakers strangely echo the processes by which witches were identified. Denunciations and acts of exorcism were not so much determined by dominant values and ideas than they were legitimated by them ex post facto.78 Today as well, reifying figures of evil seems to succeed precisely because it allows state actors to pursue a diffuse mission for security on a daily basis with a simplified and more predictable view of the world.79 Eiko Siniawer also shows in her article that the focus on “organized crime” and the rhetoric of criminalization are classical ways of underestimating and deliberately overlooking illegal practices of legitimate actors.80 The fight against organized crime thus appears to be an aspect of power and sovereignty enabling the exercise of modes of government compatible with neoliberal economic globalization. It appears as an interventionism that is not dictated from on high, by the sole sovereign decision of the state—which might conflict with the principles of support for markets, competition, and profitability—but that rather advances by “delegation” to the



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highest and lowest levels, through the partnership between private and public actors, through consumers, competitors, and company hierarchies, and finally through the ability to quit the national territory altogether thanks to consensual norms and morality more than of law itself.81 These interventions, always business friendly, are a mixture of incentives and directives, of self-supervision and peer pressure, of control by subordinates and control by clients (as in the well-known case of whistle blowing), of threats to reputation (as in the technique of naming and shaming), of the mobilization of morality (according to the puritanical imaginaire of globalization), of listing (which requires much less evidence than would a court sentence), and of risk prevention (which tends to eliminate the act in favor of an essentialization of the terrorist, the gang, the mafia member, the criminal state, and the smuggler). By obscuring the collusion between crime, business, and politics favored by the privatization of the state, the process of criminalization is seen to be the very expression of a “cheap mode of government”82 specific to neoliberalism, combining the dream of self-regulation, discretionary bureaucratic intervention, and moralization. The neoliberal state through its public-private redeployment does not surrender its power but reshapes it by defining new fields and overall new modalities of interventions. As examples of illegal migrations, money laundering, fakes, and trafficking have shown, this redeployment doesn’t result only from voluntarism by an omnipotent and omniscient state. It is, in reality, the fruit of a permanent interaction, the fruit of tensions, conflicts, negotiations, and arrangements between various actors—public and private actors, economic and political actors. The role that state and state agents play in it is fundamental: they criticize former practices, try to make state sovereignty felt, and develop new interventions. However, these are shaped by economic forces and private actors with which they interact, so state interventions have to model themselves on the neoliberal political economy: I have shown that the fight against economic criminality passes less and less through public administrations such as police and justice, and more and more by the application of rules, standards, and procedures that are simultaneously defined by state actors and by private actors. This neoliberal art of government becomes incarnate in a “framework policy” that opens the way to an “active governmentality” required for all society to conform to principles of enterprise, competition, and market.83 This redefinition both transforms and is the expression of the ways political domination is exercised: through intermediaries, mostly economic ones, and so through mechanisms that are less direct, less institutional, and less police oriented.

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NOTES This chapter was first published in the Journal of Social History 45, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 642–60. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for the permission to reprint the article here. 1. G. Gribaudi, “Il ciclo vizioso dei rifiuti campani,” Il Mulino 435 (2008): 17–35. 2. M. Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (New York, 2005); R. W. Baker, Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System (Hoboken, NJ, 2005); M. Glenny, McMafia. Crime without Frontiers (London, 2008); Politique internationale, special issue “Contrefaçon, fraude alimentaire et contrebande: les fléaux du XXIème siècle” 124, (2009). 3. M. Castells, The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 3, The End of Millennium (London, 1998); D. Conway and N. Heynen, eds, Globalization’s Contradictions. Geographies of Discipline, Destruction and Transformation (London, 2006) and especially D. Conway, “Globalization of Labor. Increasing Complexity, More Unruly,” 79–94, and C. Allen, “Unruly Spaces. Globalization and Transnational Criminal Economies,” 95–105. 4. S. Strange, The Retreat of the State. The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge, 2006); R. B. Hall and T. Biersteker, eds, Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge, 2000). 5. For a critical analysis, Critique internationale, special issue on “Les faces cachées du partenariat euro-méditerranéen” 18 (2003): 114–78. 6. See the French journal Esprit 356 (July 2009): 104–92, and especially O. Abel, “L’océan, le puritain, le pirate,” A. Garapon, “L’imaginaire pirate de la mondialisation,” and O. Mongin, “De la piraterie protestante aux piratages contemporains.” 7. J. McC. Heyman ed., States and Illegal Practices (Oxford, 1999); W. van Schendel and I. Abraham, “Introduction. The Making of Illicitness,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization, ed. W. van Schendel and I. Abraham (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 1–37; B. Dillman, “Introduction. Shining Light on the Shadows: The Political Economy of Illicit Transactions in the Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Politics, special volume on “Crime, Corruption and the Shadow Economy in the Mediterranean,” 12, no. 2 (2007): 123–39; J. L. Briquet and G. Favarel-Garrigues, eds, Milieux criminels et pouvoir politique. Les ressorts illicites de l’Etat (Paris, 2008), translated as Organized Crime and States. The Hidden Face of Politics (Basingstoke, UK, 2010). 8. See for example M. Péraldi, ed., Cabas et containers. Activités marchandes informelles et réseaux migrants transfrontaliers (Paris, 2001); B. Hibou, “The ‘Social Capital’ of the State, or the Ruse of Economic Intelligence,” in J. F. Bayart, S. Ellis, and B. Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa (London, 1998) and “L’intégration européenne du Portugal et de la Grèce: le rôle des marges,” in La coopération internationale face au libéralisme, ed. S. Mappa (Paris, 2003), 87–134; R. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca, NY, 2002); A. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection



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(Princeton, NJ, 2005); J. F. Bayart, Le gouvernement du monde (Paris, 2006; English translation Global Subject, London, 2008) ; F. Adelkhah and J. F. Bayart, Voyages du développement. Emigration, commerce, exil (Paris, 2007) ; G. Favarel-Garrigues, T. Godefroy, and P. Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. Les banques aux prises avec l’antiblanchiment (Paris, 2009); G. Gribaudi, ed., Traffici Criminali. Camorra, Mafie e Reti Internazionali dell’illegalità (Torino, 2009). 9. Heyman, States and Illegal Practices; Bayart, Global Subjects; Briquet and Favarel, Organized Crime and States; P. Dardot and C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris, 2009). 10. C. Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1975) and “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. P. B. Evans, D. Rueschmeyer, and T. Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985). 11. Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou, Criminalisation of the State in Africa; Heyman, States and Illegal Practices; B. Hibou, “L’historicité de la construction européenne: le secteur bancaire en Grèce et au Portugal,” Les Etudes du CERI 85–86 (April 2002) and “L’intégration européenne du Portugal et de la Grèce”; B. Hibou and M. Tozy, “Une lecture d’anthropologie politique de la corruption au Maroc: fondement historique d’une prise de liberté avec le droit,” Revue Tiers Monde (January–March 2000): 23–47  ; G. Gribaudi, Mediatori. Antropologia del potere democristiano nel Mezzogiorno (Torino, 1980). 12. P. Hillyard, J. Sim, S. Tombs, and D. Whyte, “Leaving a ‘Stain on the Silence.’ Contemporary Criminology and the Politics of Dissent,” British Journal of Criminology 44, no. 3 (2004): 369–90; Schendel and Abraham, “Introduction. The Making of Illicitness”; Briquet and Favarel, Organized Crime and States. 13. This comes directly from the seminal and now classical works of historical sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Tilly, or Foucault. 14. Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa; R. Coleman, Reclaiming the Streets. Surveillance, Social Control and the City (Cullompton, UK, 2004); R. Coleman, S. Tombs, and D. Whyte, “Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft in the Entrepreneurial City,” Urban Studies 42, no. 13 (December 2005): 2511–30; Bayart, Global Subjects; O. Vallée, La police morale de l’anticorruption. Cameroun, Nigeria (Paris, 2010); G. Favarel-Garrigues, La police des moeurs économiques. De l’URSS à la Russie (1965–1995) (Paris, 2007); Briquet and Favarel, Organized Crime and States; Gribaudi, Traffici Criminali; Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. 15. B. Hibou, “Retrait ou redéploiement de l’Etat?,” Critique internationale 1 (October 1998): 151–68; B. Hibou, ed., La Privatisation des Etats (Paris, 1999; English translation Privatizing the State, London, 2004). 16. For all these transformations, among many others, J. P. Garson and M. El Mouhoud, “Sous-traitance et désalarisation formelle de la main d’œuvre dans le BTP,” Notes de l’IRES 19 (1989): 36–47; A. Pupier, “La fausse sous-traitance dans le bâtiment et les travaux publics,” Sociétés contemporaines 10 (1992): 153– 70; T. Coutrot, L’entreprise néolibérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste (Paris, 1998); L.

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Boltanski and E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris, 1999; English translation The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, 2006); J. P. Durand, La chaîne invisible. Travailler aujourd’hui: flux tendu et servitude volontaire (Paris, 2004). 17. For a beautiful sociological and anthropological analysis of outsourcing, subcontracting, and temping agencies, see N. Jounin, “L’illégalité sous-traitée? Les conséquences du recours à des employeurs intermédiaires dans le secteur du bâtiment,” Droit social 1 (2007): 38–45 and Chantier interdit au public. Enquête parmi les travailleurs du bâtiment (Paris, 2008). 18. M. I. Baganha, “A cada Sul o seu Norte. Dinâmicas migratorias em Portugal,” in Globalização. Fatalidade ou Utopia, ed. B. de Sousa Santos (Porto, 2001); Hibou, “L’intégration européenne de la Grèce et du Portugal”; A. Math and A. Spire, Vers une immigration permanente de travailleurs temporaires. Du mode 4 de l’AGCS aux différents régimes migratoires de travailleurs détachés, IRES, document de travail, n° 04.060 (2006) 19. Jounin, Chantier interdit au public. 20. M. Math and A. Spire, “Des travailleurs jetables,” Plein droit 61 (June 2004); F. Quassoli, “Migrants in the Italian Underground Economy,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23, no. 2 (1999): 212–31. 21. M. Samson, “Travailleurs de l’ombre. Les obscures filières de l’économie française,” in La France invisible, ed. S. Beaud, J. Confavreux, and J. Lindgaard (Paris, 2006), 427–42; Math and Spire, Vers une immigration permanente; Jounin, Chantier interdit au public. 22. C. Fouteau, “Expulsables. Comment vivre sans papiers en France quand on est en règle dans son pays,” in La France invisible, ed. Beaud, Confavreux, and Lindgaard, 141–54. 23. V. Guiraudon, “Third Country Nationals and European Law: Obstacles to Rights’ Expansion,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24, no. 4 (October 1998): 657–74; special issue of Cultures et Conflits (49) on “La mise à l’écart des étrangers: la logique et les effets du visa schengen” (Spring 2003); D. Bigo and E. Guild, Controlling Frontiers. Free Movement into and Within Europe (Aldershot, UK, 2005); E. Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’Etat, le peuple (Paris, 2001). 24. Fouteau, “Expulsables”; T. Deltombe and J. Lindgaard, “Expulsés. Quand il n’est pas possible de refaire sa vie ‘au pays’ après avoir été expulsé de France,” in La France invisible, ed. Beaud, Confavreux, and Lindgaard, 155–65. 25. Jounin, Chantier interdit au public. 26. In reference to S. Sassen, Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York, 1996). 27. Beaud, Confavreux, and Lindgaard, La France invisible. 28. For a deconstruction of this discourse, see B. Hibou, “Le Partenariat en réanimation bureaucratique,” Critique internationale 18 (January 2003): 117–28; O. Lamloum, “L’enjeu de l’islamisme au coeur du processus de Barcelone,” Critique internationale 18 (January 2003): 129–42; M. Péraldi, “Aventuriers du nouveau capitalisme marchand. Essai d’anthropologie de l’éthique mercantile,” in



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Voyages du développement, ed. Adelkhah and Bayart; A. Içduygu, “The Politics of Irregular Migratory Flows in the Mediterranean Basin: Economy, Mobility and ‘Illegality’,” Mediterranean Politics 12, no. 2 (July 2007): 141–61. 29. V. Pereira, “L’Etat portugais et les Portugais en France de 1957 à 1974,” PhD diss., Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2007. 30. See the special issue of the French journal Cultures et Conflits, 68, “Circulations et archipels d’exception” (Winter 2007): 7–146. 31. G. Lahav, “Immigration and the State: The Devolution and Privatisation of Immigration Control in the European Union,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24, no. 4 (October 1998): 675–94. 32. R. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca, NY, 2002); R. Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Ithaca, NY, 2003); T. Godefroy and P. Lascoumes, Le capitalisme clandestin. L’illusoire régulation des places off shore (Paris, 2004); C. Chavagneux and R. Palan, Les Paradis fiscaux (Paris, 2006). 33. B. Hibou, “Les enjeux de l’ouverture au Maroc: dissidence économique et contrôle politique,” Les Etudes du CERI 15 (April 1996) and “L’intégration européenne de la Grèce et du Portugal”; D. McMurray, In and Out of Morocco: Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown (Minneapolis, 2001); H. Meddeb, Contrebande et réseaux marchands informels en Tunisie, Paris, FASOPO, Working Paper (February 2009). 34. Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. 35. Ibid; Vallée, La police morale de l’anticorruption. 36. C. Hood, “What Happens When Transparency Meets Blame-Avoidance,” Public Management Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 191–210. 37. M. Power, The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification (Oxford, 1997). 38. M. Power, The Risk Management of Everything. Rethinking the Politics of Uncertainty (London, 2004). 39. Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale; Garapon, “L’imaginaire pirate de la mondialisation.” 40. Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. 41. Hood, “What Happens When Transparency Meets Blame-Avoidance”; Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. 42. M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975, English translation Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, London, 1977); P. Lascoumes, Elites irrégulières. Essai sur la délinquance d’affaires (Paris, 1997). 43. Coleman, Tombs, and Whyte, “Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft in the Entrepreneurial City.” 44. Coleman, Reclaiming the Streets. 45. Favarel-Garrigues, Godefroy, and Lascoumes, Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. 46. Commission européenne, Livre vert relatif à la lutte contre la contrefaçon (Brussels, 1998); European Commission, Smuggling, Counterfeiting and Piracy. The Rising Tide of Contraband and Organized Crime in Europe (January 2001), http://www.reacteu.org; Ministère des Finances, Lutter contre la nouvelle délinquance économique:

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les contrefaçons, Notes bleues de Bercy (Paris, 16–31 May 1995); Ministère des Finances, Le plan d’action 2003–2004 du Comité national anti-contrefaçon, Notes bleues de Bercy (Paris, 2003); J. L. Zecri, “Les contrefaçons: un fléau financier à l’échelle mondiale,” Humanisme et entreprise 284 (October 2007): 54–92. 47. See for example Ministère des Finances, Le plan d’action 2003–2004 du Comité national anti-contrefaçon. 48. S. Casillo, “L’irresistibile ascesa dell’industria del falso in Italia,” Il Mulino 37 anno XLVII (July–August 1998): 696–710. 49. J. Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago, 2004). 50. P. Delval, “Faux-semblants et vrais crimes: risques majeurs pour les consommateurs,” Politique internationale 124 (Summer 2009): 45–64. And for historical comparison, P. Minard, La fortune du Colbertisme. Etat et industrie dans la France des Lumières (Paris, 1998) ; C. Poni, “Mode et innovation. Stratégies des marchands en soie de Lyon, 18e siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 45, no. 3 (July–September 1998): 589–625. 51. Casillo, “L’irresistibile ascesa dell’industria del falso”; Guyer, Marginal Gains. 52. M. Péraldi, “Economies criminelles et mondes des affaires à Tanger,” Cultures et Conflits 68 (Winter 2007): 111–25. 53. For all these processes, R. Saviano, Gomorrah (New York, 2007);  Delval, “Faux-semblants et vrais crimes”; V. Manry, “‘Etre en affaire.’ Compétences relationnelles, éthique de la performance et ordre social au marché des Puces,” in Cabas et containers, ed. Péraldi, 279–314. 54. R. Romulo, “Mesurer le commerce illicite pour mieux le combattre,” Politique internationale 124 (Summer 2009): 21–22. 55. Casillo, “L’irresistibile ascesa dell’industria del falso”; Saviano, Gomorrah; A. Dal Lago and S. Palidda, “L’immigration et la politique d’immigration en Italie,” in Les nouvelles migrations, un enjeu européen, ed. E. Bribosia and A. Rea (Bruxelles, 2002), 183–206; L. d’Alessandro, “Città e criminalità: il comercio come chiave interpretativa,” in Gribaudi, Traffici criminali, 334–469. 56. C. Schmoll, “Cosmopolitisme au quotidien et circulations commerciales à Naples,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 66 (2003), http://cdlm.revues.org/index138. html; Saviano, Gomorrah; R. Sciarrone, “Mafia and Civil Society. Economico-criminal Collusion and Territorial Control in Calabria,” in Briquet and Favarel-Garrigues, Organized Crime and States, 173–96. 57. J. L. Briquet, Mafia, justice et politique en Italie. L’affaire Andreotti dans la crise de la République, 1992–2004 (Paris, 2007); Briquet and Favarel-Garrigues, Organized Crime and States; Gribaudi, Traffici criminali. 58. For a description of these measures, Ministère des Finances, Le plan d’action 2003–2004 du Comité national anti-contrefaçon; Delval, “Faux-semblants et vrais crimes.” 59. M. Amon and P. Amon, “L’innovation contre les trafics illicites: un enjeu stratégiques,” Politique internationale 124 (Summer 2009): 32–33. 60. R. S. Frey, “The International Traffic in Tobacco,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1997): 303–19; E. T. Kellett-Bowman, “Le trafic de cigarettes dans l’Union



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européenne,” Regard européen (July 1997): 43–50; N. Guarino, “Sigarette di contrabbando: il traffico illecito di tabacchi a Napoli dal doppoguerra agli anni novanta,” in Gribaudi, Traffici criminali, 90–111. 61. Hibou, “Les enjeux de l’ouverture au Maroc”; McMurray, In and Out of Morocco; Péraldi, Cabas et containers; C. Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2007). 62. Péraldi, “Economies criminelles et mondes d’affaire à Tanger”; Meddeb, Contrebande et réseaux marchands informels en Tunisie. 63. A. Berramdane, “Le statut des enclaves espagnoles de Ceuta et Melilla dans l’Union européenne,” Revue du droit de l’Union européenne 2 (2008): 237–60. 64. Péraldi, “Economies criminelles et mondes d’affaire à Tanger.” 65. O. Pliez ed., La nouvelle Libye. Sociétés, espaces et géopolitique au lendemain de l’embargo (Paris, 2004) and “Salloum, une bourgade bédouine sur la route de la mondialisation,” Espace géographique 38 (January–March 2009): 31–42; J. P. Bras, “Le Maghreb dans la ‘geurre contre le terrorisme.’ Enjeux juridiques et politiques des législations antiterroristes,” Année du Maghreb (2005–2006): 447–67 ; B. Hibou, La force de l’obéissance. Economie politique de la répression en Tunisie (Paris, 2006; English translation The Force of Obedience. Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, London, 2011); Meddeb, Contrebande et réseaux marchands informels en Tunisie. 66. Guarino, “Sigarette di contrabbando”; Berramdane, “Le statut des enclaves espagnoles de Ceuta et Melilla dans l’Union européenne.” 67. Palan, The Offhore World; Chavagneux and Palan, Les Paradis fiscaux. 68. Schmoll, “Cosmopolitisme au quotidien”; Sciarrone, “Mafia and Civil Society.” 69. Briquet, Mafia, justice et politique en Italie; Gribaudi, Traffici criminali. 70. Péraldi, “Economie criminelles et mondes d’affaire à Tanger”; A. Haddaoui, “Il traffico di cannabis: dalle filiere internazionali alle reti locali marsigliesi,” in Traffici criminali, ed. Gribaudi, 556–73; Manry, “Etre en affaires”; Schmoll, “Cosmopolitisme au quotidien.” 71. J. Tandonnet, “La Méditerranée sous haute surveillance,” Diplomatie 35 (November–December 2008): 41–43. 72. D. Boudouin, J. Colin, and M. Quercy, “Développement régional et organisation des échanges dans l’espace euro-méditerranéen,” Méditerranée 98, no. 1–2 (2002): 97–103; J. Marcadon, “Géographie portuaire de l’espace euro-méditerranéen,” Méditeranée 98, no. 1–2 (2002): 55–66; V. Lavaud-Letilleul, “L’aménagement de nouveaux terminaux à conteneurs et le renouvellement de la problématique flux-territoire dans les ports de la Rangée Nord,” Flux 59 (January–March 2005): 33–45. 73. A. Frémont, “L’espace maritime et marchand: pour une problématique,” L’espace géographique 3 (1996): 202–13; R. Bergeron, “Croissance des flux de conteneurs et avènement d’un mégaport: Gioia Tauro en Calabre,” L’information géographique 3 (1999): 99–111. 74. Nordstrom, Global Outlaws. 75. Amon and Amon, “L’innovation contre les trafics illicites,” 35.

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76. C. Ginzburg, Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba (Torino, 1989; English translation Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, New York, 1991). 77. G. Levi, L’eredità immateriale. Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento (Torino, 1985). 78. P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981). 79. Levi, L’eredità immateriale. 80. E. H. Sutherland, White-Collar Crime: The Uncut Version (New Haven, CT, 1983); Lascoumes, Elites irrégulières; G. Slapper and S. Tombs, Corporate Crime (London, 1999); Coleman, Tombs, and Whyte, “Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft.” 81. Dardot and Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde; Garapon, “L’imaginaire pirate de la mondialisation.” 82. M. Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population (Paris, 2004; English translation Security, Territory, Population, Basingstoke, UK, 2007). 83. M. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique (Paris, 2004; English translation The Birth of Biopolitics, New York, 2008).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bayart, J.-F. Le gouvernement du monde. Paris, 2006; English translation Global Subject, London, 2008. Bayart, J.-F., S. Ellis, and B. Hibou. The Criminalisation of the State in Africa. London, 1998. Briquet, J. L., and G. Favarel-Garrigues, eds. Organized Crime and States. The Hidden Face of Politics. Basingstoke, UK, 2010. Dardot, P., and C. Laval. La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale. Paris, 2009. Favarel-Garrigues, G., T. Godefroy, and P. Lascoumes. Les sentinelles de l’argent sale. Les banques aux prises avec l’antiblanchiment. Paris, 2009. Foucault, M. Security, Territory, Population. Basingstoke, UK, 2007.     The Birth of Biopolitics. New York, 2008. Ginzburg, C. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. New York, 1991. Gribaudi, G., ed. Traffici Criminali. Camorra, Mafie e Reti Internazionali dell’illegalità. Torino, 2009. Guyer, J. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago, 2004. Hibou, B., ed. Privatizing the State. London, 2004. Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ, 2005. Heyman, J. McC., ed. States and Illegal Practices. Oxford, 1999. Naylor, R. Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy. Ithaca, NY, 2002. Palan, R. The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires. Ithaca, NY, 2003.



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Power, M. The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification. Oxford, 1997. Sutherland, E. H. White-Collar Crime: The Uncut Version. New Haven, CT, 1983. Tilly, C. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, ed. P. B. Evans, D. Rueschmeyer, and T. Skocpol. Cambridge, 1985.     ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ, 1975. Van Schendel, W., and I. Abraham, eds. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington, IN, 2005.

Contributors

O

Renate Bridenthal is professor of history, retired, from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She has co-edited and contributed to Becoming Visible: Women in European History, When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, and has co-edited Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History and Seascapes: Littoral Cultures and Transoceanic Exchanges. Douglas Burgess, Jr. is an author and historian specializing in maritime and legal history. Burgess received a BA from McGill University in 1999, a JD from Cornell University in 2002, an LLM (Legal Masters) from the University of British Columbia in 2003, and a PhD from Brown University in 2009. Published books include The Pirates’ Pact, Seize the Trident, and The World for Ransom. He is currently assistant professor of history at Yeshiva University in New York. Béatrice Hibou is director of research of the CNRS at CERI-SciencesPo (Paris). She holds a PhD in political economy from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1995). Her most important publications include La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, Anatomie politique de la domination, The Force of Obedience. Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, Privatising the State, and The Criminalisation of the State in Africa (with Jean-François Bayart and Stephen Ellis). Mary Lindemann is professor and chair of the department of history at the University of Miami. She is the author of Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, Health and Healing in Early Modern Germany, and Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712–1830. She has just completed a study of “merchant republics” (Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg) during the long eighteenth century. 263

264 Contributors

She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Michael Kwass is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Recipient of the David Pinkney Prize for Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (2000), he has published numerous articles on consumer culture in the age of the Enlightenment and is completing a book titled Louis Mandrin: Globalization, Smuggling, and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century France. Patricia Rawlinson is a senior lecturer in Criminology at Monash University, Melbourne. She has published widely on crime and corruption in Russia and Eastern Europe. Her recent publications include From Fear to Fraternity: A Russian Tale of Crime, Economy and Modernity (2010) and “Transnational Organized Crime: Media, Myths and Realities” in The Handbook of Transnational Organized Crime (2012). Nazih Richani is associate professor and director of Latin American Studies, Kean University, and the author of several academic articles and the books Dilemmas of Democracy and Political Parties in Sectarian Societies: The Case of the PSP in Lebanon and Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. A second revised edition of Systems of Violence is forthcoming in June 2013. He is also a recipient of three Fulbright Grants. Eiko Maruko Siniawer is associate professor of history at Williams College. She specializes in the history of modern Japan and is the author of Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan. Her current research is on the concepts of waste and wastefulness in postwar Japan. Kristof Titeca is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Fund-Flanders (FWO), based at the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp, and the Conflict Research Group, University of Gent. His research interests are cross-border informal trade, rebel movements, and “failed states” in sub-Saharan Africa, issues on which he has conducted extensive field research in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and on which he has published in journals such as African Affairs, World Development, the Journal of Modern African Studies, and others. Carl A. Trocki is a senior scholar of Southeast Asian history. He has held appointments at Georgetown University and the Queensland University of Technology. His recent books include Opium, Empire and the Global Political

Contributors

265

Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950, and Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control. He was also an editor of Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Postwar Singapore. He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Anand A. Yang, former director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, is currently the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is author of The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India and Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State; editor of Crime and Criminality in British India and Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History; and author of a forthcoming book Empire of Convicts. He is former editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and Peasant Studies and past president of the Association for Asian Studies (2006–2007) and of the World History Association (2008–2010).

Index

O Abe Isoo, 107, 108 Adams, Julia, 24–25, 42n5 Africa, 13, 171–72, 176, 177–78, 186; slaves from, 78, 130. See also Congo, Uganda Algeria, 250 Altvater, Elmar, 7 American Revolution, 10–11, 54 Amin, Idi, 177, 178, 179, 180, 185, 186 Amsterdam, 9–10, 28–29, 40; accusations of corruption in, 32–35, 40–41; contracten van correspondentie in, 24–25, 29, 30, 31, 32–33, 34–35, 40–41, 42n5; governmental structure in, 29–30, 31 Andaman Islands, 129, 135–36, 144 Ariwara (Congolese city), 172, 179, 182–85 Armed Forces of the Congolese Peoples (FAPC), 182–84, 185 Arua (Ugandan city), 172, 180–81 “Arua boys,” 180, 181 Aslund, Anders, 224 Augustine of Hippo, 1, 2 Australia, 125, 127, 134, 139, 141, 165 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), 197, 205–8, 211, 212, 213n27

Bartels, Johann Heinrich, 26–27 Bayart, Jean-François, 8, 20n50 Bellomont, Lord (Richard Coote), 62–63, 65, 66, 67–68, 69, 74n75 Bengkulen Rules, 133, 138 Bengkulen settlement, 129, 130–31, 137; convict labor in, 125–27, 129, 130–35, 139, 141, 142, 144; slaves in, 130–31 Berlusconi, Silvio, 237 black markets, 93n24, 109 blat, 219 Bonanza Marimbera, 197, 200–201 Bontemantel, Hans, 30, 33 Borneo, 155, 157, 158, 167n7; Chinese secret societies in, 150, 151, 153, 157 Braudel, Fernand, 10 Brecht, Bertolt, 1 Brenton, Jahleel, 64, 66–67 Burma, 129, 140, 156, 164 Butterworth, William J., 142 Cali Cartel, 202, 203–4, 207 Camorra, the, 237–38, 249 capitalism, 3, 14, 88, 91; Chinese secret societies and, 11, 157, 158, 160, 165–67; crime as “Achilles heel” of, 3; and “moral economy,” 94n34, 157; organized crime as stabilizing force for, 8, 12, 98–99. See also neoliberalism

Ban Kah Choon, 163 Bankes, John, 60, 67 Barco, Verigilio, 199, 202 267

268 Index

Castells, Manuel, 8, 172 Central African Republic, 177 Ceuta, 249–50 Ceylon, 129, 143 Chiang Kai-Shek, 162, 166 China, 11, 19n46, 136, 162–63, 166, 247; origins of secret societies in, 150, 152–53. See also Chinese diaspora Chinese diaspora, 158–59, 165–66; secret societies and, 149–52 (see also kongsi, Triads) CIA. See US Central Intelligence Agency civil society, 5, 7, 8, 14; definitions of, 5 Clarke, Walter, 63 cocaine, 12, 77, 196, 197, 201, 202 Coddrington, Nathaniel , 59, 62–63 Cold War, 109, 163, 216 Coleman, G. D., 140 Colombia, 12, 19–20n48; government of, 199, 201–2, 203–4, 208–12; as Spanish colony, 198–99; and United States, 207, 211. See also narcobourgeoisie (Colombian) Comaroff, Jean, 6 Comaroff, John L., 6 Congo, 172, 177–87, 192n67. See also West Nile region consumption, 77–80, 91 contracten van correspondentie (contracts of correspondence), 24–25, 29, 30, 31, 32–33, 34–35, 40–41, 42n5; scholarly views on, 24–25 convict workers (from India), 11, 125– 30, 146n21; need for, in Southeast Asian British settlements, 125, 130–31, 136, 140–41, 144–45; numbers of, 129–30, 136, 139–40; regulations for, 125–29, 132–35, 137–39, 141–44; replacement of slave labor by, 11, 130–31 coolies, 134, 137, 138, 160, 166

Coote, Richard. See Bellomont, Lord Cornwallis, Lord, 135 corruption: accusations of, in Amsterdam and Hamburg, 25–26, 32–41; definitions of, 4, 9–10, 24–28, 40, 217, 218–19, 230; scholarly views on, 23–26, 33–35 Cranston, Samuel, 63 Crawfurd, John, 158 crime: continuity of, with the state, 2, 6, 8, 55, 99–100, 119n56, 184, 196, 240, 196, 240; definitions of, 3–4, 5, 13, 99, 240–41, 245; economic, and neoliberalism, 238–41, 243–53; study of (criminology), 5. See also criminalization, organized crime criminalization, 2, 6–7, 10, 107, 155, 184; defined, 3; and neoliberalism, 14, 241–43, 252, 253; in Russia, 227, 239; of smuggling, 10, 13, 88–89, 91 “Cunden,” 123–24, 127, 128, 139, 144, 145 Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association), 98, 101–8, 109, 110 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 26 definitions: of corruption, 4, 9–10, 24–28, 40, 217, 218–19, 230; of crime, 3–4, 5, 13, 99, 240–41, 245; of the informal economy, 172, 174–77; of the modern state, 5, 8–9, 113–14; of organized crime, 217, 218–19, 224–25, 230, 234n22, 248; of piracy, 55, 56, 59, 62, 74n81 Dekker, Rudolf, 25, 42n2, 44n18 Deng Xiao-ping, 165 Dircksz, Hendrick, 32 drug trafficking, 10n48; by Chinese secret societies, 11, 156, 161, 165,

Index 269

166–67; CIA participation in, 8–9, 164, 166; in Colombia, 197–98, 199–204 ; colonial powers and, 136, 159–60, 161, 164; US syndicates and, 200, 201–2. See also tobacco smuggling Durkheim, Emile, 3 Dutch Disease, 201, 213n18 Dyer, William, 58 Dylan, Bob, 1 Dymovsky, Alexei, 227–28

Gallois, Johann Gustav, 25 Geyl, Pieter, 24 globalization, 91, 239, 241, 251–53; and money laundering, 244–46 Golden Triangle, 164, 165, 166 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 223 Gramsci, Antonio, 8 Greene, Jack, 55, 71n3 Greene, John, 60, 66, 74n75 Guomindang (GMD), 11, 162–63, 164, 166

Easton, John, 60, 64, 67 Elias, Norbert, 86 Enlightenment, the, 88–91 Escobar, Pablo, 203, 204, 206, 213n23 Europe, 6, 10, 14, 77, 78–79, 161; early-modern, 25, 27–28, 40; neoliberal governance in, 238–41, 243–53; and tobacco, 77, 78–79, 80. See also European Union, specific nations European Union (EU), 13–14, 230, 242, 250 Ewer, Walter, 131, 133

Hamburg, 9–10, 28–29, 40; accusations of corruption in, 25, 26, 35–41; governmental structure in, 26–27, 30–31, 35, 46n26 Harding, Robert, 26, Harper, T. N., 164 Hegel, G. W. F., 5 Heidhus, Mary Somers, 151 heroin, 8–9, 11, 164, 165, 166–67 Hirata Katsuichi, 111 Holmes, Leslie, 218, 228–29 Honda Nisuke, 111 Hong Kong, 130, 156–57, 166–67; Chinese secret societies in, 19n46, 162, 165, 167 Hooft, Cornelis Pietersz, 33–34, 35 Hooft, Henrick, 34–35 Huntington, Samuel, 3

fakes, 246–49 Farquhar, R. T., 136–37 Figes, Orlando, 221 Findlay, Mark, 3 Fletcher, Benjamin, 61, 75n83 Foucault, Michel, 5, 85, 93n26, 255n13 France, 10–11, 26, 43n10; colonies of, 156–57, 158, 160, 164, 166; immigrants in, 242; tobacco in, 77, 78–79 (see also tobacco smuggling). See also French Revolution French Revolution, 10, 11, 90–91; background of, 10, 77–78, 85, 88–91 Fruin, Robert, 24, 48n42 Gacha, Rodriguez, 205, 206, 213n23; cartel led by, 202, 203

immigrants, 14; Chinese, see Chinese diaspora; in Europe, 239, 241–43, 245 India, 11, 61, 93. See also convict workers (from India) Indian Ocean piracy, 2, 60 Indonesia, 149 informal economy, 14, 171–87, 242; definitions of, 172, 174–77; extent of, in Uganda, 171–72; scholarly views on, 174–76. See also drug trafficking, smuggling

270 Index

Israel, 205, 213–14n27 Israel, Jonathan, 34 Italy, 242, 252; organized crime in, 112, 237–38, 248, 249 Janssens, Geert, 25 Japan, 19n46, 98–101, 108–14; in interwar period, 101–8, 112–13; organized crime in, see yakuza; postwar, 108–12; and United States, 109, 111, 118n41 Jastram-Snitger revolt (Amsterdam), 38–39, 49n57 Java, 160 Kagarlitski, Boris, 227 Kalmanovitz, Salomón, 201 Kanba Michiko, 112 Kernkamp, Gerhard Willem, 30 Kettering, Sharon, 25, 26, 43n10 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 228, 229 Kikuchi Kan, 107 Klein, Yair, 205 Kodama Yoshio, 110 Kokusuika, 110. See also Dai Nihon Kokusuika, Nihon Kokusuika kongsi, 153–54, 156, 158–59, 160, 161; in Borneo, 150, 151, 153, 157; European colonialists and, 154, 157, 158; and Triads, 150–51, 152–53 Kooijmans, Luuc, 25 labor unions (in Japan), 12, 98, 100, 102–4, 109–10 Lamoignon de Malasherbes, Chrétien Guilaume, 90 Lara Bonilla, Rodrigo, 203, 204 Laufenberg, Heinrich, 25 law, 2, 187; approaches to understanding of, 3, 5, 6–7; Charles Tilly on, 55, 184, 240; Chinese secret societies and, 161, 162, 166; maritime, 10, 54–55, 56, 58; natural, 89–90

Ledeneva, Alena, 219 Lehder Rivas, Carlos, 204, 213n23 Leopold, king of Belgium, 177–78 Leopold, Mark, 177 Libya, 244, 250 Lleras Restrepo, Carlos, 199, 201, 202 Lopez Michelson, Alfonso, 199, 202, 204 Loviat, Jean-Claude, 76–77 MacGaffey, Janet, 187 mafia, 20n51, 112, 233–34n21, 240, 248; American, 20n51, 200; Italian, 236–37, 248; Russian, 20n51, 223–24. See also yakuza “mafia” (as label), 223–24, 227, 247–48, 250 Mahnkopf, Birgit, 7 Maklakov, V. A., 219 Malacca, 125, 129, 134 Malaya, 160, 163; Chinese secret societies in, 152, 154, 161, 163, 164. See also Malaysia Malaysia, 149–50, 165 Man, Captain H., 142–43 Mandrin, Louis, 81–82 marijuana, 12, 77, 197, 199–200, 201, 202–3 Marx, Karl, 5, 6, 255n13 Mauritius, 124, 126, 129 McCoy, Alfred, 8–9, 19n43, 164–65 McNair, J.F.A., 128–29 Medellin Cartel, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207 Mediterranean region, 13–14; neo­ liberalism in, 238–39, 240–41, 243, 248, 252–53; smuggling in, 14, 249–51 Melilla, 249–50 mercantilism, 10, 14, 78–79 Merton, Robert, 3 Mexico, 20n48 Migdal, Joel, 175 Miyake Setsurei, 106

Index 271

Mizuno Hironori, 106 money laundering, 4, 7, 12, 14, 202, 243–46, 248; in Colombia, 202, 209n2 “moral economy,” 10, 87, 94n34, 157 Moreau de Beaumont, Jean Louis, 80 Morellet, André, 89–90 Mori Kaku, 104 Morocco, 244, 250 Movimiento Latino Nacional (MLN), 204 Murano Tsuneemon, 102 Museveni, Yoweri, 180, 181

156, 166–67; colonial powers and, 136, 159–60, 161, 164 organized crime, 3, 8, 99–100, 113, 119n58; in Colombia, see narcobourgeoisie (in Colombia); definitions of, 217, 218–19, 224–25, 230, 234n22, 248; in Italy, 112, 237–38, 248, 249; in Japan, see yakuza; as stabilizing force for capitalism, 8, 12, 98–99. See also mafia, Triads outsourcing, 242. See also subcontracting Ownby, David, 151

narcobourgeoisie (Colombian), 12, 196, 212n1; drug trafficking by, 197–98, 199–204; hegemony enjoyed by, 197, 207; and paramilitary groups, 197, 205–10, 213– 14n27; and state consolidation, 196–97, 208–12 “narcobourgeoisie” (term), 212n2 narcotrafficking. See drug trafficking neoliberalism, 14, 174, 216, 229, 238–39, 240–41, 243, 248, 252–53; in Colombia, 201, 204, 207, 211, 212n2; and public/private partnerships, 238–39, 244–45, 248, 252–53; in Russia, 216, 229 (see also “shock therapy”); and specter of economic crime, 238–41, 243–53 Netherlands East Indies, 160. See also Borneo Nicolas, Jean, 85 Nihon Kokusuikai (Japan National Essence Society), 110, 111 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 8, 231

Paine, Thomas, 58–59, 63 paramilitary groups, 83, 313n25; in Colombia, 12, 19–20n48, 197, 205–10, 213n25, 213–14n27 Peck, Linda Levy, 25 Penang settlement, 129, 156; convict workers in, 125, 126–27, 134, 135–39, 140, 141, 143, 144 Perreau, R. S., 132 Peter the Great, 220–21 Phillips, W. E., 135, 136 piracy, 2, 10, 14; definitions of, 18n40, 55, 56, 59, 62, 74n81; importance of, to Rhode Island colony, 10, 31, 55, 60, 61–62, 68, 69, 70; on Indian Ocean, 2, 60; Rhode Island governance and, 56–70, 74n81; scholarly views on, 18n41, 19n42 Politkovskaya, Anna, 229, 231 Portes, Alejandro, 172 privatization, 4–5, 7; in Russia, 13, 224–26, 228; of state functions, 228 (see also subcontracting). See also public/private partnerships public/private partnerships, 13–14; in Japan, 99–100, 105–6, 110; and neoliberalism, 238–39, 244–45, 248, 252–53 Punch, Maurice, 218 Putin, Vladimir, 220, 227–29

Olsen, Mancur, 230–31 Ōno Banboku, 110–11 Onraet, Rene, 163 opium, 11, 159–60, 161, 165, 166–67; Chinese secret societies and, 11,

272 Index

Raeymaekers, Timothy, 184 Raffles, T. Stamford, 124–25, 134 Randolph, Edward, 60, 62, 64–65, 66, 68, 69, 74n79 Renan, Ernst, 9 Rendorp, Joachim van, 29 Resumption Bill of 1702, 54; background of, 54–56, 62, 64, 65, 68; failure of, 66, 68–69 Rhode Island colony, 10; conflict of, with Crown, 10, 55–70, 74–81; importance of piracy to, 10, 31, 55, 60, 61–62, 68, 69, 70; status of, as charter colony, 56–57, 63, 64, 65–66, 70 Roitman, Janet, 171 Russia, 13; common features of, with Western capitalist countries, 227–32; difficulty of defining corruption in, 217–19, 222–27; legacy of, from tsarist and Soviet eras, 13, 219–24, 226, 228; mafia in, 20n51, 112, 223–24; neoliberalism in, 216, 229 (see also “shock therapy”); tsarist, 219–21. See also Soviet communism Sachs, Jeffrey, 224 Samper Pisano, Ernesto, 203–4 Sanders, G. Earl, 198 Sanford, Peleg, 57, 58, 62–63, 66, 67–68 Santos, Juan Manuel, 213–14 Sasakaw Ryōichi, 110 Sassen, Saskia, 6–7 Schlegel, Gustav, 151 Schneider, Jane, 3 Schneider, Peter, 3 Schulte-Bockholt, Alfredo, 8 Sebastian, Tim, 231 September 11, 2001 impact, 244–46 shipping, 250–51. See also piracy Shleifer, Andrew, 224 Siam. See Thailand

Singapore, 129, 149–50, 156; Chinese secret societies in, 150, 151, 152, 160–61, 162, 165; convict labor in, 11, 124–25, 126–27, 129, 130, 134, 139–44 slave labor, 11, 78; in Southeast Asian settlements, 11, 130–31 smuggling, 6, 18n40, 249–51; in Colombia, 197, 198, 199; in mercantile period, 4, 10, 14, 16n14, 70; and piracy, 18n40; in pre-Revolutionary France, see tobacco smuggling; in present–day Mediterranean region, 14, 249–51; in Uganda border regions, 13, 171–87, 192n67 Soviet communism, 98, 216, 218, 221–23, 231; and legacy from tsarist Russia, 219–20 Spanish colonies, 198–99 Stalin, 220, 221, 222 state sovereignty, 2, 6, 7, 8 Steele, I. K., 54 Straits Settlements, 128, 129, 140, 142, 143; Chinese in, 155, 156, 157, 160. See also Bengkuren, Penang, Singapore Strange, Susan, 7–8 subcontracting, 7, 79, 237–38, 242 Sudan, 177, 178, 179 Sun Yat Sen, 162 Taiwan, 165, 166–67 Tangier, 250, 251 taxes, 11, 79; in France, 79–80, 85, 90–91; in Uganda-Congo border region, 182, 183, 184–85. See also tax havens tax havens, 244, 245, 250 temporary work, 14, 242 Tew, Thomas, 60, 61, 64 Thailand, 154, 157, 160, 162, 165; Chinese secret societies in, 155–56, 162

Index 273

Thatcher, Thomas, 58–59 Tilly, Charles, 7; on relation between crime and the state, 2, 6, 8, 55, 99–100, 119n56, 184, 196, 240; on state control of violence, 114, 120nn61,62 tobacco, 77, 78–79. See also tobacco smuggling tobacco smuggling, 76–77; and background to French Revolution, 88–91; extent of, 79–82; punishment for, 82–85; violent conflicts over, 76–77, 85–88 Transparency International, 218 Triads (Chinese secret societies), 11–12, 19n46, 149–52; and colonial powers, 150, 153–62, 165–66; and conflicts within China, 162–63, 164, 165, 166; and kongsi, 150–51, 152–53; origins of, 150, 152–53; in postcolonial era, 149–50, 163–65, 166–67; scholarly views on, 150–51, 155–56; in Siam/Thailand, 155–56, 162 Tunisia, 244, 248, 250 Turbay Ayala, Julio César, 199, 202 Uganda, 13, 171–73; borderlands of, 178 (see also West Nile region); ethnic groups in, 176–77; extent of informal economy in, 13, 171–72, 186–87; government of, 20n50, 177, 178, 179, 180–83 United States, 19n45, 94n37, 177, 203, 230; and Colombia, 203, 204, 207, 211, 213n23; and Japan, 109, 111, 118n41; organized crime in, 112, 200, 201–2, 234n22. See also US Central Intelligence Agency Uribe, Alvaro, 19–20n48, 197, 207, 210–11 US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 118n41; participation of, in drug trafficking, 8–9, 164, 166

Vaksberg, Arkady, 224 Van Citters, Jacob de Witte, 32 Vann, Richard, 15 Vella, Walter, 155, 156 Ventanilla Siniestra (Evil Window), 199, 201, 202 Véron de Forbonnais, François, 89 Vietnam, 155, 156–58, 165; Chinese secret societies in, 157, 165. See also Vietnam War Vietnam War 164 Vlooswijk, Cornelis van, 34–35 Volkov, Vladim, 220, 232 Wang Tai Peng, 150 Waquet, Jean-Claude, 43n10 Watanabe Tetsuzō, 107 Weber, Max, 5, 86, 113–14, 119–20n61 Wedel, Janine, 226 West Nile region, 172, 176–77; Congolese government and, 182–84, 186, 187; cross-border trade in, 179–87, 192n67; European powers and, 177–78; refugee movements in, 178–79; Ugandan government and, 179, 180–83, 184–86, 187 “Wygand Affair” (Amsterdam), 37–39, 49n52, 50n58 Yakovlev, Alexander, 222 yakuza, 12, 19n47, 118n40; closeness of, to Japanese state, 12, 98–100, 112–13; ideology of, 19n47, 99, 102–3, 116n18; in interwar period, 101–8, 112–13; origins of, 100–101; strikebreaking by, 98–99, 102–4 Yeltsin, Boris, 217, 223, 225–26, 227, 228 Yoshida Isokichi, 101 Yuan Bing Ling, 151, 167n7 Zinoviev, Alexander, 218 Zizek, Slavoj, 216