Covering vast chronological and global terrain, this book traces the contested and often overlapping boundaries between these practices in such very different polities as the pre-modern city-states of Europe, the modern nation-states of France and Japan, the imperial power of Britain in India and North America, Africas and Southeast Asias postcolonial states, and the emerging postmodern regional entity of the Mediterranean Sea.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - Renate Bridenthal
• 1. Dirty Politics or “Harmonie?” Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg - Mary Lindemann
• 2. A Crisis of Charter and Right: Piracy and Colonial Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Rhode Island - Douglas R. Burgess, Jr.
• 3. The First War on Drugs: Tobacco Trafficking, Criminality, and the Fiscal State in Eighteenth-Century France - Michael Kwass
• 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
• 7. A Historical Perspective on State Engagement in Informal Trade on the Uganda-Congo Border - Kristof Titeca
• 8. The Narcobourgeoisie and State Making in Colombia: More Coercion, Less Democratic Governance - Nazih Richani
• 9. Russia's Gangster Capitalism: Portent for Contemporary States? - Patricia Rawlinson
• 10. Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government: The Example of the Mediterranean - Béatrice Hibou
• Notes on Contributors