The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States: An Introduction

All history is contemporary history, famously proclaimed Benedetto Croce, meaning that we understand the past through the eyes of the present. As the media flood us with breathtaking news of state-related crimes, some express fears for the future of civilization altogether. However, in this issue a group of scholars offers evidence of Charles Tilly's fertile insight that illegal practices always played an important part in the creation and maintenance of modern states. We offer a tribute to his perspicacity in this forum.

Here four authors challenge the Weberian idea that capitalism requires a rational and predictable legal system, enforced by state monopoly of violence, and instead consider the convergence of legal and illegal practices in various times and places. The examples are of two early modern European city-states, a British colony, a modern nation-state, and a contemporary supra-national region. Mary Lindemann compares the politics of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Hamburg with respect to the malleable notion of corruption. Douglas Burgess traces Rhode Island's collaboration with pirates and its challenge to the British Crown on the legal definition of piracy. Eiko Maruko Siniawer shows how the modern Japanese government used the yakuza, a kind of mafia, to suppress political opposition and to support economic interests covertly. Beatrice Hibou unravels legal and illegal transactions within the supranational polity of the European Union and shows how state actors publicly fight crime while often secretly partnering with it.

With these diverse pilot studies we hope to encourage more historical research about the role of crime in the formation, maintenance and dissolution of states, which suggests a dialectic of power whose importance is becoming increasingly clear in our own time.