Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground by Michael Kwass (review)

This outstanding, engaging, and original book uses the story of one infamous eighteenth-century French criminal to reconstruct the global economy of smuggling. Weaving together local, national, and global dimensions, we gain a front row seat in witnessing the impact made by colonial and plantation economies upon the consumption patterns of ordinary Europeans along France’s southeastern border with Savoy, a hilly region within the newly-established Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.

At the book’s core is a thrilling crime story, retold in a lively if academic prose that manages to include all the colourful imagery that readers expect in a novel. Louis Mandrin (1725-1755) came from a well-established but impoverished family in southeastern France. When his father died in 1747, the seventeen-year-old son was left with a good education but little means to care for his family. Poor business ventures soon caused him to migrate to the other side of the law, illegally carting goods between Savoy, Switzerland, and France.

Mandrin’s nascent smuggling business specialized in two commodities that are the focus of Kwass’s curiosity: Indian calicoes and Virginia tobacco. In a dazzling chapter on the “Globalization of European Consumption,” Kwass explains how it was possible for a small-time criminal like Mandrin to obtain commodities produced so far away. By 1750, he notes, the Indian subcontinent already produced “as much as a quarter of the world’s textile output, much of it for export” (p. 32). Meanwhile, Europeans got into the game, manufacturing knock-offs in Marseille and Geneva that smugglers like Mandrin often sold to prosperous peasants and small town workers. With regard to tobacco, however, Mandrin sold the real stuff from ships that had unloaded their goods out of the view of the Ferme général, the French government sponsored monopoly.

Indeed, the Farm was much more than a single monopoly. With responsibilities for collecting taxes on many basic goods, such as salt, and policing powers that rivalled most European armies, the Farm was something of a state within a state, and increasingly unpopular among peasants, consumers, and Enlightenment men of letters, who saw its power as both tyrannical and inefficient. As Mandrin moved up the ladder from small-time criminal to the leader of a gang that included more than 100 well-armed men, contemporaries began to refer to his escapades as a “war” between the gang and the Farm. For Kwass, however, Mandrin’s actions seem less like Jesse James and more like Robin Hood. In a series of improvised schemes in various towns during 1754 and 1755, Mandrin would raid a town, overwhelm its inadequate militia, and force the Farm’s local agent to purchase his stock of tobacco at a set price. Often Mandrin would give the agent a signed receipt, claiming a kind of equal status with the Farm, as if he were a legitimate competitor. Kwass interprets Mandrin’s novel gestures as representing an alternative economy, one more popular and moral. Finally, before leaving town with his money, Mandrin would liberate the town’s prison of its smugglers and debtors, and host drinks at the local tavern. While Kwass is careful never to romanticize his protagonist, it is clear that for many contemporaries and later followers, Mandrin’s actions represented popular justice.

One reason for Mandrin’s extraordinary popularity was the string of successes that made his gang seemingly invincible during 1754. The Farm police were unable to guess his next move, and not even the Farm had enough arms to simultaneously guard every town in southeastern France. The Farm finally captured him in May 1755 when its police raided his home across the border in Savoy, creating an international incident of its own. Within days, Mandrin was tried before a French court, tortured, and executed.

The most original part of Kwass’s comprehensive analysis is the way that he links Mandrin’s story with Jan de Vries’s...