The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States ed. by Renate Bridenthal (review)

We have all attended (and perhaps even participated in) conference panels where the papers do not exactly fit together. But occasionally there is that panel where subjects spanning time periods and geographic boundaries work so well together you come out of the room wondering why more people do not attempt to make such broad connections. The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States, edited by Renate Bridenthal, fits into this latter category. In essays ranging from early modern Amsterdam and Hamburg to the twenty-first century Mediterranean (and almost everywhere in between), the ten contributors provide an ambitious approach to the problem of economic crime and its relation to state building, drawing interesting connections and striking similarities across time and space.

Tackling the role of corruption in early modern Amsterdam and Hamburg, Mary Lindemann demonstrates how corruption was embedded in political structures, but perceptions of corruption were individualized and continually shifting. In defining and re-defining corrupt behaviour, individuals used the definition of corruption as a political tool, gaining and shifting power for their own benefit without undermining the political system as a whole. Echoing similar themes in their essays on Russia’s gangster capitalism and the twenty-first century Mediterranean, Patricia Rawlinson and Béatrice Hibou show how attacks on seemingly corrupt practices are often a way to stigmatize the Other while propping up the neoliberal and free market systems that contributed to the original problem. These chapters highlight how the ability to define what is legitimate behaviour is a way to build and support state power, but these differences between definitions of legitimate and corrupt are often a matter of degree.

A number of essays point out the porous boundaries between state and criminal where connections are as common as divisions. Kristof Titeca examines the informal economy along the Uganda-Congo border on its own terms and shows how the state is one actor (among many) in a pluralized regulatory authority where the terms of the informal economy are continuously negotiated. Other chapters examine how states used criminals and criminal enterprises to further their goals. Anand Yang illustrates how British imperial authorities used convict labour to transform criminal bodies into docile labourers while building the infrastructure of empire. In one of the strongest chapters of the book, Eiko Maruko Siniawer discusses how the yakuza and the Japanese state worked together to suppress leftist activities and labour union strikes in interwar Japan — actions that helped push Japan toward militarism.

Connections between state and criminal extend beyond convenient partnerships. In his chapter on the rise and transformation of the Triads, Carl A. Trocki shows how the Triads worked in the gaps left by the formal state and managed to develop into a global crime syndicate and alternative state power. In the case of Colombia, Nazih Richani traces how the narcobourgeoisie developed as a socieoeconomic class and consolidated their political power by co-opting state institutions, ultimately contributing to the development of Colombia’s police state.

The theme of power runs throughout the book, but it is a tenuous power and economic crime can expose its fragile underpinnings. Tracing the events surrounding the failed Resumption Bill of 1702 in Rhode Island, Douglas R. Burgess, Jr. shows how competing claims for admiralty jurisdiction between colonists and the English Crown precipitated a crisis over legal identity, laying the groundwork for later developments in the American Revolution. In a fascinating essay, Michael Kwass extends the roots of the French Revolution back to the French state’s “first war on drugs” and the critiques of the state’s draconian attempts to stop tobacco smuggling coalescing with Enlightenment critiques of that same state.

This book contributes to the large field of studies on the role crime plays in the growth of the modern state, but they do so through a unique and wide-ranging approach. In examining how state and criminal enterprises “mutually constitute each other” (2), each author highlights how...