Chapter 4 traces the wartime emergence of undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus by the Moreno Network. It analyzes how the Moreno Network was forged by an elite clique of military intelligence officers granted extraordinary discretion while infiltrating the state apparatus to combat Guatemala’s insurgent groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the heightened sense of threat, this counterinsurgent elite introduced a series of predatory institutional arrangements to capture customs revenues. The chapter also examines how the illicit customs procedures were enforced by the Moreno Network, both through the use of violent and nonviolent coercion and through the co-optation of security forces and other state agencies.

Chapter 8 examines the survival of the undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus from the discovery of the Moreno Network in 1996 to the uncovering of La Línea in 2015. Specifically, it discusses the series of reforms implemented by the Arzú government in the aftermath of the Moreno Network revelations to curb customs fraud and contraband, including (1) the expulsions of high-ranking security officials implicated in the scheme, (2) the restructuring of Guatemala’s port system, and (3) the creation of a new fiscal apparatus in the form of the Superintendent of Tax Administration (SAT). The chapter then evaluates how the undermining rules in customs outlasted these sweeping reforms, illustrating how the wartime distributional coalition, while largely displaced from the state sphere, penetrated new semi- and extra-state spaces like political party channels and private port concessions.

Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

This chapter analyses the treatment of animals in sea warfare under extant international law and it assesses the adequacy of these norms for the protection of animal welfare. The welfare of marine animals is threatened by warfare in various ways. Individual marine mammals, such as dolphins or sea lions, are trained to take part in hostilities. Other sea life suffers, whether directly or indirectly, the repercussions of hostilities. In the context of prize law, animals could in some cases qualify as contraband goods, susceptible to seizure when on board neutral vessels heading toward enemy ports. It is concluded that the law as it stands today provides neither optimal protection for animals considered as a constitutive part of the marine environment nor for animals in themselves considered as sentient beings. The chapter formulates recommendations for the progressive development of the law, including the creation of a sui generis status for sentient animals, the regulation of military sonars and the establishment of protected marine zones where no combat activities whatsoever should take place.

This chapter reconstructs Haitian and Dominican life along the border in the years before the 1937 Genocide. It addresses the history of the old border by studying new laws and new forms of enforcement that changed border life during the 1920s and 1930s. It draws from records of migratory and non-migratory arrests of ethnic Haitians. Offenses included contraband, illegal border-crossing, sanitary laws, theft, and failure to produce national identity documents. It argues that ethnic Haitians were disproportionately targeted for the enforcement of these laws and the pattern of enforcement reflected a rising tide of official persecution. Far from being a harmonious, open, bicultural border, the chapter shows that border and migratory enforcement grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s and the new patterns of enforcement were changing everyday life in places where people had once crossed freely. Struggles over claims to land, livestock, and crops are recorded in the remarkable testimonies from ethnic Haitians who spoke boldly against their persecution in Dominican courts. Through an analysis of excuse-making, the chapter also details the strategies ethnic Haitians employed as they struggled to maintain old ways of life amidst news legal forms of ethnic and racial discrimination.

The law of neutrality introduces a concomitant set of rights and obligations between belligerents and neutrals. The law as it has settled at the turn of the twentieth century has remained the same in relation to its basic principles, and it has easily adapted to the evolution of the law of the sea, globalized trade and arms technology. The intrusiveness of belligerent practice in the form of exclusion zones, navicerts and distance blockade has become part of the law provided that it does not deviate from the humanitarian law of armed conflict. Moreover, the four Geneva Conventions and the First Additional Protocol admit a humanitarian role for neutral States.

Monopolies constituted one of the main ways to control the economy from the Ottoman Empire to republican Turkey. Monopolies, which predominantly functioned as a mechanism to provide revenue for the state before the modern era, have gained new functions such as structuring property relations by commercializing the economy and generating revenues for modernization and state-building. Ottoman historians examined smuggling in the Ottoman Empire. What is less known is the smuggling during the early republic. The new Turkish state embarked on radical modernization and state-making projects and financed them with monopoly revenues as well as taxes. This chapter examines the responses of low-income consumers, producers and traders to monopolies and monopoly-like state control of tobacco, cigarette, salt, alcoholic beverages, textiles, sugar and forests through smuggling during the first two decades of the Republic. It argues that most actions labeled as “smuggling” were economic survival methods and were the continuation of practices with a very long pedigree because this is how people coped with the high prices of monopoly products, taxes and profit margins. The chapter shows that this informal economy restricted the republican state’s extractive capacity.

Ideas and practices often perceived as modern carry a complex premodern history that cannot be excised from their present. This is certainly the case of trade embargoes as economic means for the attainment of political goals. For a variety of reasons, however, tracing change over long periods of time remains an exercise in chronological and spatial jurisdiction. Further complicating our understanding of the convoluted relationship between past and present has been the increasingly pronounced tendency to write in the vein either of a “history of ideology” or, conversely, of a “history of action.” In fact, “theory” and “practice” existed in a dialectical relationship, a cyclical tug of war that produced not so much winners and losers as complex realities that require a thick reading of legal, political, cultural, and social change. This chapter, by contrast, seeks to explain the transfiguration of the legal tradition from the perspective of international law history by focusing on two interrelated transitions.

During the final decades of the 1600s, French and Spanish residents in Hispaniola had developed a deeply ambivalent yet fluid relationship that ranged from the open violence to collaboration in their daily dealings. By the end of the century, however, Spanish residents on the island, especially in the north, came to rely on French merchants and settlers, who provided Hispaniola residents with a certain level of economic prosperity that legal (and illegal) Spanish traders operating in Santo Domingo could only provide at much higher prices and limited quantities. This rise of the intercolonial trade between both sides of the island happened as the efforts of the Spanish crown to eliminate French settlements from Hispaniola also increased. The participation of Spanish local residents in the war effort allowed them to manipulate the Spanish offensive and foil the imperial objective of consolidating Spanish control over all of Hispaniola, thus choosing the commercial benefits of accommodation to the neighboring French presence, despite the risks, instead of a safe reunification under Spanish control that would once again commercially isolate them.

This chapter reveals the great level of control that local elites accumulated over both local and royal institutions in Santo Domingo, to expand their influence to other parts of the Spanish Caribbean and acquire a profitable network of associates and introduce contraband goods into the city. Rodrigo Pimentel’s political life provides an illuminating example of the particularities of Santo Domingo’s institutional life, but on a larger scale, it also reveals the profound limitations that the Spanish Monarchy’s bureaucratic apparatus had to govern its own Caribbean territories and, by extension, most of its colonial dominions beyond Mexico City and Lima. Under the Habsburg, colonial centers of royal authority, Audiencias and governors often became extensions of the communities that hosted ministers and royal officials, and not anchors of royal power in remote Spanish possessions, as the crown initially intended. In theirdealings withhigh courts, these local groups of power both made and unmade the Spanish empire: they limited the influence of Madrid, but by using royal institutions for their own ends, they shaped the edges of the empire according to their own interests.

The historian can glimpse prison networks, and connections between incarcerated participant women, at points where their activities clashed with prison regulations. Evidence of prison exchange networks was revealed when collusion was reported to officials, when illicit material goods were discovered on bodies or in cells, or when gossip about another inmate or staff member reached staff ears. Chapter 4 interrogates information and material goods transactions to discover the workings of networks and relationships behind bars. It offers an insight into ways the prison economy could facilitate networks that enabled women of different ages, backgrounds and circumstances to connect. The chapter is divided into three distinct sections. The first examines the exchange of information in prison, the second focuses on material goods networks, and the third considers how exchanges of information and goods impacted power relations and hierarchies. Evidence of female networks and partnerships indicates convict ingenuity and enterprise, cooperation and collusion. The prison thus offers a snapshot of nineteenth-century Irish society and a glimpse of (predominantly lower-class) female networks and relationships. This chapter demonstrates that in prison, as on the outside, community networks and cooperation were vital for social and economic survival.

Chapter 2 considers the microregion of the Leeward Islands in terms of political economy and commercial practices. Since cross-imperial trade played such a crucial role in the formation and development of the region’s intercolonial networks, an understanding of the extent and texture of this trade, as well as the related dynamics of smuggling and investment, is key to fully grasping the other aspects of the microregion. Not only did commercial practices drive contact and competition between colonies and groups, but the flow of trade was also a crucial concern for the various regulatory attempts of individual empires in the region, in terms of both inter-imperial interaction and intra-imperial legislation. The analysis presented here forms part of the foundation for the following chapters, by examining the networks and structures of the inter-imperial microregion and some of the ways in which European metropoles responded to local conditions. The chapter also illuminates some of the shifts taking place within the region as a consequence of the emerging globalization of the early nineteenth century, a process that the Leeward Islands were initially at the center of in the Atlantic context but that ultimately led to their near-disappearance from the global economic stage.