In fall 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William K. Evans, the US Army’s chief civil affairs officer in Taiwan, smuggled sixty kilograms of gold bullion that he confiscated from the Japanese Tenth Area Army and offloaded it on Shanghai’s black market, returning to the United States with $108,000 in cash (worth approximately $1.5 million today). The gold was supposed to go the Chinese Nationalist government. Although US military authorities found overwhelming evidence of Evans’ guilt and had recently sentenced another colonel to ten years in prison for a nearly identical crime committed in Tokyo, Evans walked away a free man after a protracted Sino-US diplomatic struggle and two mistrials in federal court. By examining the Evans case, this chapter sheds light on the transition from extraterritoriality and formal colonialism to America’s postcolonial model of using status of forces agreements (SOFAs) to exercise jurisdiction over US forces stationed abroad.

By the second decade of independence, Uganda’s economy groaned under the pressures of domestic misrule and international turbulence. This chapter traces the variety of popular and state reactions as price inflation and commodity shortages came to prevail. Some Ugandans experienced shortages as an affront to their ethical expectations about merit and redistribution; they accused their compatriots of misdeeds and demanded their government better manage the economy. In response, large domains of economic life were criminalized as the state tried to redirect trade toward avenues more easily taxed or regulated, including through an Economic Crimes Tribunal that indicted innumerable Ugandans. Yet, smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging proved especially bedeviling to the state, Drawing on a range of police investigations, trial records, and petitions, this chapter details the sorts of opportunistic exchanges and engagements that characterized Uganda in the 1970s, an improvisational mix of dissidence and claims-making, acquiescence and rebuke that radically challenged sovereignty and citizenship.

This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.

The new dynamics on the border epitomize how the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution compounded the already wobbly state building campaign at the border. During the decade from 1965 to 1975, the war and the chaotic sociopolitical movement militarized the Sino-Vietnamese border and made this far-off region more relevant to the decision-making in Beijing and Hanoi about their internal power struggles and national security policies. Yet, these developments also shifted state-society relations on the political periphery in favor of a more porous boundary. Thus, the extension and contraction of state power took place simultaneously. Both Chinese and Vietnamese authorities launched ambitious infrastructure projects in the border area to facilitate the transportation of aid to Vietnam and mobilized the local society against the possible expansion of the war. The Sino-Vietnamese land and maritime border region, as well as the transportation lines running through it, became spaces of frequent interactions between the Chinese and Vietnamese officials regarding the provision of aid and the coordination of border defenses. The efficiency of these interactions, however, was increasingly susceptible to the decline of the Sino-Vietnamese partnership following the Tết Offensive and the start of negotiations between Hanoi and Washington in 1968.

This chapter examines how borderlands state building backfired against the background of aggressive collectivization movements in the two counries from 1958 to 1964. During agricultural collectivization, state building by the two communist states at the border became increasingly coercive. The border people nevertheless sought to take advantage of the porous international boundary to resist state incursion by voting with their feet, making the extension of state authority and its functions a highly contested process. The years from 1958 to the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964 witnessed a widening gap between what the two centralizing governments sought to achieve at their shared border and the capabilities of the state organs stationed on the ground to pursue the diplomatic and state-building tasks assigned to them by the political centers. The famine caused by the Great Leap Forward drove an increasing number of unauthorized border crossings. The Vietnamese communists, who initiated their own cooperative movement in 1958, perceived the emerging chaos in China as detrimental to the consolidation of the DRV state. This severely tested the ability of the Chinese and Vietnamese local officials to enforce their recently established border control institutions, making this a prominent bilateral issue.

Traces the decline of the American trade in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars. Discusses the downfall of many American merchants in the region and the need to shift to new economic stragegies.

Benin–Nigeria relations are characterised by two-way informal cross-border trade (ICBT) facilitated through their long, porous border. First, Benin imports consumer goods that are subject to high import protection in Nigeria and then transships them to Nigeria through elaborate channels. Second, Benin illegally imports petroleum products from Nigeria, where consumer prices are highly subsidised. Also, consumer, intermediate, and capital goods are smuggled from Nigeria into Benin. This ICBT accounts for a significant share of Benin’s income, employment, and tax revenues on imported goods that are transferred to Nigeria. These benefits of ICBT to Benin, however, are very fragile as they are on the vagaries of economic policy in Nigeria. Moreover, ICBT has nurtured informality, corruption and political capture. It also crowds out private and public resources that could have been put to better use in agricultural and the manufacturing sectors. The way forward for Benin is to progressively move away from smuggling towards formal trade. Benin could aim to become a competitive, efficient regional centre for legal trade and services to its hinterland countries, as well as to Nigeria.

Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.

This chapter maps the effects of war on economies and on women’s work. First, it surveys the role of women both as an official and unofficial part of armies and other military support operations. Second, it looks at the way that military conscription of young men affected the work of women who stayed home, especially given that many of these men would never return or would return unfit for work. Third, it examines the strain that armies, whether engaged in hostilities or simply passing through a region, placed on the local resource base and the way this affected the structure of work, including, at times, amplifying its coercive character. Fourth, war encouraged women in garrison and port towns to engage in new forms of commercialized service work, while giving rise to a large body of people, including many women, to which the state owed wages or pensions. Finally, war generally went along with rising taxes, most often upon commodities and often on staples, such as salt. One result was a sharp increase in smuggling, which, in turn, altered both women’s and men’s relationship to consumption and to the State.

This chapter shows how the 2016 Cessation of Hostilities affected both military dynamics and local governance in Syrias southern Daraa governorate. Contrary to findings from the rebel governance field that tend to amplify the role armed actors play in the development of local governance structures, this chapter finds that there are a range of networked systems and actors involved in providing governance in southern Syria that were influenced in various ways by the 2016 ceasefire. While the armed groups in Daraa certainly played a large role in security provision, their influence was circumscribed by the region’s tribal leaders. Additionally, during the ceasefire, the Syrian regime reallocated its military resources away from the south, fighting between more moderate armed groups, extremist groups and specific targeting by the Syrian regime of local civic and rebel leaders increased; power dynamics between the four main local governance actors were recalibrated; and, this realignment shifted the ability of certain actors to provide humanitarian assistance, giving the people of Daraa a significant say in their own governance.

The chapter offers a general introduction to the Ichigo campaign, particularly with reference to its economic impact. Launched late in the war when Japan’s position in the Pacific was deteriorating, it was the largest military campaign ever undertaken by the Japanese Imperial Army. The armies of Chiang Kai-shek performed very poorly, often just melting away. There was general pessimism about the war in China even as the Allies did well elsewhere.

The campaign had a calamitous economic impact on Free China. Food supplies were cut off. Hyperinflation continued to have a devastating impact on the lives of Chinese. There were struggles in maintaining the exchange rate of fabi and the beginnings of conflict with the United States over this issue. US treasury secretary Morgenthau became angry with Chiang. A second dispute over the sale of gold in China supplied by the United States created tension between Morgenthau and T. V. Soong who represented Chiang in Washington.

This chapter explores illicit means of obtaining food in the ghettos including smuggling, black market purchases, and food theft. The chapter discusses the ways in which geographical location impacted what types of illicit food access were available to individuals in the ghettos, how and at what time frame these illicit means might be prosecuted, and methods employed to illicitly obtain food. It juxtaposes large-scale and small-scale projects for obtaining additional food. It also includes a study of the black market prices in the three different ghettos and what factors impacted food prices.

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.