• 1 Block 1989, p. 328; Kitson 2014, pp. 38‑40.

2Indeed, personalities such as Paul Carbone provided abundant material for films and books. Born in Corsica at the end of the 19th century, Carbone became a prominent figure in the Marseilles “milieu,” involved in drug trafficking during the interwar period and in arms smuggling to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. His engagement in illegal activities, however, had begun even earlier: before the First World War, he was involved in procuring in Egypt.1 His trajectory is therefore revealing on several levels. First, it highlights the mobility, connections, and transnational as well as transimperial networks of individuals engaged in illicit activities across the wider Mediterranean. Spanning from Marseilles in the west to Alexandria in the east, these networks challenge familiar east-west divides. Second, it illustrates their agency, versatility, and adaptability, as they shifted from one sphere of activity to another, moving between human trafficking, drug smuggling, and arms dealing depending on context, opportunity, and available information. Third, the media and cultural resonance of Carbone’s activities—already evident in extensive interwar press coverage and later sustained through best-selling books and films—points to another noteworthy dimension: the enduring appeal of smugglers in popular culture, including literature, music, and cinema, and the resulting proliferation of powerful and influential representations. Slippery and elusive figures of Mediterranean history, smugglers were nonetheless firmly etched into the region’s cultural memory.

• 2 Karras 2010, pp. 1‑2.

4Before examining these aspects, it is useful to outline a conceptual framework for understanding illicit trafficking. As Mogens Pelt notes in his contribution to this special issue, illicit trade consists of transactions that infringe national laws or interstate agreements but may nonetheless be legal at one or even both ends of the exchange. In other words, smuggling rests on legal definitions and is therefore constructed from the top down, almost by default: without states and borders, there is no illicit trafficking. Yet laws and borders are themselves social and political constructs, and thus smuggling—especially ideas and perceptions of it—can, and in some cases does, exert influence upon them.2 The study of smuggling, therefore, offers a privileged double vantage point from which to analyze institutional processes such as state-building.

• 3 Hüsken 2017; Titeca 2022.
• 4 Montel 2005, pp. 101‑102.

6When treated imaginatively, these sources can further help us nuance the multifaceted relationship between smuggling, the state, and society. They remind us that smuggling constitutes not only a form of contestation against authority but also a subsistence strategy adopted by individuals and groups alike. As a social practice, smuggling leaves considerable room for negotiation rather than confrontation, including through bribery and corruption. This helps explain why, in some contexts, smugglers embrace and even proudly display this label, or are viewed positively by local populations.3 The major historiographical potential of this subject therefore lies precisely in these interstices and ambiguities. As Laurence Montel puts it, “the richness of the subject lies in the study of the margins: between the legal and the illegal, the legal norm and the social norm, legal society and organized crime.”4

• 5 Gallien, Weigand 2022, pp. 2‑3.

7Given the inherent in‑betweenness of the subject, as well as the diversity of local contexts and legal regimes, it is impossible to formulate a single, clear‑cut definition of smuggling: heroic for some, immoral for others, “informal,” or “business” for yet others, the term encompasses a wide variety of practices that may refer to quite different phenomena.5 Conversely, the same transaction may be labelled differently depending on the legal framework or the perspective of authorities and smugglers, rendering smuggling a deeply situational as well as contested term.

• 6 Marin 2016, pp. 634‑638; Moatti (ed.) 2020; Calafat, Grenet 2023.

9In addition to focusing on these three particular forms of illicit trafficking, this special issue concerns a specific geographical region: the Mediterranean. In this sense, the articles gathered here represent an effort to bring together two research fields that do not always intersect, in the hope that each may shed new light on the other: on the one hand, the emerging field of smuggling studies and, on the other, the well-established yet often debated domain of Mediterranean studies. The latter has undergone various phases of development and historiographical ebb and flow; recent scholarship, however, influenced by the spatial turn in the social sciences, has generated renewed interest in the Mediterranean as a space of mobility—not only in the late early modern period, but also during the era of imperial decline and post-imperial reconfigurations.6 But what exactly is this space that invites such mobility? In other words, what do we mean by Mediterranean(s)?

• 7 Moatti 2020, p. 5.
• 8 Marin 2016, pp. 632‑636.

10The “Mediterranean” constitutes a highly productive yet deeply contested analytical framework. Rather than offering a synthesis, it functions primarily as an open research agenda—one that has both inspired a vast body of scholarship and, at times, constrained conceptual renewal.7 Many of its earlier conclusions have been repeatedly and widely challenged. Yet this is precisely why the “Mediterranean” continues to be productively employed: for the enduring questions it raises, albeit in profoundly reimagined forms. According to Brigitte Marin, historiographies emerging from this scholarly tradition revolve around three main axes of inquiry: geographical and environmental factors analyzed over the longue durée; human activities related to maritime spaces; and, finally, contacts, conflicts, and processes of hybridization.8 The latter two—particularly those concerning contacts—are of central importance to this special issue. By necessity, they entail a critical examination of the concept of the “Mediterranean,” a term that must now be understood in the plural. The Mediterranean is thus conceived not as a fixed geographical space or a self-evident object of historical inquiry, but as a flexible heuristic and historiographical construct, the conceptual value of which lies less in analytical coherence than in its capacity to generate fundamental questions about scale, connectivity, and difference.

• 9 Braudel 1949.

11The Mediterranean has often been conceptualized as a coherent space that, according to Fernand Braudel’s classic study, generates strong and enduring connections.9 This approach, however, has been subjected to sustained criticism. Although Braudel acknowledged the diversity of local contexts, his framework nonetheless tended to reproduce a homogenizing mode of thinking about the Mediterranean. Indeed, the principle of the region’s geographical unity is a relatively recent, modern European discursive construction, dating to the early 19th century, and therefore aligns neither with the longue durée of Mediterranean history nor with the wide range of local realities it encompasses.

• 10 Herzfeld 1984; Herzfeld 2005; Moatti 2020, pp. 14‑16.

12Moreover, Braudel’s work has been criticized for its implicit defense of colonial systems, which allegedly led him to overlook alternative—namely, non-European—historical trajectories and perceptions of the sea. This Eurocentric and unitary conception bears certain similarities to the construction of “the Orient,” though without fully sharing its powerfully negative implications. In this regard, the concept of Mediterraneanism, as developed by the social anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, highlights a long-standing tendency to treat this space as a unified whole (“The Mediterranean”), a tendency that implicitly asserts the cultural dominance of the “European” societies located along its northern shores.10

• 11 Horden, Purcell 2000, p. 114.
• 12 Moatti (ed.) 2020; Calafat, Grenet 2023.

13Perhaps the most influential challenge to a unitary vision was formulated by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell—a medievalist and a classicist, respectively—whose work The Corrupting Sea (2000) emphasized the fragmentation of this space. For them, there is no single Mediterranean world, but rather a constellation of micro-regions, often closely interconnected through networks of minor routes.11 While their approach has drawn criticism in some quarters—particularly regarding its tendency to smooth over contextual and chronological complexities—it has nonetheless contributed decisively to the widespread acceptance of the notion of multiple “Mediterraneans,” rather than a singular “Mediterranean.”12 This perspective has enabled historians to foreground the plurality of situations that emerge within this space, making it a particularly useful framework for the study of interactions and mobilities.

• 13 Moatti 2020, pp. 25‑27.
• 14 See, for example, Fuhrmann 2020; Guedj 2021; Smyrnelis 2023.

14To counterbalance the emphasis on plurality, some scholars have sought to identify the sea as a key unifying factor among these Mediterraneans. This is already manifest in the work of Horden and Purcell, who approach the sea as an ungovernable yet profoundly connective force. Admittedly, their book has faced criticism in this respect as well, insofar as it once again presupposes a relatively continuous, close, and homogeneous relationship to the sea across different contexts and periods, without sufficiently accounting for instances of non-engagement with, or even conscious distancing from, it.13 Even so, maritime connectivity remains widely regarded as a defining feature of the Mediterranean. Accordingly, the study of ports, routes, and the circulation of people and ideas by and across the sea continues to be a central concern in current scholarship.14 Despite sustained critique, the Mediterranean has thus endured as a productive analytical framework, continuing to inspire and frame new scholarly inquiries.

• 15 Horden, Purcell 2000.

15Ever since historians began to challenge Braudel’s pioneering work, the shift from writing the history of a singular Mediterranean to writing about the Mediterraneans in the plural has necessitated a genuine reorientation in perspective. First, it has entailed decentering the analytical gaze by incorporating other spaces and historiographical traditions. A further shift has involved moving away from Braudel’s approach—and that of many of his contemporaries—which tended to analyze historical processes “from above,” privileging large-scale and highly visible phenomena in the archives, rather than “from below,” where a myriad of local situations and practices unfold. Thus, for example, whereas Braudel emphasized high-value maritime cargoes and long-distance trade, the authors of The Corrupting Sea redirected attention to smaller-scale forms of circulation, such as coastal trade.15

• 16 Borutta, Gekas 2012.

16A second major contribution of subsequent debates concerns the inherent asymmetry of this space. Braudel’s framework merits reassessment, insofar as it rested on the presumed superiority of northern Mediterranean societies, more often assumed than explicitly argued. Rather than reproducing this hierarchy, recent scholarship has reframed analysis in terms of structural asymmetry instead of civilizational superiority. From this perspective, the Mediterranean can be understood as a “colonial sea”: a space of interaction characterized by exchanges that are frequently constrained by coercion and force.16 Although some forms of interaction admittedly unfold beyond imperial or colonial frameworks, these structures nonetheless exert a powerful influence over human and material movements, with far-reaching political, economic, military, social, and cultural implications.

• 17 Calafat 2019.

17Building on the above, we treat the Mediterranean as a capacious analytical framework that emphasizes the historically evolving relationship between homogeneity and diversity. Thus conceived, the Mediterranean sheds light on phenomena such as the illicit circulations examined in this special issue. High connectivity within asymmetric settings, combined with marked spatial disparities, is central to understanding illegal practices, which often exploit precisely these conditions. Attention to temporal ruptures is equally crucial, as political transitions generate openings that enable economic reconfigurations and forms of exchange operating beyond established legal and institutional arrangements. However, while the region has long been characterized by fragmentation, acknowledging the role of homogenizing tendencies remains analytically essential. Scholars increasingly argue that fragmentation has gradually diminished. Over the long term, shared practices, particularly legal ones, have contributed to a partial homogenization, which is continually redefining this space of interaction.17 Imperial, colonial, and global forms of integration imposed a higher degree of unity, albeit an incomplete one. This process deserves scrutiny in its own right, as the densification of connections and relative convergence have significant implications for circulations—particularly illicit ones.

• 18 Neuberger 2013.
• 19 Gkotsinas 2022, pp. 20‑23.
• 20 Ram 2020.
• 21 MacArthur-Seal 2025.
• 22 Gingeras 2014.
• 23 Salmon 2024b.

18Mediterranean studies therefore offer a particularly productive framework for analyzing smuggling. The region is structured around maritime transport networks and major multiethnic port-cities such as Marseille, Trieste, Salonica, Constantinople/Istanbul, Piraeus, Alexandria, Beirut, and Smyrna. It functions as a dynamic zone of production, transit, and consumption, where licit and illicit trade intersect. More specifically, the Mediterranean has served as a key site for the production of lucrative global commodities, including tobacco in late Ottoman Macedonia;18 hashish in Greece,19 Lebanon, and Syria;20 opium in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey;21 heroin in Turkey and Bulgaria;22 and arms manufactured in France and adjacent countries.23 These commodities circulated through complex networks linking centers of production to diverse markets, driven by fluctuating demand and shaped by regional economic, social, and political dynamics. Regional upheavals—such as conflicts in the Ottoman Empire (notably in the Balkans), the First World War, Arab revolts, and the Spanish Civil War—alongside the introduction of drug prohibition policies, most prominently in Egypt, and the proliferation of prostitution in port cities, all played a significant role in shaping illicit economies. Smuggling and state-building processes were deeply intertwined, particularly in the late Ottoman Mediterranean and during the post-imperial period following the First World War. In this sense, smuggling can be understood as a distinctly post-imperial phenomenon, reflecting but also shaping the enduring legacies of imperial collapse and the often-tenuous reconfiguration of power structures, borders, and economic networks.

• 24 Grahn 1997, Klooster 2009, Cromwell 2018.
• 25 Tagliacozzo 2005; Antunes, Polónia 2016.
• 26 Darwin 2020.

19In the scholarship on smuggling, the Mediterranean has been relatively overlooked in comparison with other regions, most notably the Atlantic world of maritime routes linking the Americas, Africa, and Europe. In the Atlantic case, research has concentrated on the Age of European Expansion, when the prevailing mercantilist doctrine—which emphasized the importance of a positive trade balance—stimulated widespread smuggling.24 These studies have shown how colonial rivalry led the British, Dutch, and French to engage in large-scale illicit trade in South and Central America and the Caribbean, where the Spanish and Portuguese empires claimed exclusive control over the commerce in numerous precious commodities, chiefly tobacco, cacao, sugar and molasses. Other works on the early modern period have similarly explored smuggling in Southeast Asia, another region shaped by trade restrictions and monopolies imposed by both imperial powers (China) and the British, Dutch, French and Portuguese colonial authorities, where powerful trading companies also operated.25 Despite their different regional focus, these early modern studies share a strong emphasis on the sea, which remained essential for transport well into the 20th century—and even into the 21st.26

• 27 Adelman 1999.
• 28 See, for example, Duinat 2019; Hakkı Öztan, Tejel (eds.) 2022.
• 29 Duinat 2018.
• 30 Dupont 2024.
• 31 Berjoan, Ostolaza 2024.

20More broadly, scholarly attention has increasingly turned to interactions within and between political spaces. In this context, borderlands have become a central focus of historiography and have subsequently been reconsidered. Jeremy Adelman’s pioneering work, in particular, was among the first to conceptualize borders not as fixed limits, but as dynamic spaces of interaction, mobility, and hybridity, where subaltern groups—such as Native Americans—leveraged asymmetries of power as political and economic resources.27 Understood in this way, borderlands emerge as areas of informal or illegal exchange between societies that have come to perceive their territories as spaces of contact. It is now widely acknowledged that borderlands do not necessarily function as barriers to movement or trade, whether legal or illicit.28 At the same time, however, other studies have emphasized that borders also impose constraints and generate adaptations. As the case of the Pyrenean frontier demonstrates, from the late 18th century onward, the act of crossing a frontier increasingly reinforced the state’s physical and symbolic presence, insofar as it signaled that actors understood and responded to the stakes involved.29 The First Carlist War (1833–1840), in particular, led to numerous reconfigurations, both among smugglers and among authorities, who were compelled to develop new tools of surveillance and control.30 Finally, striking a middle ground between these two historiographical tendencies, a third strand emphasizes how local communities emerged as active agents within border regions, negotiating, crossing, contesting or accepting the frontier in various ways.31

• 32 Borutta, Gekas 2012, p. 3.

21Throughout the late modern period, new boundaries were being established both on land and at sea. Seen from this perspective, the post-imperial Mediterranean should be regarded less as a fragmented space and more as a complex borderland in the making, and thus as an area of intense smuggling activity. Studying the Mediterranean therefore requires a transnational approach that brings into dialogue spaces traditionally analyzed separately, such as its eastern and western shores.32 Adopting this viewpoint, this issue highlights the importance of nodal cities such as Marseille, which functioned, for example, as a gateway both to the eastern Mediterranean—particularly Istanbul and Egypt—and to the interior regions of the Balkans and Central Europe (see Gkotsinas, Montel, Salmon).

• 33 Fuhrmann 2020, pp. 93‑210.
• 34 Fuhrmann 2020, pp. 10‑18.

22After all, patterns of exchange, control, and evasion circulated across the basin and affected multiple Mediterranean regions. Ottoman ports in the eastern Mediterranean before the First World War, for instance, were sites of intense commercial exchange and cultural transformation.33 For a long time, political and cultural biases obscured this reality, as the eastern Mediterranean was often perceived as non-modern and therefore only weakly connected before the 20th century.34 Smuggling in this context was understood, if at all, along the lines fictionalized by Agatha Christie, where criminals are confined aboard ships of Europeans on the Nile or cross-regional trains linking the east to the west such as the Orient Express. However, in the age of steam, routes—primarily maritime, but also rail-based (see Pratali’s article)—expanded dramatically, becoming the dominant means of transporting people, goods, and information. Institutions such as the Messageries Maritimes (examined by MacArthur-Seal here) and other shipping companies played a crucial role: they not only helped unify imperial spaces but also connected port cities, creating dense networks of exchange. As networks of communication multiplied, ship and train personnel played an increasingly significant role in facilitating smuggling activities.

• 35 Sahlins 1984; Dornel 2025.
• 36 Gallien, Weigand 2022, p. 2.
• 37 Thai 2018.
• 38 Mitchell 1999, Chopra 2011.
• 39 Bayart 2004, pp. 87‑93.

23The rising nation-state sought to transform borderlands into rigid borders—spaces of strict control and exclusion. In the case of the Pyrenees during the early modern period, scholars have shown how the creation of a frontier imposed a political boundary within areas of intense circulation.35 The construction of borders has tangible effects on those who cross them, whether travelers or nomadic pastoral communities.36 Beyond this, efforts to control the flow of commodities—and, by extension, consumers’ tastes—can also be understood as a constitutive element of state-building processes.37 In this sense, the “state” itself emerges as the product of ongoing processes of regulating movement, of things as much as of people.38 One may think here of the proliferation of agencies tasked with combatting smuggling, including customs administrations, specialized police forces, and even international organizations such as the League of Nations. Smuggling should therefore not be interpreted primarily as a sign of state weakness at its borders. On the contrary, as the historical sociologist Jean François Bayart argues in his broad synthesis on globalization, smugglers actively contribute to the strengthening of state institutions by compelling authorities to adopt countermeasures.39

• 40 Frémeaux 2001.
• 41 Pelt 1998; Inglis 2014.
• 42 Calhoun 2007.

24Combating illicit trade is not, however, the only way in which the modern state engages with it. For several decades, historians of international relations have also drawn attention to the role of the state in the illicit circulation of weapons. The Algerian War (1954–1962), for example, illustrates how smuggling came to be perceived as a key element of foreign policy during armed conflicts.40 Conflicts also create new economic opportunities for illicit trafficking and can give rise to novel transnational transactions. Thus, despite its anti-communist stance, the Greek dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas engaged in commercial dealings with the Republican Government during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Guided by purely financial considerations, Greece supplied weapons and ammunition to both sides of the conflict indiscriminately.41 Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, arms supplies for the Haganah (the Zionist armed wing) were arranged in the United States, where equipment was purchased through shell companies. In this case, the weapons benefited from Nicaragua’s diplomatic cover as they transited through Czechoslovakia as well as Mediterranean ports such as Marseille, Genoa and Trieste, before reaching Zionist militias.42 The circulation of arms thus provides a clear indication of the growing integration of local conflicts into global—and at times state-sponsored—networks of trade and exchange.

• 43 Gallien, Weigand 2022, p. 8.
• 44 Moine 2006.
• 45 Engelbrecht, Hanighen 1934.

25Like the history of the underworld more broadly, the history of smuggling has, since the 1990s, become an important object of cultural history, particularly the history of representations. Scholarship has emphasized how central perceptions of smugglers and smuggling practices were to the public imagination.43 This observation applies mainly to figures involved in large-scale operations, among whom the arms dealer Basil Zaharoff stands out as the most emblematic of the “munitionnaires.”44 From early on, numerous myths circulated about his Greek origins, even though he later became a French citizen. During his lifetime, he was the subject of several biographies, eventually becoming such a familiar name in popular culture—including Hergé’s Tintin and the Broken Ear—that Jean-Marie Moine coined the expression “Zaharovian literature.” Zaharoff’s image owes much to Helmuth Engelbrecht and Frank Hanighen’s investigative work Merchants of Death where he featured prominently.45 Labelled the “super-seller of death,” he was portrayed as an exceptionally shrewd individual who amassed his fortune through privileged access to European chancelleries. Contemporary critics employed highly charged language to describe him, calling him “the king of war profiteers,” “the most mysterious man in Europe,” and “the richest man in the world.” In the largely pacifist climate of the interwar years, public opinion anathematized him, seeking a figure onto whom responsibility for the devastating Great War could be projected.

• 46 Kalifa 2011, pp. 258‑266.
• 47 Dewerpe 2000, pp. 151‑154.
• 48 Schuster 2022.
• 49 Salmon 2024a.

26Such cultural representations must be properly historicized if we are to understand who these individuals actually were. Dominique Kalifa has shown that operating within an illegal framework—an inherent feature of arms smuggling—is often associated with images of virility and action, producing idealized figures of “real men.”46 These clichés also appear in police reports describing the physical and moral characteristics of smugglers. This is hardly surprising, given that surveillance and repression records frequently adopted narrative styles borrowed from spy fiction or the tabloid press, both of which were heavily saturated with stereotypes.47 More broadly, the discursive construction of deviance relies predominantly on male-coded stereotypes,48 a tendency that renders women involved in illegal practices largely invisible, or confines their visibility to already narrativized transgressive figures such as revolutionaries or prostitutes.49

• 50 Donovan 2006; Pliley, Kramm, Fischer-Tiné (eds.) 2016; Courtwright 2019.

27The influence of moral discourses on such representations, as well as the role of anti-vice activism—which emerged from the late 19th century as a powerful driver of political and social action—must also be taken into account.50 Unlike many other smuggled commodities, arms and drugs are invested with strong moral, ideological, and political meanings that go well beyond questions of fiscal evasion, helping to explain the enduring power of their representations. Discourses surrounding human trafficking and sexual “perversion” clearly fall within this framework, too. The selection of arms, drugs, and specific actors for regulation or prohibition within a given political space reflects broader social and political concerns, making these categories primary targets of anti-vice activism.

• 51 Boltanski 2012; Kalifa 2013.
• 52 Montel 2005, pp. 104‑105.

28Studying the “underworld” thus requires a critical reassessment of archival materials relating to illegality, with particular attention paid to their poetics of production as well as to their analytical potential. What police sources reveal, and how mass media shape narratives of the underworld, has been well documented.51 Conversely, the absence of sources on certain individuals raises questions about the extent of their actual involvement: it may have been exaggerated by popular representations in literature and the media, or downplayed by surveillance services reluctant to act against particularly powerful figures—or even inclined to collaborate with them. Historical analysis therefore often requires careful navigation between these two poles, as Laurence Montel reminds us through a close examination of the previously cited example of Paul Carbone and François Spirito.52

• 53 Frenking forthcoming.

29Ultimately, as Sarah Frenking argues, the “underworld” should be understood as a social construct—and even as a specific spatial configuration—in which social practices take shape.53 This perspective invites historians to reconsider both the agency of the individuals involved and their use of space, sometimes at a very fine-grained scale.

• 54 Kunth 2016; Regnard 2022.
• 55 Clancy-Smith 2010.
• 56 Khuri-Makdisi 2010.
• 57 Kunth 2016, pp. 90‑97.
• 58 Regnard 2022, pp. 168‑248.

31This approach is exemplified by studies of migrant groups,54 as well as of workers, artists, and militants in the western55 and eastern Mediterranean.56 Among other insights, the careful reconstruction of characteristic trajectories highlights the centrality of interpersonal relationships in decisions to depart, in border crossings, and in processes of settlement. It also sheds light on phenomena closely intertwined with illicit mobility and related economic practices, including bribery and the “corruption” of control officers,57 as well as the development of extensive underground economies in ports of transit and cities of settlement—most notably Marseille, which, not by coincidence, features prominently in the majority of articles included here.58

• 59 Mays 2020.
• 60 Chaumont 2009.
• 61 Rodríguez García, van Nederveen Meerkerk, van Voss 2017, p. 5.

32More closely aligned with the concerns of this special issue, the reconstruction of illegal trajectories—such as those of minority groups—underscores the analytical value of individual case studies. This approach makes it possible to mobilize a range of perspectives that enrich historical analysis, including ethnicity and religion (at both group and individual level),59 as well as class and gender. One indicative example is the study of mobility within human trafficking networks, or what was termed in the early 20th century the “white slave trade”/“traite des blanches.” This theme has recently generated a rich body of scholarship illuminating both individual agency and the gendered dimensions of sex work. By deconstructing the notion of a centralized, international organization trafficking women conceived as passive objects, and by scrutinizing narratives constructed to serve political purposes, these studies reveal a far more nuanced reality.60 Rather than portraying the phenomenon as driven solely by predatory procurers or “immoral” women, recent analyses foreground women’s agency, emphasizing “the opinions and motivations of the concerned actors who implicitly or explicitly perceive prostitution as an alternative way to make a living, often preferable to other strenuous, dangerous, and low‑paid jobs.”61

• 62 Laite 2021.
• 63 Camiscioli 2024.
• 64 Frenking forthcoming.

33In this vein, the case of Lydia Harvey provides Julia Laite with an opportunity to trace the young woman’s movements from New Zealand to Buenos Aires and to give voice to an individual historically relegated to a subordinate position.62 Similarly, a recent monograph goes beyond analyzing the construction of fantasies surrounding “French sex” or the figure of men “rejecting honest work” to explore the lived experiences of French women traveling on both sides of the Atlantic in the context of sex work, blending forced with voluntary migration.63 Despite its many constraints, sex work could thus function as a space of agency for women who leveraged it as a means of mobility.64

• 65 Carey 2014, p. 196.

34These observations also apply to other domains, such as drug trafficking, where recent scholarship has shown that women’s relationships to the drug trade are far more complex than portrayals that cast them as mere victims or addicts would suggest.65 Viewed from this perspective, patterns of female underrepresentation and historical silence are denaturalized and themselves become a subject of historical inquiry.

• 66 Clancy-Smith 2012.

37This special issue adopts a broad Mediterranean framework, yet the contributions it brings together point to a variety of analytical scales. Illicit trafficking can be practiced, observed, and interpreted at multiple levels—from local to national and from regional to international. These shifts in scale raise important questions about both illicit activities and the ways in which they are policed and repressed. For instance, can small-scale or strictly local forms of smuggling, confined to a limited perimeter, be tolerated by authorities? One might argue that this has often been the case, as illustrated by the operation and supply of “black markets” during periods of war, blockade, or other crises. At national or regional level, however, smuggling that challenges state borders is more likely to provoke systematic and severe repression by border-control institutions concerned not only with public revenue but also with the assertion of territorial sovereignty. Yet, while this response appears plausible, tolerance, accommodation, or even co‑option by state actors can also occur. The picture is further complicated once one moves up to the international scale, where patterns of cooperation can take a transnational form, both among smugglers and among those tasked with suppressing them. From the 19th century onward in particular, the facilitation of circulation and mobility—driven by the acceleration of communications and technological developments such as steam navigation and the expansion of port infrastructures that were increasingly difficult to monitor—further reshaped illicit trafficking, which gradually assumed global dimensions. In her study of precolonial Tunisia, for example, Julia Clancy-Smith has shown how capitalism, imperialism, and advances in transport infrastructure had concrete effects on the expansion of illicit trades, ranging from arms smuggling to human trafficking, with crossroads spaces playing a particularly decisive role.66

• 67 Horden, Purcell 2000, pp. 78‑80.
• 68 Papamichos Chronakis 2024, pp. 2‑5.
• 69 Borutta 2013.
• 70 Bartolotti, Regnard 2024.

38Shifting between scales, zooming in and out, thus provides a way to historicize smuggling practices by situating them within specific local or regional contexts, as well as within fragmented legislative regimes that generate loopholes and legal ambiguities. This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the diverse forms that smuggling and its regulation have taken across different periods and regions. In the Mediterranean context, such diversity reflects historical, geopolitical, and social transformations, as well as geographical specificities ranging from insularity to mountainous terrain, in line with Horden and Purcell’s analysis of Mediterranean micro-regions.67 Thus, in the eastern and southern Mediterranean in particular, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, new political arrangements, such as the mandate system, ushered in a phase of colonial control, complementing parallel processes of nation-state formation already under way in parts of the north-eastern Mediterranean. In some areas, this dual process reshaped patterns of circulation and altered the role of specific port cities and localities, often in opposite ways. Salonika, for instance, after its incorporation into the Greek kingdom in 1913, was to some extent cut off from its Balkan hinterland.68 By contrast, Marseille—already a key hub between metropolitan France and colonial Algeria69—increasingly functioned as a site of intersection and encounter for people, commodities, and a wide range of activities, including illicit practices that flourished precisely because of its status as a major colonial port.70

• 71 Pattieu 2009.
• 72 Dornel 2025, pp. 170‑171.

39One example is the activity of black procurers, often former sailors, who were far from constituting a marginalized or isolated subculture and were instead able to collaborate with individuals of diverse backgrounds, including white actors.71 Likewise, the presence of colonial soldiers in Marseille contributed to the emergence of what might be described as a “dissident subculture.” The case of the Annamites stationed there during the First World War is highly illustrative: they developed illicit trading networks, dealing in tobacco, opium and foodstuffs, as well as in pornographic photographs, in order to improve their living conditions in metropolitan France.72

• 73 Borutta, Gekas 2012, p. 6.

41In this context, the analytical focus can shift from larger areas to cities, contact zones, and micro-sites of encounter—such as infamous districts, bazars, brothels, ports, and other places of negotiation, coexistence, and cooperation—and vice versa.73 This jeu d’echelles constitutes one of the core methodological propositions of this special issue, offering a means to examine historical phenomena across multiple and overlapping conceptions of the Mediterranean, and thereby reaffirming the continued relevance of this spatial category for historical analysis. From this perspective, smuggling not only serves as an object of study per se but also contributes to how the Mediterranean itself is conceptualized, suggesting that Mediterranean studies and smuggling studies are mutually illuminating. More broadly, the history of illicit trajectories provides a new lens through which to examine transnational exchanges and, more generally, processes of globalization from the margins of society and the “periphery” of the Western world.