1The editors and authors of this special issue devoted to “Illicit trafficking in the Mediterranean context, 1870–1960” are to be applauded for their deeply researched and richly narrated volume. Its provocative and wide-ranging studies achieve an unusually sustained conversation, one of the major objectives of which is to address micro and macro and in‑between scales of the “illicit”, to offer a more expansive vision of the Mediterranean during “hinge” moments in empire, nation, law, migration, and much more. Nevertheless, the geo-political and chronological reach of these articles extends beyond the Inner Sea as well as into the 21st century, and back to the pre-modern. Their “stories,” pieced together from fragmented archival and other documentation, are simultaneously heart-wrenching, curious, and even amusing. A new genre is on tender in the historical and social sciences: “contraband accounts” that are judiciously and rigorously scrutinized using the latest methodologies, along with measured doses of imagination, now legitimately under the historians’ remit.

2The primary sources upon which the authors draw are often new or underexplored, for example, those of “La police des chemins de fer,” which Samantha Pratali demonstrates, provide documentation on how women and children were inserted into transnational trafficking through the port of Marseille to destinations near and distant across the globe. In many of the articles, we see that international treaties or agreements impeded the efforts of local or national authorities to suppress contraband in people for prostitution, drugs, and even Parmesan cheese. Multi-state conventions forged new legal uncertainties, the interpretation of which curtailed the implementation of laws, even with “benevolent” intent, notably among low‑level agents situated at the hierarchical “ends” of chains of policing or control—the guys on the ground in ports, or at border crossings.

3Other articles invite us to visit places seemingly disconnected in conventional inter‑war imaginaries, such as Pierre Salmons’s “The French Riviera Milieu and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).” That La Côte d’Azur, then under construction as a luxury sea‑side tourist attraction mainly built by North African migrant labor, was a hot gun-running node—who would have thought? But, in the world view of one participant in the “Milieu,” an entrepreneurial gunsmith by profession, transnational arms smuggling represented a source of income, without ideological preference for political faction. The same could be said of the sailors and ships studied by Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal in “Merchants, Sailors, and Smuggling: The Illicit Opium Traffic between Istanbul and Marseille in the Early 1930s.” Here we find “part‑time” or opportunistic smugglers who employed much older practices found worldwide where critical sea‑land interfaces experienced an uneasy co‑existence with various degrees and scales of surveillance. Heaving containers with forbidden commodities off ships to escape detection has a long pedigree, stretching well into the pre-modern eras—or in the years after the alleged abolition of African slavery by international treaty fiat, of moving enslaved black people around the Atlantic and Mediterranean through a range of subterfuges.

4Kostis Gkotsinas, in “In the Shadow of Prohibition and Nation-Making: Greek Smugglers and Shifts in Early Twentieth-Century Drug Trafficking” reminds us that specific Mediterranean groups, often from islands, were associated in the collective conscience with extralegal activities far beyond the Inner Sea. In a sense, the “Greeks” were the eastern Mediterranean equivalent of the vilified “lawless” Maltese depicted as such from the 19th century on, or even earlier. Yet at the same time, Maltese and Greeks (and others) were venerated as picaresque populist heroes by their local comrades, constituencies, and collaborators. In “Saisir les circulations illicites à Marseille au début du xxe siècle”, Laurence Montel argues along similar lines but here a city, long cast as a center of licentiousness and the preferred space of those deemed “hors la loi,” became the epicenter of the Mediterranean illicit.

5As an assemblage, the global microhistories in this special issue argue that “Contraband and Smuggling Studies” have not only come to maturation but should also occupy a central place in established narratives of the “global economy” (or economies). Far from representing parallel or nested economic realities within state or imperial political systems, these studies show that licit, informal, or grey-black exchanges were and are in fact “the economy of exchanges”, near and far, past and present. And they painfully reveal the multifaced violences inherent in something termed the world order.