Preliminary Programme

The opium régie plays a leading role in the Indochinese tax system. Smuggling is its natural corollary, all the more intense because of the high value added by the monopoly. The aim of this presentation is to better understand the need for the “Douanes et Régies” Administration to characterize these practices of opium fraud, in so far as they undermine finances and challenge the effective exercise of the colonial order in areas where the circulation of goods escapes it. This characterization of the illicit forms a transgression against which the colonial order can exert its coercion, through a strong repression that poorly conceals the impotence of the colonial administration in the face of the extent of the phenomenon. (Show less)

The paper will explore how the border (both physical and legal) between territories of 'British India' and Princely states in colonial South Asia provides a context to interrogate the notion of licit and illicit through the lens of railway crimes. Railway lines had narrow legal jurisdictions and crimes committed across different kinds of borders within the same colony have not been looked before in the historiography of Imperial Britain. My paper therefore will open a new conceptual framework to think about transience of licit and illicit. (Show less)

This paper focuses on discussions within the framework of the Committee of Experts on Native Labour, which was composed (for the most part) of former or active colonial administrators, and convened by the International Labour Organization in 1926. We want to reconstruct the negotiations of the boundary between licit and illicit forms of coercion to work in the colonies – negotiations that eventually led to the Forced Labour Convention (No. 29, 1930). We argue that the way in which ‘forced labour’ was defined during the discussions of the Committee allowed forms of labour coercion to persist for the sake of colonial economies. (Show less)

In 1890, Imperial Germany sought to work with its colonial rivals, to realize a system of controls over the sale of surplus arms to Eastern and Southern Africa. Threatened by indigenous revolt, German authorities first helped to pass the Brussels Conference Act that banned arms sales to many regions of colonial Africa alongside prohibitions on the slave trade and dealing in alcohol. Enforced by a joint naval blockade along with the UK, Portugal and Italy, the Brussels Conference marked the high point of German support for international arms control. In the ensuing years, German arms manufacturers and merchants increasingly sought to sell their wares through the territory of imperial rivals who sought to ban this trade or to customers in the Middle East who acted as middlemen, selling on these guns to rebels in Afghanistan and India. As a relative latecomer to colonial competition, German arms traders often found themselves boxed in by trading centers and routes dominated by rival empires, thus making them move into the grey areas between international trade and transimperial smuggling in order to make a profit. This found tacit support of the German state, which aimed to facilitate its manufacturers and traders ability to sell where they pleased even if it upset other imperial powers, while still restricting traffic to spaces where it could threaten the German colonial project. (Show less)