Description
In the early 1920s the authorities and public of the Netherlands were confronted with a new problem: Chinese ‘organized’ crime. Chinese fought and killed each other in the port of Amsterdam. Chinese illegal opium dens were found in the harbour districts of both Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Police and customs officers seized contraband opium and arrested seamen working on the steamships connecting the Netherlands to Asia and the Americas.The Chinese illicit trade was not limited to opium alone. While opium smuggling (supplying Chinese migrants in the Netherlands after the prohibition of trade for non-medical purposes in the first Opiumwet (Opium Act) of 1919) was the most visible manifestation of the illicit trade, this trade was entangled with the smuggling of firearms and of humans. Moreover, Chinese smugglers succeeded in establishing new alliances with Western smugglers. The continued embeddedness of the illicit opium trade in the Netherlands would evolve in the illicit heroin trade of the 1970s and facilitated the ‘heroin epidemic’ of the 1970s-1980s.
This paper looks at this entangled smuggling as it developed in the interwar period from the perspectives of historical criminology and cultural history. The paper investigates the contexts and conditions of Chinese smuggling: the economic importance for the steamship companies and the Dutch economy of a labour force of Chinese seamen; the related ‘co-management’ of Chinese crime by Chinese shipping masters and the Dutch police; the establishment of Chinese migrant communities in Dutch ports; the importance of opium use to Chinese labourers; and the social and cultural position of Chinese smugglers and migrants.
Entangled smuggling was socially and culturally embedded in a community that was ethnically and culturally homogeneous (with a background in the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian). Shipping masters and ‘secret societies’ were central to the socio-economic and cultural existence of Chinese migrants, and they were crucial in facilitating smuggling operations. Nevertheless, entangled smuggling was not so much an operation masterminded by Fu Manchu-like criminal bosses, as a traditional aspect of the life of Chinese seamen now confronted with strategies of Western states to introduce regimes of prohibition.
| Period | 2 Jul 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Entangling Histories of International Trafficking |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Erfurt , GermanyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |