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Notes
1 Louis Mandrin (1724–1755) was convicted of smuggling and counterfeiting in France. There has been more accounts and portrayals of him than of any other smuggler, robber or criminal during the French Ancien Régime (Lusebrick Citation1979).
2 Academic literature on informality is wide, and making a review of it is out of the scope of this paper. The way academics deal with informality is mainly rooted in their disciplines. Economists tend to attach the word “informal” to singularized entities like the “sector,” the “operators” or the “entrepreneurs.” Political scientists or anthropologists describe “practices” as informal. For “informal practices” related to economic questions, see for instance Ledeneva (Citation2006) whose approach is based on a typology of different kinds of practices in Russia or the project The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality directed also by Prof. Ledeneva (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/research/funded-research-projects/informal-practices).
3 Taxation is a “traditional” dividing line in public policies. In general, most governments strive to establish a specific taxation applied to informal traders or make them formal.
4 Informal entrepreneurs are often represented as small businesses with almost no financial strength.
5 The World Customs Organization (WCO) organized, jointly with the World Bank, an international conference on “Informality, International Trade and Customs”, held in June 2013 in Brussels. This conference brought together a hundred or so Customs officials and academics, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists. It was partially funded by the Korea Customs Service. One of the aims of this conference was to sensitize researchers to field dilemmas and issues faced by officials in charge of enforcing law at borders and to share with these officials a reflection on the political, sociological and ethical dimensions of their functions when confronted by the issue of “informality.”
6 By “state vision,” we understand that they mean the views advocated by international experts from IGOs, national experts and civil servants working in and for state administrations.
7 The reverse can be the case in borderlands. Roitman (Citation2004) describes how, at the borders between Cameroon and Nigeria, Cameroonian informal traders ask for the help of the Cameroon government to counter foreign informal traders who compete with them.
8 Gaignat de Laulnais was a French merchant in Nantes before teaching trade practices and writing a guide for traders. He is one of these numerous “merchants-intellectuals” who, between the mid-17th century and the mid-18th century, built a kind of science of commerce, knowledge on trade based on their practical experience, and compiled it into guides of commerce (Hoock and Jeannin Citation1993; Skornicki Citation2006). The work of one of them, Jacques Savary, was quoted in American handbooks of accounting until the early 20th century (Parker Citation1966).
9 See, for instance, Michaels (Citation2009) on the role of the World Bank Doing Business reports on the evolution of national laws.
10 This is a very common representation. In his Laws, Plato would owe nothing to foreign merchants. In his ideal city, the Foreigner from Athens proposes to restrict import and exports in terms of the nature of goods and, above all, he does not impose any taxation on foreign trade. This is a bit strange for contemporary experts who think, on the contrary, that reducing tariffs is a way to increase international trade. The point Plato wanted to make clear is the fact that the city treasury must not depend on the taxation of long distance merchants and this is in line with the global closure of the city.