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“... the most famous criminal in the country’s history, Louis Mandrin, established his reputation. As Michael Kwass explains in his excellent book, flourishing global trade and domestic economic expansion had combined to create a vast new consumer market for imported goods: sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, porcelain, fabrics, spices and much else. By ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”

“... focus on influences outside Europe and how they can enhance our understanding of 1789. Michael Kwass brilliantly explores the volume of illicit trade in pre-revolutionary France, especially in non-European commodities such as tobacco and calico. Perhaps half of all Frenchmen condemned to the galleys between 1685 and 1791 were incarcerated for ...”