Co-option or criminalisation? The state, border communities and crime in early modern Europe

From the eighteenth century onwards, the state took increasing responsibility for controlling activities within its borders. Prior to this, however, the role of the state was less clearly defined. In the early modern period, with Europe dominated by expansionist Empires comprised of loose collaborations of national groupings, state borders were often not clearly defined, and inadequately policed or protected by the central state. Thus, as well as the persistent threat of large-scale military invasion, frontier or borderland regions also became hotspots for cross-border banditry, smuggling and piracy, often on a well-established and semi-professional scale. As a result, border communities were often co-opted by the state to act as ‘border guards’, by policing and defending the state frontiers, in return for certain ‘privileges’, despite the fact that, in some instances, these border communities were known to participate in large-scale criminal activities themselves. By considering and comparing three separate border communities: the Cossacks of Southern Russia (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), the Uskoks of Dalmatia (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and the Chods of Bohemia (twelfth to seventeenth centuries), and their involvement with large-scale cross-border criminal activities, this article will draw a number of general conclusions about the nature of crime in state border regions and the complicity of the state in many aspects of organised crime during the early modern period.