Underworlds

This work describes organized crime and the world of marginal groups in the 17th- and 18th-century Netherlands. Rural banditry has often been associated with mountainous, poverty-stricken areas located at the peripheries of the European continent or on the borders between states. This book is about bands operating in the countryside of one of the most densely-populated, economically-developed, and pacified European states. It examines the nature of these criminal bands and the way they changed over time, probing the links between warfare, poverty, immigration, social exclusion, stigmatization and involvement in rural organized crime. At the same time, this book presents an historical anthropological survey of marginal groups in the Dutch Republic. Investigating the enormous cultural diversity of organized crime and the prominent role of ethnic minorities (East Europeans, Jews and gypsies), Egmond establishes the existence of a variety of underworlds rather than of a single criminal organization.