The Portuguese build an empire.

Albuquerque's victory in Malacca gave Portugal a major foothold in the Far Eastern pepper trade, but the Portuguese were never able to fully dominate it. The chapter summarizes the struggles of Portugal's building of its empire. It also discusses the cartaz system, where the Portuguese claimed suzerainty over the Indian Ocean and no one else was allowed to sail unless they purchased a safe conduct pass. The cartaz obliged Asian ships to call at a Portuguese-controlled port and pay customs duties before proceeding on their voyage. Ships without this document were considered fair game and their goods could be confiscated. It was, pure and simple, a protection racket. The cartaz system, plus customs duties and outright piracy, provided most of the funds defraying the costs of the Portuguese navy and its garrisons. The chapter also outlines the importance of Indian cotton in the Spice Trade and the routes of spices into Europe. Further, the chapter provides highlights of the Portuguese profits on spices. Portuguese imports of pepper held strong over most the sixteenth century. The total weight of the spice cargoes averaged 40,000 to 50,000 quintals (1 quintal = 130 pounds or 59 kilograms) annually in the first half of the century and 60,000 to 70,000 quintals later on. Records have been left of one cargo in 1518 that totalled almost 5 million pounds (2.27 million kilograms), of which 4.7 million pounds (2.13 million kilograms) was pepper, 12,000 pounds (5443 kilograms) cloves, 3000 pounds (1360 kilograms) cinnamon and 2000 pounds (907 kilograms) mace (Krondl, 2007). Most of the pepper and other spices were purchased in Malabar on the open market. Portuguese profits on the pepper trade could run as high as 500%. Lastly, the chapter briefly discusses how other European countries looked for alternative routes to the spices.

The Antiradicalization Protection Racket

This chapter addresses program failures. The masculinities supported are premised on a “chivalric” defense of citizens, which only works if “bad men are lurking to attack women.” As societies accept an increasingly paternalistic state, they are expected to extend gratitude for protection; dissent or criticism is marginalized. There is a proliferation of securitization, where areas of ordinary life are reclassified as “security” concerns. Broad methods create unsafe spaces through increased surveillance and the appropriation of other institutions for security measures. Attempts by the state to lessen women’s suffering are utilitarian, aimed at reducing the risk of detainees regressing by placing women as their “wives,” making detainees dependent upon the state to which they owe gratitude. These programs present a “protection racket,” which undermines the rights and security of women and constitutes a demand for deference from citizens in exchange for governance and security. Dissent is delegitimized be evoking security needs.

The Politics of Criminal Victimization: Pursuing and Resisting Power

The conventional approach to criminal victimization views it as a traumatic but one-time act. This overlooks a layer of contentious and dynamic politics between victims and criminal actors that we have yet to analyze. I develop a new theoretical framework to analyze the strategic behaviors that victims and criminal actors use to pursue and resist power as part of the political process of criminal victimization. The framework enables us to better observe, conceptualize, and theorize how victims exercise agency vis-à-vis their criminal perpetrators, as well as behaviors and practices that criminal actors undertake to carry out and sustain victimization, but which are overlooked by the traditional focus on their use and threat of coercive force. I illustrate the framework’s analytic utility with an empirical analysis of the victimization of informal street vendors in a major Latin American city under a criminal protection racket. The argument and empirical findings suggest ways to expand and deepen the research agenda on the politics of criminal victimization.

Food crime without criminals: Agri-food safety governance as a protection racket for dominant political and economic interest

This chapter argues that the slow violence experienced by those in more traditional and alternative ways of food provisioning, which developed within public and private agri-food-safety governance, functions as a kind of protection racket that enables the dominance of particular epistemic, political and economic interests. While the institutional enactments of slow violence are typically not against the law they can be labelled criminal within a colloquial use of the term, not least because they are complicit with social injustice, exclusions and the rendering of many vulnerable to food insecurity and climate change. New feminist epistemologies, ontologies, and feminist ethics support a concern for care and justice while keeping people safe, as well as offer resources for better kinds of governance and would be more responsive to the contemporary opportunities from agro-ecology and food sovereignty.

The British Monopoly On The Surat Trade To The Middle East And The Indian Ship-Owning Merchants’ Struggle Against It: 1759–1800

Between 1759 and 1800, Surat, still an important trade and financial centre, was under the ultimate rule of the East India Company. Although the EIC justified this as necessary for protecting Surat's inhabitants and, most particularly, the local merchant class, the Company failed not only to protect the Surat merchants against the depredations of Great Britain's European enemies, but also to safeguard the merchants from extortion by local EIC top officials. In fact, the latter imposed what was essentially a protection racket on trade from Surat to the Middle East. This article focuses on the Surat merchants’ long-drawn out and ultimately unsuccessful struggle against what, in the official documents, was dubbed the [British] monopoly of the trade to the “Gulphs”. The episode demonstrates two theses: the first is that the interests of the Surat merchants held little importance to the EIC or its officials, and the second is that, during the period under examination, no mutually beneficial partnership tied the British to the Surat merchants — rather, the relationship was one of naked exploitation by the former of the latter.