Redes delictivas y formas de crimen organizado en las ciudades de la Europa atlántica durante el Antiguo Régimen

Abstract

The forms to experience urban life, rights and citizenships were quite diverse in early modern societies. Within the urban European societies grew up street cultures that made easy the development of some forms of criminal organization. These gave some chances to a multitude of immigrants for taking part in quite diverse forbidden business related to the trade and distribution of illegal goods. From Cervantes to Victor Hugo and Dickens the European literature has described those urban underworlds as capable for the building of hierarchical crime organizations. The analysis of those smuggling networks that took part in the colonial Spanish trade introducing illicit goods in Canary Islands, Seville and other Atlantic Spanish ports as well as that about crime networks developed in Amsterdam and London give the chance for the overcoming of the literature archetype of organized crime in Old Regime urban societies.