Mediterranean Jews and the politics of contraband trade in World War I

This chapter repositions the politics of contraband trade in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean during the First World War at the interstices of state policies and individual merchant action. It examines how the British and French military authorities imaginatively adopted a variety of non-economic criteria to define as ‘contraband’ the business activities of numerous prominent Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Dönme merchants in the port-cities of Salonica and Kavala, and how in turn these merchants challenged their blacklisting by employing a multi-faceted social, cultural and political capital to prove their loyalty to the Entente Powers. Mainstream historiography on the political economy of illicit trade during the Great War has so far adopted a largely nation-bound approach focusing on the processes of state-building and the establishment of national economies sustained by an increasingly tighter control over international trade. This chapter by contrast draws from Greek and Entente government records, archives of international Jewish organizations, and the local press, to prioritize the functioning of formal and informal cross-ethnic networks and argue that the multiethnic, post-Ottoman commercial elites of Greek Macedonia actively shaped the convoluted politics of contraband trade as their region transitioned from empire to nation-state.