ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the relationship between spatial and gendered aspects of illegal exchange in the pre-modern urban economy by concentrating on salt and textile smuggling in eighteenth-century Lyon and the border province of Dauphiné. Articulating the local and the global, the town serves as a lens for analysing the illicit economy, and for approaching the diversity of spatial configurations pertinent for every male or female economic actor who contested the official rules of exchange and their impact on the urban space. This chapter focuses on the urban ‘interstices’ of the unofficial calicos market during the French prohibition (1686–1759), the illegal circulations of salt and textiles between some towns and their peripheries, and the international smuggling spaces linking Lyon or Grenoble to Geneva. It pays attention to the complementary notions of visibility and clandestinity, mobility and immobility, and to the ways in which the spatial, legal and social boundaries were used and negotiated. The concept of male and female economic territories will be used to analyze the relationships between gender, space, power and institutions, and to show how the physical space of the city and its surroundings was experienced and used as a resource by all participants in the illicit economy.
