ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical analysis of the illegal trade from the viewpoint of the lower strata as it reveals the practices and meanings that they invoked for normalizing their engagement in illegal practices. The urban and rural poor found in the unregulated trade the means to emancipate themselves from the paternal relationships that were based on large landholding and kinship during the import-substituting industrialization period. The chapter shows that the peasantry of Kilis achieved an independent status vis-a-vis the market relations, as they were emancipated from their dependency on the paternalistic relations of agricultural production in the 1960s. According to the minister of internal affairs Sukru Kaya, the high numbers of border-crosser peasants that went to work on the Syrian fields in plough and harvest times implicated them in practices of 'smuggling'. The border people may have the advantage of living at the edge of two differential legal and economic systems.
