Dark Commerce

How a New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future

By: Louise I. Shelley

Narrated by: Kate Harper

A comprehensive look at the world of illicit trade

Though mankind has traded tangible goods for millennia, recent technology has changed the fundamentals of trade, in both legitimate and illegal economies. In the past three decades, the most advanced forms of illicit trade have broken with all historical precedents and, as Dark Commerce tells, now operate as if on steroids, tied to computers and social media. In this new world of illicit commerce, which benefits states and diverse participants, trade is impersonal and anonymized, and vast profits are made in short periods with limited accountability to sellers, intermediaries, and purchasers.

Louise Shelley examines how new technology, communications, and globalization fuel the exponential growth of dangerous forms of illegal trade - the markets for narcotics and child pornography online, the escalation of sex trafficking through web advertisements, and the sale of endangered species for which revenues total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The illicit economy exacerbates many of the world’s destabilizing phenomena: the perpetuation of conflicts, the proliferation of arms and weapons of mass destruction, and environmental degradation and extinction. Shelley explores illicit trade in tangible goods - drugs, human beings, arms, wildlife and timber, fish, antiquities, and ubiquitous counterfeits - and contrasts this with the damaging trade in cyberspace, where intangible commodities cost consumers and organizations billions as they lose identities, bank accounts, access to computer data, and intellectual property.

Demonstrating that illicit trade is a business the global community cannot afford to ignore and must work together to address, Dark Commerce considers diverse ways of responding to this increasing challenge.

©2018 Louise I. Shelley (P)2018 Princeton University Press

Important Topic

This book is important for our time. I liked the historical perspective and in some areas, the examples offered support the assertions. In other areas it doesn’t.

A Cohesive History -- Not a 'List of Facts'

Louis Shelby and Kate Harper create an interesting, straightforward listen on a nuanced topic that touches all of our lives, despite illicit commerce remaining outside the periphery of popular culture. Dark Commerce is the nuts-and-bolts of criminality with historical rhymes between the ancient past, past, present, and future.

Wonderful information

Listening to this book has added perspective and introduced a new way of thinking about sustainable development and the complexity of the way forward. Solutions need to happen on a global level and the cost of price-driven social irresponsible consumerism is great and a huge mountain to climb!

Excellent Scholarly Work

This was a very solid overview of a number of illicit trading typologies including drugs, human trafficking, wildlife trafficking, environmental damage, cybercrime and counterfeiting.

Well researched and described - particularly the ecological aspects to illicit trade. The author gives a fairly objective overview of how states and non-state actors interplay with each problem. Her general default is a belief in state and interstate solutions but acknowledges and points out their clear limitations.

A minor gripe is each typology was only covered a few inches deep (maybe a solid foot at times). Most typologies were not complete front-to-end, many-to-one descriptions with exception to the rhino horn analysis. The author successfully focused on scoping the problems from a macroscopic perspective.

Would have enjoyed perhaps a bit more of the author’s comparison/contrasts of different types of networks as she did with human trafficking differences between Russia and China. Still as a financial crime professional, I gained a few key insights I can apply tomorrow.

Overall a very impressive work and I am not easily impressed. Highly recommend for intelligence, military, finance, and security professionals.

Good overview but too political

Example: the chapter on rhino horns doesn’t talk about the proposed solution of privatizing land and legalizing the rhino horn trade so that the owners of the private herds can make enough money for the preservation of the species. This is a reasonable solution that probably the most likely to work, but it isn’t suggested potentially because it is anti-big government/globalist. Also, the author hates on President Trump without going into why she is critiquing his decisions. Sorry, but his positions/decisions have merit worth discussion even if you ultimately disagree with them.

Boring and repetitive.

Sounded like an interesting topic but badly written and very repetitive. The author doesn't offer the insight I was hoping for. It's just a collection of dry facts.

Best to just collate news articles

I was impressed by this book at all.

it was just facts and figures, more like a report than anything i wouldnt waster your time.

Boring