“Government repression of extralegals was plentiful, harsh, and in France, deadly. In the mid-eighteenth century, laws prohibiting the French public from manufacturing, importing, or selling cotton prints carried penalties ranging from slavery and imprisonment to death. The extralegals remained undeterred. Heckscher estimates that within one ten-year period in the eighteenth century the French executed more than 16,000 smugglers and clandestine manufacturers for the illegal manufacture or import of printed calicoes. An even larger number were sentenced to the galleys or punished in other ways. In the town of Valence alone, 77 extralegal entrepreneurs were hanged, 58 were broken on the wheel, and 651 were sentenced to the galleys. Authorities found it in their hearts to set free only one extralegal.”

—The Mystery of Capital