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The Black Market in Occupied Northern France, 1940-4
During the Second World War, the black market was an integral part of daily life in all parts of wartime Europe - occupied, collaborationist, neutral - and beyond, in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Wherever nations had shifted to a controlled economy, in which supply and distribution were regulated by the government through rationing and quota systems and demand exceeded the regulated supply, the black market flourished. It was the free market at its most brutal. Prices were determined by the laws of supply and demand, adjusted to recognise and reward the enormous risks taken by suppliers in trading on the black market. It was no different in northern France
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