On England's eighteenth-century south coast, smuggling outearned farming and fishing
Daniel Defoe, visiting Lymington in 1724, found almost no foreign trade except smuggling and roguing, which he said dominated the whole English coast from the Thames to Land's End. Steep duties on tea, wine and spirits, raised to pay for costly wars, made running contraband a better living than honest work.
In places such as Romney Marsh, East Kent, Cornwall and East Cleveland, whole communities depended more on smuggling than on farming or fishing. Coastal towns later competed over whose smugglers had been boldest, and Smugglers Inn became one of the most common pub names by the sea. The verb itself arrived in English around the seventeenth or eighteenth century, from Low German or Dutch words for moving goods illegally, built on a root meaning to sneak.
The trade is probably as old as taxes. England began treating it as a serious problem after Edward I set up national customs collection in 1275, and medieval smugglers mostly sneaked heavily taxed wool and hides out of the country. Historians who rely on court papers see only those careless enough to be caught, so some now use merchants' own accounts instead. A study by Jones of sixteenth-century Bristol shows members of the civic elite quietly exporting grain and leather by hiding or mislabelling cargo.
In North America, colonial smuggling pushed back against mercantilist taxes. After independence it thrived on the fringes, at Passamaquoddy Bay, Lake Champlain, St. Mary's in Georgia and Louisiana, and those same spots carried goods out during Jefferson's embargo of 1807 to 1809. Freer trade reduced smuggling in both Britain and America, but Prohibition in the 1920s revived it, and drug smuggling grew into a major problem after 1970.
The economics are simple: risk lets smugglers charge a premium, and tax gaps create margins. One truckload of cigarettes moved between American states can reportedly earn two million dollars. Modern drug networks rarely form a single hierarchy; brokers, financiers and transport specialists each handle one stage, often hiding cargo inside legitimate container shipping.
Source: Smuggling
