Colonial Era Smuggling

. . . Molasses was an essential Ingredient in American Independence. Many great Events have proceeded from much smaller causes.

John Adams. letter to Judge William Tudor, 11 August 1818

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“[T]he hope of evading such taxes by smuggling gives frequent occasion to forfeitures and other penalties, which entirely ruin the smuggler, a person who, though no doubt highly blameable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.”

– Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776

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Smuggling - was common throughout the Atlantic world, not just the American colonies or Britain.  There is a reason the free trade movement arose out of the mercantile period.

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Smuggling became a national pastime in America because of punitive British regulations.  There were three major items that were smuggled.

- 1733 - 1766 Molasses
- Tea
- Wine





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Smuggling and the American Revolution podcast

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Session Abstract:

Evidence of illicit commerce in the early modern Atlantic world abounds. Admiralty proceedings, the correspondence and account books of merchants, customs reports, petitions, and inaccuracies in bills of lading all testify to merchants' ability to trade where they pleased and to avoid duties in the process.

Yet for decades many scholars considered such evidence to be exaggerated the wailings of over-industrious administrators trying to justify their positions or unrepresentative of the majority of trade and thus only of minor importance. In the last few decades, however, as scholars have endeavored to describe the workings of the Atlantic economy with ever more precision, it has become clear that illegal trade was a major feature of eighteenth-century commerce. 

Historians of Britain and France, for example, have demonstrated that smuggling, not just of luxury goods but also of tobacco, tea, and other imports, was common throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Spanish America it was much the same, with English, Dutch, and Portuguese traders collaborating to move gold, cacao, and other goods off of the Spanish Main in return for Europeans goods of all kinds. 

The Eastern Caribbean was an especially active arena of illicit trade where even warfare did not disturb illegal exchanges between British and French colonists, with the Dutch and Danes acting as important participants and facilitators. 

In the process of uncovering such illegal trade many scholars have assumed that the central impetus behind smugglers' exchanges was economic: the desire for profit and a willingness to defy the law to secure the best commercial opportunities wherever they lay. But were such attitudes at the root of all smuggling? Was it only self-interest that drove illicit trade? After all, many early modern merchants, especially those living in the colonies, viewed smuggling not as a crime against "the laws of nature," but as necessary adaptations to what they saw as arbitrary commercial restrictions designed to enrich metropolitan coffers. As Adam Smith remarked in 1776, the smuggler was in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so. 

This panel attempts to address these questions by moving the discussion of illicit commerce beyond circuits of goods to the ideas and attitudes of those who participated in underground trade. It therefore explores not only the practices of clandestine trade but contemporary understandings of law, criminality, mercantilism, and Empire. With five brief (ten minute) papers based on original research in a round-table setting our panel unites both sides of the Atlantic, encompassing three of the four continents that sea brings together, and nearly all of the major European empires of the eighteenth century British, French, Dutch, and Spanish. This geographic scope offers a rare opportunity to bring vastly different perspectives to bear on the meaning of illicit trade in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.


Smuggling in Early America  by Christian J. Koot

--- Smuggling formed in resistance to British economic and political control. British authorities attempted to harness the trade of their Atlantic colonies by employing a series of laws that restricted overseas commerce (often referred to as the Navigation Acts). This legislation created the opportunity for illicit trade by raising the costs of legal trade. Hampered by insufficient resources, thousands of miles of coastline, and complicit local officials, British customs agents could not prevent smuggling. Economic self-interest and the pursuit of profit certainly motivated smugglers, but because it was tied to a larger transatlantic debate about the proper balance between regulation and free trade, smuggling was also a political act. Through smuggling colonists rejected what they saw as capricious regulations designed to enrich Britain at their expense.