smuggling

smuggling illegal transport across state or national boundaries of goods or persons liable to customs or to prohibition. Smuggling has been carried on in nearly all nations and has occasionally been adopted as an instrument of national policy, as by Great Britain against Spain and France in the 18th and 19th cent. The restrictive economic policies of mercantilism in the 17th and 18th cent. gave rise to smuggling in France, the Spanish colonies, and North America. British attempts to halt the practice by stringent enforcement of the Navigation Acts were a contributory cause of the American Revolution. Napoleon's decrees attempting to seal off the European continent from British commerce gave rise to widespread smuggling in the early 19th cent. Britain, source of free-trade philosophy, has been more liberal in her antismuggling laws than other nations; the practice was condoned in a famous passage by Adam Smith . Smuggling into the United States flourished in the prohibition era and was carried on practically with impunity from overseas and overland from Canada. Illegal entry of immigrants into the United States has also presented a problem during periods of curtailment of immigration, as at the end of World War I and in recent years. Luxury articles, stolen art and other goods, electronic devices and software, and specifically prohibited items such as narcotics are smuggled worldwide. The U.S. Coast Guard has the suppression of smuggling as one of its chief activities. U.S. law declares the article smuggled to be forfeit and the smuggler liable to a fine or imprisonment, or both. Examples of the smuggling of persons are the slave trade to the United States and Latin America following its outlawing by the great powers in the early 19th cent. and the traffic in women for immoral purposes, contrary to international convention.

Bibliography: See J. J. Farjeon, The Compleat Smuggler (1938); N. Williams, Contraband Cargoes (1959); T. Green, The Smugglers (1969); H. Waters, Smugglers of Spirits (1971).

smuggling became a serious issue in the 18th century, as government regulation of commerce, for both fiscal and economic policy purposes, increased, and as levels of consumption grew with rising prosperity. Contraband was imported directly from France, from the Isle of Man (until the British government purchased its trading rights in 1765), and from Guernsey. The main goods smuggled were tea (up to the sharp reduction in duties in 1784), tobacco, and spirits, mainly brandy. Suppression was hindered by the connivance of merchants and landowners. Later in the century, as costs rose, large‐scale criminal organization came to play a more prominent part. Contemporaries, anxious to demonstrate the damaging effects of the Wollen Act, maintained that large quantities of wool were illegally exported from Ireland to France, but research shows that the amounts were in fact negligible.

The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, followed after 1800 by the growth of free trade and more effective law enforcement, ended the first great age of Irish smuggling. In the 1930s the imposition of tariffs on Irish livestock imports to the United Kingdom (see economic war) created an illegal cross‐border cattle trade. Across a longer period, higher tariffs and excise duties in independent Ireland encouraged smuggling of spirits, tobacco, and manufactured goods from Northern Ireland. Accession to the European Union was eventually to undermine this traffic, while creating, through its system of subsidies, a whole range of new opportunities to profit from the clandestine movement of livestock.