The Smugglers' Trade in Sixteenth Century England

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This is the most sophisticated historical study every undertaken of the illicit trade, in this country or abroad. All previous studies of smuggling, most of which concern the illicit trade of the eighteenth -early nineteenth centuries, have contented themselves with examining the reaction of the State to contraband traffic. By contrast, this book examines the world from the smugglers' point of view, making extensive use of business records generated by merchant-smugglers. To examine such records, the applicant uses methodologies similar to those employed by modern fraud investigators. It was for the development and application of these methodologies that he won the Economic History Society's 'T.S. Ashton prize' in 2001. Using the business records of smugglers, the book investigates why individuals smuggled, how they managed their businesses, how they protected their illicit trade and what they did to prevent detection and capture. In addition, the book examines the economic framework within which smugglers operated and, in particular, how changing fiscal, regulatory and market conditions affected the scale and nature of smuggling during the late medieval and early modern period. Concentrating on evidence from Bristol, the book thus opens a window, for the first time, on the smugglers' world. There are two reasons why this book will be an important publication. First, it demonstrates that it is possible to achieve something that has long been thought impossible - a detailed reconstruction of the illicit trade. Since the sources employed in this study are not unique to the period, other historians will be able to adopt this methodology to undertake similar investigations of the smugglers' trade, both in this country and abroad. Indeed, since the private commercial records of the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries are more detailed and numerous than those of the Tudor period, it should prove easier for historians working on later centuries to undertake similar investigations. This book therefore has the potential to open the door to the creation of a new branch of commercial history. The second reason why this book is important, is that its findings will force economic historians to re-evaluate their assumptions about England's early modern commercial history. It also will reveal, for the first time, the impact the illicit trade had on economic, social, political and urban development. The book's most obvious contribution to existing historical debates is that it will force historians to reconsider the use they make of data derived from the customs accounts, on which all interpretations of England's early modern commercial development are based. The book demonstrates that while customs data can generally be accepted as an accurate record of trade for goods subject to low officials costs (taxes and regulations), when such costs were high the illicit trade could account for the bulk of total trade. This has important implications for the use of customs data by economic historians seeking to determine the structure or development of English overseas trade. For example, the book reveals that since exports were subject to far higher official costs than imports in the sixteenth century, the data derived from the customs accounts provide a highly misleading impression of both England's trade balance and the importance of imports relative to exports. Similarly, since official costs and restrictions on trade increased markedly during the second half of the sixteenth century, the illicit trade would have grown in size. The customs accounts therefore underestimate the growth of England's overseas trade at this time.