Smuggler Nation (60 page)

Certainly in comparison, my students involved as consumers in the smuggling economy are mere amateurs; yet they are the ones who have violated the law. And that brings me to my final point. Even though America very much remains a smuggler nation (along with its counterpart, the ever-expanding police nation) it seems clear that curbing reckless behavior in the licit side of the economy is the country’s most formidable challenge today.
⁸
The policing face of the state, while increasingly prominent, is noticeably selective in who and what it targets. The Securities and Exchange Commission is a tiny player in the massive federal criminal justice bureaucracy. Despite the intensity of the financial crisis and its aftershocks, policing Wall Street remains a half-hearted sideshow compared to policing border smuggling. It is far easier, after all, to go after drug couriers and smuggled migrants than the financial speculators who made such extraordinary profits in the years leading up to the financial crisis. John Brown, who loathed government interference and made his fortune by blurring the lines between licit and illicit business, would be envious.

NOTES

Introduction

1
. This interactive dynamic is an adaptation and variation of Charles Tilly’s notion that “states make war and war makes states.” See Charles Tilly,
Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1992
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

2
. The relevant historical literature is enormous, but most works tend to focus more narrowly on a particular commodity or smuggling activity, specific historical events and limited time periods, or a geographically confined place or area. Some of the literature focuses on “organized crime” more generally, which includes a much wider assortment of domestic crimes such as extortion, loan sharking, and racketeering. See, for example, Michael Woodiwiss,
Organized Crime and American Power: A History
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

3
. As detailed in the chapters that follow, Astor, the wealthiest man in America at the time of his death in 1848, made his initial fortune trading illicit alcohol for Indian furs, engaged in “trading with the enemy” during the War of 1812, and dabbled in opium smuggling to China. Astor was far from unique. Stephen Girard, also one of the richest men in country when he died in 1831, had built up much of his early fortune through smuggling of various sorts, including in the China opium trade. For brief profiles of Astor and Girard in the context of the early U.S. economy, see Michael Lind,
Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States
(New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 65–75.

4
. For an influential recent account, see Moises Naim,
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy
(New York: Doubleday, 2005).

5
. Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations
(Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2008), 686.

6
. See, for instance, Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
Part I
. In describing the “exceptional character of the early American state,” Skowronek notes that European observers, including Tocqueville, Marx, and Hegel, considered America to be peculiarly stateless in comparison to the European tradition.

7
. Students of American political development have been curiously neglectful of the prominence of the customhouse in their accounts of the early American state. But see Gautham Rao,
The Creation of the American State: Customhouses, Law, and Commerce in the Age of Revolution
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008), 35. More generally, on the too-often-overlooked role of government regulation in early America, see William J. Novak,
The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

8
. Ira Katznelson, Martin Shefter, and other scholars have persuasively argued that we should look more closely at international influences on American political development. Yet their much-needed call to examine how America has been “shaped by war and trade” does not extend to illicit trade or the role of illicit trade in wartime. See Katznelson and Shefter, eds.,
Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

9
. On the international dimensions of policing, see Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann,
Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Nadelmann,
Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement
(University Park: Penn State Press, 1993).

10
. On the politics of moral crusades more generally, see especially James A. Morone,
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

11
. On the use of counterfactual analysis, see Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds.,
Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Richard New Lebow,
Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

12
. For a useful historical introduction, see Alan L. Karras,
Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). For an overview of the contemporary illicit global economy more broadly, see H. Richard Friman, ed.,
Crime and the Global Political Economy
(Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, 2009).

13
. Michael Connor,
Duty Free: Smuggling Made Easy
(Boulder, CO: Paladin, 1993); Connor,
Sneak It Through: Smuggling Made Easier
(Boulder, CO: Paladin, 1983); Connor,
How to Hide Anything
(Boulder, CO: Paladin, 1984).

14
. Luca Bastello,
I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons
(New York: Faber and Faber, 2010). Also see Hawkeye Gross,
Drug Smuggling: the Forbidden Book
(Boulder, CO: Paladin, 1992).

15
. Ed Rosenthal,
Marijuana Grower’s Handbook
(San Francisco: Quick American Archives, 2010); Jorge Cervantes,
Marijuana Horticulture
(Vancouver, WA: Van Patten, 2006).

1
. As Barbara Tuchman puts it, “Subject to infinite variables of winds and currents, of supply and demand, of crops and markets, trade has a way of carving its own paths not always obedient to the mercantilist faith.” Tuchman,
The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution
(New York: Knopf, 1988), 21.

2
. Bernard Bailyn,
Atlantic History: Concept and Contours
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 88.

3
. Bailyn,
Atlantic History
, 89.

4
. For a useful overview, see Wim Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800,” in
Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830
, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

5
. For a discussion of the differences between the North and South in the colonial smuggling economy, see George Louis Beer,
The Commercial Policy of England Toward the American Colonies
(New York: Columbia College, 1893), 132–34. Some accounts suggest there was more illicit trade in the Southern colonies than has been conventionally assumed. See Samuel G. Margolin,
Lawlessness on the Maritime Frontier of the Greater Chesapeake, 1650–1750
(Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1992).

6
. See, for example, W. A. Cole, “Trends in Eighteenth Century Smuggling,”
Economic History Review
10, no. 3 (1958): 395–410.

7
. See Cathy Matson,
Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 207.

8
. Bailyn,
Atlantic History
, 90.

9
. Bailyn,
Atlantic History
, 90.

10
. John Adams to William Tudor, 11 August 1818, in John Adams,
The Works of John Adams
,
Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams
, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 10:345.

11
. See Thomas Barrow,
Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 55.

12
. George Louis Beer,
The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754
(Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958), II:282–83.

13
. Barrow,
Trade and Empire
, 31.

14
. Colonial and English Channel smuggling are briefly compared in Beer,
The Commercial Policy in England Toward the American Colonies
, 132.

15
. Carl E. Prince and Mollie Keller,
The U.S. Customs Service: A Bicentennial History
(Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1989), 2.

16
. For a more detailed discussion, see Barrow,
Trade and Empire
.

17
. Gautham Rao,
The Creation of the American State: Customhouses, Law, and Commerce in the Age of Revolution
(University of Chicago, PhD dissertation, Department of History, December 2008), 35.

18
. R. Auchmuty, quoted in Barrow,
Trade and Empire
, 141.

19
. Arthur Meier Schlesinger,
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776
(New York: Facsimile Library, 1939), 43.

20
. Klooster, “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800,” 167.

21
. See in general James Blaine Hedges,
Browns of Providence Plantations: Colonial Years
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1968).

22
. Quoted in Russell Bourne,
Cradle of Violence: How Boston’s Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006), 53.

23
. And this in turn left a paper trail for historians. The insurance records also document bribes—“gifts”—to the Boston deputy collector of customs. See John W. Tyler,
Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 15–16.

24
. Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade,”
Agricultural History
30, no. 2 (April 1956): 82.

25
. For a more detailed discussion, see Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade”; and Richard Pares,
Yankees and Creoles: The Trade Between North America and the West Indies Before the American Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).

26
. Ian Williams,
Rum: A Social and Sociable History
(New York: Nation Books, 2005), 89.

27
. Schlesinger,
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776
, 43.

28
. Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade,” 84.

29
. Williams,
Rum
, 90.

30
. Charles William Taussig, quoted in Williams,
Rum
, 85.

31
. William Smith McClellan,
Smuggling in the American Colonies at the Outbreak of the Revolution: With Special Reference to the West Indies Trade
(New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912), 36.

32
. Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade,” 83.