Smuggler Nation

The subtitle to Peter Andreas’s tells it all: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America . America is a product of its long borders and frequently illicit border crossings. In his TLS review of the book, Eric Rauchway sums up Andreas’s thesis: “Washington made a new nation at whose heart, Andreas says, was the smuggling ethos. Illegal imports had made possible the relatively high standard of living in the colonies and the consumerist habits that underwrote the expectation of American prosperity; smuggling was an activity not merely of the ‘socially marginal,’ but of society’s pillars. And Americans had grown used to smuggling and consuming smuggled goods because a lax state had declared certain kinds of trade illegal and then devoted insufficient resources to deterring illicit commerce.”

There was a constant dynamic of prohibition, lax enforcement, violation, and normalcy: “illegal trade or migration becomes normal, creating the expectation that prohibited goods or labour will be available, despite the law. The will to enforce the law thus erodes, as indeed does respect for the law. As the state expands in scope and diminishes in effect, it falls into further disrepute, though never so complete as in 1776. The state’s embrace of smugglers exacerbates the problem. Sometimes administrations turn a blind eye to smugglers who are doing their dirty work for them, as when American entrepreneurs began bootlegging alcohol to the aboriginal inhabitants of North America.”

Thus our habits of consumption, or suspicion of government, our standard of living were shaped by illegal trade.