Smuggling history

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Smuggling history

Smuggling-the movement of goods in violation of prohibition regimes, commercial quotas, or tariff schedules-depends on states for its existence. States define borders and regulate trade, and the incomplete enforcement of restrictions makes smuggling possible. States regulate commerce, claim sovereignty over delimited territories, and implement enforcement strategies. Smuggling will continue as long as frontiers and trade limits exist. Likewise, so long as there is smuggling, there will be efforts to stop it, limit its impact, and guard against it. Smuggling and measures to counter it exist in a relationship of mutual dependence.

Global smuggling since 1450 has been given shape by three principal systems of political authority and trade regulation: mercantilism, the international order of nation-states, and global prohibition regimes. First, European imperial powers worked to impose mercantilist trade monopolies on their colonial systems. These initially took shape in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the Iberian monarchies undertook expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Other European states followed, and mercantilist commercial policy shaped trade within European imperial systems through the eighteenth century. Challenges to these monopoly tendencies came in two forms: internal attempts to circumvent restrictions and external challenges to exclusive commercial prerogative. The second and third systems emerged during the nineteenth century, both challenging mercantilism and recasting the parameters for legal trade and smuggling. The rise of nation-states shifted much of commercial policy to individual nations and made smuggling a national problem. Nonetheless, the collaboration of nation-states in establishing a mutually agreeable political and economic order extended the regulation of trade to a transnational setting. This led to the third system of global prohibition regimes. The earliest regimes of the nineteenth century targeted the trafficking of humans and piracy, and over the course of the twentieth century these were joined by bans against trafficking in arms, endangered species, counterfeit and laundered currency, and psychoactive drugs.

Historically, smuggling has flourished when there has been strong demand for a commodity, ready supplies, and commercial restrictions that either set unattractively high trade tariffs or prohibitive regimes that ban the commodity itself or, in the case of mercantile capitalism, bar outsiders from trading with regulated markets. Smuggling boomed when states sought to impose restrictive commercial regimes in spite of consumer demand and competition to satisfy it.

The demand for American silver drove the efforts by European powers to challenge Spain's hegemony in the New World. Spain's European rivals shifted their strategies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries away from the violent capture of New World goods and towards more peaceful penetration of Spanish American markets. First the Dutch, then the English and to a lesser extent the French found smuggling more profitable than piracy. The Dutch made Curaзao and St. Eustatius into entrepфts, and the English followed suit with Jamaica. These centers, originally oriented toward supplying Spanish America with African slaves and European finished goods, developed during the eighteenth century into smuggling centers for the colonial Americas. They served as hubs for a growing regional economy that joined British North America, Spain's mainland colonies, and Caribbean islands in a network that snubbed metropolitan directives.

Spanish American silver helped spur a price revolution in seventeenthcentury Europe and provided European traders the specie necessary for penetrating East Asian spice markets in the 1600s and 1700s. It also leaked westward to China. The Spanish colony of the Philippines joined the Mexican mining economy with China's fine textiles and porcelain industries, and the Chinese merchants who established themselves in Manila became the key social players in this clandestine trade.

The exchange with the Americas was one of two furtive circuits in which Chinese trade circumvented the restrictions of European mercantilist capitalism. The second involved the exchange of Chinese tea for Indian opium, a trade that developed during the eighteenth century and challenged British monopoly demands in the nineteenth century. The Chinese state struggled to limit local opium production, while Britain in turn pushed Indian opium on the Chinese market. Although Britain's victory in the Opium War (1839-1842) forced China to accept unlimited Indian imports, neither state could prevent the smuggling of products from Indian or from Southeast Asia, where production had expanded in response to Chinese demand.

Tea smuggling caused further problems. Private traders thwarted the East Indian Company's attempts to exercise exclusive control over the marketing of Indian tea. Such was the extent of smuggling that in the eighteenth century the British Crown gave up on collecting tea taxes in Europe and tried to recoup the losses by imposing greater control on its North American colonies. Colonial subjects had grown accustomed to acquiring Indian tea from Dutch traders. The efforts to bring colonial consumption in line with mercantilist principles challenged long-standing commercial practices and contributed to the crisis of colonial rule.

Twentieth-century prohibitive regimes also faced difficulties in suppressing smuggling. The ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United

States from 1920 to 1933 pushed the spirits trade north and south, transforming the U.S.-Canadian border into a vibrant area of production and exchange and making

Florida into a rum running center. Organized crime groups in the United States took advantage of Prohibition to consolidate their control over these international smuggling operations and to expand their activities. Narcotics trafficking has proven resilient in the face OF a global prohibition regime that took shape early in the twentieth century. Demand in the North Atlantic, especially for cocaine since the late 1970s, helped drug-trafficking enterprises become powerful forces in national and international politics.

Changes in international economics and politics contributed to shifting patterns of smuggling in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The oil crisis of the 1970s produced shifts in international finance that established the foundation for the thriving business of offshore banking and money laundering of the 1980s and 1990s. Human trafficking expanded during the 1990s. Neoliberal reforms in poor countries and the collapse of the Socialist Bloc left many in dire economic conditions. This combined with sustained demand for labor in the North Atlantic. Generally, the liberalization of international trade has assisted extra-legal trade. Just as the market reforms of the 1990s made the legal circulation of goods, capital, and information easier, they also facilitated smuggling along these same routes.

Techniques for smuggling ranged from the personal and small scale to the institutional and systemic. The methods for surreptitiously introducing goods varied. They were concealed in false bottoms or containers designed for other goods. Sometimes fractions of the merchandise were reported, unloaded, and taxed at the port of entry and then the rest introduced untaxed afterward. Likewise, tax evasion occurred on the export end: Merchants underpaid taxes or loaded additional goods once the taxes were paid or the vessel had left port. Fraudulent emergency landings were a common ruse.

Official collusion has often been vital for successful smuggling operations. Port authorities falsified travel documents on arrival or departure. The confiscation and auction of captured merchandise also served as a smuggling strategy. Arrangements were made so that confiscated goods were sold to the original owners or their agents. Complicit customs officials would then be recompensed.

Quantifying smuggling in relation to legal trade is a daunting, sometimes impossible task. Students of world trade often disagree about the significance of clandestine exchange, some giving it more importance or assessing its percentage of overall trade as much greater than others. Measuring its size and value is always a tentative exercise, as its success rested on its invisibility to state vigilance. Nonetheless, some techniques do provide some insight, albeit incomplete and tentative, into volumes and values. Production records are useful, as are the port records of free-trade centers like Dutch Curaзao and St. Eustatius during the eighteenth century. Price lists have also been utilized successfully to gauge smuggling's significance, as high prices on consumer markets, in Western Europe or China for example, indicate sustained demand for products that have often been officially proscribed.

Bibliographic list

movement good smuggling state

1. Alipov, S.V. Smuggling history / S.V. Halipov. - Moscow: Higher education, yurayt-Izdat, 2017. species-464 c. Electronic resources

2. «Smuggling.ru» the Internet-portal - http://www.tamognia.ru/books/ (accessed 14.12.2018)

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