Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas (review)

Andreas’ well-written study aimed at a popular audience argues that smuggling was, and remains, an engine of economic and political development in American history. He seeks to challenge whiggish historical narratives of national development, such as the rule of law, the rationalization of the marketplace, and the centralization of state power. Andreas builds on interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to uncovering the logistics and significance of the market’s peripheries—for example, works by Mihm, Halttunen, and Balleisen that study such marginal practices as counterfeiting, confidence schemes, and failure itself, as well as others by Portes, Castells, and Benton that illustrate the structural significance of informal economies on a globalizing world.¹ But scope and scale are the distinguishing marks of Smuggler Nation, For Andreas, colonial settlement, the American Revolution, the development of the early republic, the Civil War era, the so-called Gilded Age, the age of immigration, and the war on drugs are not merely case studies about illicit activity. Rather, they are chapters in a history of American central government that treats the relationship between markets, morals, and police. “Illicit trade,” Andreas explains, “challenged but also empowered the new American state” (7).

Andreas’ point is not controversial from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, given the U.S. society’s ongoing struggle to police controlled substances along national borders. Andreas’ concluding chapters about these topics contain some fascinating stories—for instance, how the Coast Guard’s enforcement practices accelerated the consolidation of rum running and how nafta spurred the Mexican-American drug trade (241, 317). But these chapters are unsurprising and breezy in comparison to the weighty and analytically sharpened discussions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century smuggling that constitute the heart of Smuggler Nation, In Andreas’ argument, smuggling during the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, Jefferson’s Embargo, white westward expansion, and the late nineteenth century are interconnected episodes in a centuries-long history of market opportunity, central-government enforcement, and smugglers’ evasions, rather than discrete examples of statelessness or incapacity.

Smuggler Nation is a fine interdisciplinary history that will find its mark among scholarly and popular audiences. Greater engagement with the market itself would have further improved this excellent book. Why, for instance, did one species of illicit trade drive shadow economics and state policy at a particular time? Why did it suddenly give way to another? What happened to the cultural and geographical pathways that undergirded these economies? Coping with these questions would have allowed Andreas to pinpoint more explicitly the role and importance of smuggling within the shift from commercial revolution to industrial capitalism and beyond. The fact that readers will be informed sufficiently to ponder such questions after reading Smuggler Nation attests to the value of its scholarly contribution.