Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 (review)

Island-studded Passamaquoddy Bay on the border between Maine and New Brunswick has been a smuggling zone since the French and English first attempted colonies in northeastern North America in the seventeenth century. In Borderland Smuggling, Joshua Smith analyzes the intense and contentious period of smuggling from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. Smuggling, as Smith notes, is 'a social force within border communities' (xiii) involving local economies, violence, and the reach of governmental authority, from the local to the national and imperial. The years from 1783 to 1820 were also a critical period of identity formation for citizens of the new United States and British subjects in the remaining colonies of British North America, and attitudes toward smuggling refracted multiple elements of that process.

Smith's work reconfigures conventional wisdom about smuggling. Current scholarship on piracy, such as that by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, can leave the impression that smuggling was pursued by the underclasses and disaffected. But, as Smith shows, that was not invariably the case. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British Americans of all social classes engaged in smuggling. Colonial resistance to British attempts to curb it after the Seven Years' War (1756–63) and thereby collect more colonial customs revenues contributed to the coming of the War for Independence. That evidence, however, leads to another bit of erroneous conventional wisdom: US citizens were sympathetic toward, if not supportive of, smuggling, while British North Americans, loyal subjects of the empire, were anti-smuggling. Smith's evidence shows that smugglers working from Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia came from all social classes, and local elites who allowed smuggling and engaged in it were approved over officials hired to restrict it. Yet by the 1830s elites were beginning to sanitize local memory of the preceding five decades, acknowledging that communities such as Eastport, ME, and Saint Andrews, NB, had benefited from smuggling but suggesting that it had largely been the work of outsiders 'who introduced vicious habits and immorality to the community' (110).

For British and American officials, controlling the trade of this border zone became symbolic of the ability of governments to impose order on and elicit loyalty from the governed. For residents of Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, smuggling was an economic strategy more than a reflection of political ideology, as former rebels and loyalists collaborated in the movement of goods across the international boundary. The inability of governments to impose their wills was abundantly manifest with thwarted attempts to enforce Jefferson's Embargo of 1807 and the subsequent Non-Intercourse Act and Macon's Bill No. 2, as well as New Brunswick's Plaster Act (1817). The last was an attempt by Saint John's merchant elites to control the trade of gypsum produced by Nova Scotians, and they persuaded the Nova Scotia assembly to pass supporting legislation. Resistance to that legislation produced strange bedfellows, with royally appointed customs officials in New Brunswick siding with gypsum smugglers, both British and American, because imperial officials did not feel obliged to enforce provincial trade legislation.

Borderland Smuggling is a book of modest size, but that briefness combined with the reach of the issues it addresses makes it an excellent book for discussion in an upper-level undergraduate course or a graduate seminar. It is highly readable and covers the reach of state power, the problems that border zones create for the coalescence of state power and identity, the strategies communities devise to subvert state authority in the interest of the local economy, and the willingness of people to accept if not sanction the use of violence in protecting local interests. Smith also shows how international tensions, such as the War of 1812, could intensified smuggling, and how later free trade tempered smuggling across the border between the United States and British North America. Finally, Borderland Smuggling is part of a small but growing...