Inside the Illicit Economy: Reconstructing the Smugglers' Trade of Sixteenth Century Bristol

From the moment governments began making money from levying duty on imported goods, a smuggling trade developed to avoid paying such taxes. Whilst the popular image of smugglers remains an essentially romantic one, this book makes clear that smuggling was, from the start, a large-scale systematic business that relied on the connivance of well-connected merchants. Taking the port of Bristol as a case study, the book provides the most sophisticated historical study ever undertaken of the smugglers' trade, in this country or abroad. What distinguishes this book from previous studies of smuggling is that it uses the business accounts of sixteenth-century merchants to reconstruct their illicit operations. It provides a detailed analysis of the merchants' illicit business operations, assessing how individual merchants, and Bristol's merchant class, were able to protect their illegal trade. More fundamentally, it examines how and why the illicit trade developed, why the Crown was unable to suppress it, and the role smuggling played within Bristol's wider economy. Through an investigation of these matters the study explores a world that has long attracted popular interest, but which has always been assumed to be immune to serious historical investigation. The book offers a pioneering study, demonstrating that a detailed examination of a particular time and place, based on a close and integrated reading of both official and private records, can make it possible for historians to investigate illicit economies, from the point of view of those engaged in them, to a greater degree than has previously been believed possible.