"Professor Peter Andreas talked about his book, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, in which he reveals the long history of smuggling in the U.S., which, prior to the Revolutionary War, was driven by a desire to grow domestic industries and bypass import taxes to the British. Today, the U.S. is the leading market in the world for illicitly traded goods, while at the same time being one of the leading voices for reform."book-discussion-smuggler-nationExcerpt from Book Review:
"Andreas deftly explains how the battle lines of the American War of Independence were drawn largely because of people’s varied and often self-serving relationships to smuggling. Nowadays the word “smuggling” has a decidedly negative connotation, as it’s largely associated with drugs or other contraband. But in Colonial times, smuggling was widely practiced by respectable merchants, including possibly Hancock, Robert Morris, and other Founding Fathers, and it was systemically endorsed by the community at large. Smuggling is business, “a clandestine economic practice that we can simply define as bringing in or taking out from one jurisdiction to another without authorization,” Andreas writes. “Smuggling was so institutionalized in the Boston merchant community that merchants were able to buy insurance policies to cover them in the event of seizure.”
