Borderland Smuggling
Borderland Smuggling
Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820
North American Society for Oceanic History John Lyman Book Award in United States Maritime History Passamaquoddy Bay lies between Maine and New Brunswick at the mouth of the St. Croix River. Most of it (including Campobello Island) is within Canada, but the Maine town of Lubec lies at the bay’s entrance. Rich in beaver pelts, fish, and timber, the area was a famous smuggling center after the American Revolution. Joshua Smith examines the reasons for smuggling in this area and how three conflicts in early republic history—the 1809 Flour War, the War of 1812, and the 1820 Plaster War—reveal smuggling’s relationship to crime, borderlands, and the transition from mercantilism to capitalism. Smith astutely interprets smuggling as created and provoked by government efforts to maintain and regulate borders. In 1793 British and American negotiators framed a vague new boundary meant to demarcate the lingering British empire in North America (Canada) from the new American Republic. Officials insisted that an abstract line now divided local peoples on either side of Passamaquoddy Bay. Merely by persisting in trade across the newly demarcated national boundary, people violated the new laws. As smugglers, they defied both the British and American efforts to restrict and regulate commerce. Consequently, local resistance and national authorities engaged in a continuous battle for four decades. Smith treats the Passamaquoddy Bay smuggling as more than a local episode of antiquarian interest. Indeed, he crafts a local case study to illuminate a widespread phenomenon in early modern Europe and the Americas. A volume in the series New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, edited by James C. Bradford and Gene Allen Smith
A rich chronological catalogue of smuggling at the turn of the nineteenth century and a provocative argument: smugglers, and not nation-states, were the ones who defined the real limits of early American regional borders.’—H-Net ‘A significant contribution to the social construction of identity along the Canadian-American borderland.’—American Historical Review ‘Smith analyzes the intense and contentious period of smuggling from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. . . . Highly readable.’—Canadian Historical Review ‘A key implication of the book is that smuggling was extensive and lucrative.’—Journal of American History ‘No study has made a more useful contribution to our understanding of the realities of seaborne commerce across the Maine-New Brunswick frontier than Smith’s splendid book.’—International Journal of Maritime History ‘This finely researched book provides a glance into a lost culture, and its careful analysis will provide a glimmer of understanding of some of the variables still extant in today’s illicit trade.’—Nautical Research Journal ‘Borderland Smuggling should be read by anyone interested in the regulation of trade, borders, and American national identity.’—Business History Review ‘Point[s] our attention to the concrete, transnational connections and conflicts that framed economy, polity, and society in the early republic.’—Journal of the Early Republic ‘Important both to regional studies as well as to the history of relations between the United States and Great Britain in these turbulent years.’—Military History ‘Smith’s carefully crafted, accessible account of smuggling in the Passamaquoddy region makes an important, scholarly contribution to our historical understanding of transborder trade and communications and reveals the usefulness of, and provides a model for, transborder scholarship.’—New England Quarterly ‘An interesting and informative account of how material self-interest and local loyalties trumped broader allegiances in the northeastern borderland of the early nineteenth century.’—Common-place
Joshua M. Smith is professor of humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy and director of the American Merchant Marine Museum.
