Smuggling
In Britain, wool was smuggled to the continent from late 16th century and smuggling became economically significant at the end of the 17th century, under the pressure of high excise taxes. In 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote of Lymington, Hampshire, on the south coast of England
“I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land’s End in Cornwall.”
The high rates of tax on tea, wine, spirits, and luxury goods coming in from mainland Europe made the smuggling of these things to avoid tax highly profitable for poor fishermen and seafarers. In certain parts of the country such as the Romney Marsh, East Kent, Cornwall and East Cleveland, the smuggling industry was for many communities a better way of earning a living than legal activities such as farming and fishing. The main reason for the high tax was so the government could pay for extremely expensive wars with France and the United States.
Before the era of sordid drug smuggling and human trafficking, smuggling had acquired a kind of nostalgic romanticism, in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped:
“Few places on the British coast did not claim to be the haunts of wreckers or mooncussers. The thievery was boasted about and romanticized until it seemed a kind of heroism. It did not have any taint of criminality and the whole of the south coast had pockets vying with one another over whose smugglers were the darkest or most daring. The Smugglers Inn was one of the commonest names for a bar on the coast”.
