ARTICLE: Smuggle Me This, Smuggle Me That
Adventures and Misadventures of apparently loveable rogues
Today’s rabbit hole is romanticised yarns from the history of smuggling in Britain. It’s happening, because for the princely sum of £2 I found a book written by one Charles Harper in 1909, when I went rogue away from the military history section in a used bookshop. I regret nothing.
Why was there a heyday from about 1700?
The origins of customs duties and embargoes are lost in the mists of time in a place I have no interest in digging for them, but safe to say, nobody likes giving their government money. That, and when said government have gone and done something stupid which then impacts the coming and going of stuff people want, they definitely don’t feel bad about cutting said governments out of transactions and fetching things on the black market. Enter the smugglers…
(All of the illustrations for this article come from the 1909 edition of Harper’s book. They were drawn by a Paul Hardy)
In short, thanks to Harper, I can say with minimal authority that it is possible to blame William of Orange for the beginning of the peak of these shenanigans. Right about the time this Dutchman took the British throne, there began a growth in customs demands as successive governments, all the way into the nineteenth century, sought imaginative ways to wring more money out of the population.
Wars contributed to this, and for that I suppose you can also blame the likes of Napoleon. Wars are expensive, and the money has to come from somewhere. Is it any wonder, then, that the miffed population of this little island found the smugglers that managed to import things like fancy, embargoed French knickers from across the channel, rather romantic?
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