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How Illicit Trade Made America
Oxford University Press
February 2013
On Sale: February 14, 2013
472 pages
ISBN: 0199746885
EAN: 9780199746880
Kindle: B00B5SE9ZS
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit
imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch
gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial
technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to
French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century,
to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era.
Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral
part of American capitalism.
Providing a sweeping
narrative history from colonial times to the present,
Smuggler Nation is the first book to retell the
story of America--and of its engagement with its neighbors
and the rest of the world--as a series of highly contentious
battles over clandestine commerce. As Peter Andreas
demonstrates in this provocative and fascinating account,
smuggling has played a pivotal and too often overlooked role
in America's birth, westward expansion, and economic
development, while anti-smuggling campaigns have
dramatically enhanced the federal government's policing
powers. The great irony, Andreas tells us, is that a country
that was born and grew up through smuggling is today the
world's leading anti-smuggling crusader.
In tracing
America's long and often tortuous relationship with the
murky underworld of smuggling, Andreas provides a
much-needed antidote to today's hyperbolic depictions of
out-of-control borders and growing global crime threats.
Urgent calls by politicians and pundits to regain control of
the nation's borders suffer from a severe case of historical
amnesia, nostalgically implying that they were ever actually
under control. This is pure mythology, says Andreas. For
better and for worse, America's borders have always been
highly porous.
Far from being a new and
unprecedented danger to America, the illicit underside of
globalization is actually an old American tradition. As
Andreas shows, it goes back not just decades but centuries.
And its impact has been decidedly double-edged, not only
subverting U.S. laws but also helping to fuel America's
evolution from a remote British colony to the world's
pre-eminent superpower.
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