Talk:Smuggling

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Smuggling is the other face of mercantilism, the flexible counter-system that allowed colonial systems in the Americas, both English and Spanish, so strict on paper, to flourish. A history section has not even been begun here... --Wetman 19:33, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. It is important to remember that social attitudes to smuggling were different from today; the taxes levied on luxury goods by the government were seen as punitive and unfair (because, to be frank here, they actually were, simple as that). Their social status is shown up at Kinson in Bournemouth where the big Fryer grave in the churchyard gives the name of their in-law, Isaac Gulliver, and a man killed by the excisemen on the beach near Poole is buried openly in the churchyard (allbeit discreetly behind the church) with a rhyming elegy on his headstone. The customs would often complain that Gulliver's sloops were faster than their own; and one story I have read had a local bigwig entertain the Excisemen to drinks. When asked whether he had seen the smugglers they were chasing he denied having done so then a little time after they had left he looked into his back room and said to the smugglers "you can come out now, they've gone".

Part of the funny side of this is that the drink he offered the Excise men was probably contraband. Britmax 08:45, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

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