These centers, originally oriented toward supplying Spanish America with African slaves and European finished goods, developed during the eighteenth century into smuggling centers for the colonial Americas. Eustatius into entrepôts, and the English followed suit with Jamaica. First the Dutch, then the English and to a lesser extent the French found smuggling more profitable than piracy. Spain's European rivals shifted their strategies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries away from the violent capture of New World goods and towards more peaceful penetration of Spanish American markets. The demand for American silver drove the efforts by European powers to challenge Spain's hegemony in the New World. Smuggling boomed when states sought to impose restrictive commercial regimes in spite of consumer demand and competition to satisfy it. Historically, smuggling has flourished when there has been strong demand for a commodity, ready supplies, and commercial restrictions that either set unattractively high trade tariffs or prohibitive regimes that ban the commodity itself or, in the case of mercantile capitalism, bar outsiders from trading with regulated markets. The earliest regimes of the nineteenth century targeted the trafficking of humans and piracy, and over the course of the twentieth century these were joined by bans against trafficking in arms, endangered species, counterfeit and laundered currency, and psychoactive drugs. This led to the third system of global prohibition regimes. Nonetheless, the collaboration of nation-states in establishing a mutually agreeable political and economic order extended the regulation of trade to a transnational setting. The rise of nation-states shifted much of commercial policy to individual nations and made smuggling a national problem. The second and third systems emerged during the nineteenth century, both challenging mercantilism and recasting the parameters for legal trade and smuggling. Challenges to these monopoly tendencies came in two forms: internal attempts to circumvent restrictions and external challenges to exclusive commercial prerogative. Other European states followed, and mercantilist commercial policy shaped trade within European imperial systems through the eighteenth century. These initially took shape in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the Iberian monarchies undertook expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. First, European imperial powers worked to impose mercantilist trade monopolies on their colonial systems. Global smuggling since 1450 has been given shape by three principal systems of political authority and trade regulation: mercantilism, the international order of nation-states, and global prohibition regimes. Smuggling and measures to counter it exist in a relationship of mutual dependence.
Likewise, so long as there is smuggling, there will be efforts to stop it, limit its impact, and guard against it. Smuggling will continue as long as frontiers and trade limits exist. States regulate commerce, claim sovereignty over delimited territories, and implement enforcement strategies. States define borders and regulate trade, and the incomplete enforcement of restrictions makes smuggling possible. Smuggling-the movement of goods in violation of prohibition regimes, commercial quotas, or tariff schedules-depends on states for its existence.
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