Smuggler nation : how illicit trade made America / Peter Andreas.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-425) and index.

p. 1. The colonial era -- p. 2. The early republic -- p. 3. Westward expansion, slavery, and the Civil war --p. 4. The gilded age and the progressive era -- p. 5. Into the modern age.

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. Providing a sweeping narrative history from colonial times to the present, Smuggler Nation retells 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 work, smuggling has played a pivotal yet overlooked role in America's birth, westward expansion, and economic development, while anti-smuggling campaigns have dramatically enhanced the federal government's policing powers. 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 porous borders and growing global crime threats. Politicians and pundits who issue urgnet calls to regain control of the nation's borders (implying that they were ever actually under control) suffer from a severe case of historical amnesia. Far from being a new and unprecedented danger to America, the illicit underside of globalization is actually an old American tradition with a decidedly double-edged impacto, 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.