SOURCE: “The English and Scottish Tobacco Trades in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Legal and Illegal Trade,” in The Economic History Review, Second Series, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, August 1982, pp. 354-72.

In the following essay, Nash examines the well-organized smuggling operations that were designed to circumvent the high taxes placed on tobacco during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such activities, the critic observes, resulted in an inaccurate historical accounting of the volume and “regional impact” of the tobacco trade in both England and Scotland.

In a study published in 1958 Prof. Cole made a challenging statement about the dangers of using the eighteenth-century customs statistics without taking into account the distorting effects of smuggling:

it has generally been held that although smuggling was certainly widespread, the problem of its precise extent, or even its probable order of magnitude, defies solution. If this view is accepted, it is difficult to...