| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joshua M. Smith. Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783–1820. Foreword by James C. Bradford and Gene A. Smith. (New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2006.Pp. xv, 160. $55.00.
Britain's official recognition of U.S. independence in 1783 redrew the map of North America, establishing boundaries between sovereign states. But what did it mean for neighbors who lived along the new dividing line that separated British Canada and the United States, neighbors who had long traded with each other without regard to national identity or political alignment? In his engaging monograph on smuggling in the Passamaquoddy borderlands of Maine between 1783 and 1820, Joshua M. Smith argues that the residents on both sides of the new boundary constructed their own identities in ways that emphasized continuity and local interests rather than reflecting change and national politics.	1
Viewed from London or from Philadelphia, and later, Washington, smuggling was a crime that deprived the state of much-needed revenue. Customs officials and navy cutters were commissioned to move swiftly in bringing such robbery to a halt. Americans who had once been sympathetic to smugglers who evaded Britain's Navigation Acts were less forgiving when the U.S. Treasury was the victim. Smuggling looked different to residents of Passamaquoddy Bay, however. For some, it was a "form of self-help, a way that neighbor helped neighbor in the grim business of survival" (p. 1). Like political economist Adam Smith, Mainers and New Brunswickers considered themselves to be honest citizens dealing with unjust laws that violated the laws of nature. They were free traders who disregarded artificial lines that distant officials drew in order to regulate and tax commerce.	. . .

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