ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an estimate of the quantitative importance of smuggling which helps to assess the possible margin of error involved in the use of the official statistics. It deals first with the traffic in one commodity, tea, and then considers what light the fluctuations in tea smuggling cast on the history of smuggling as a whole. The high value of tea in proportion to its bulk, coupled with a rate of duty which often doubled the legal price, made this particular traffic exceptionally profitable; and for a large part of the eighteenth century, tea was the one of the staple goods of the ‘free trader’. After 1784, of course, the enterprising free trader tended to look elsewhere for easy profits, and although the virtual abolition of the tea duty probably contributed to a general decline in smuggling, there is no reason to suppose that it came to an end.
