ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The books describe the goods carried, their quantity, the owners of the merchandise and the duties paid. Smuggling, in the popular imagination, is perhaps more the stuff of this book than of serious history at least when it comes to the smuggling of past centuries. The book is not about that world and it does not concern the eighteenth century in which such events are typically set. It shows how private commercial records can be used to reconstruct the illicit business practices of merchants in former centuries. The book focuses on one aspect of the trade of one port in one century. Using the private business records of these merchants and subjecting them to the sort of analysis more commonly associated with modern fraud investigations can expose the workings of the ports illicit economy.
