ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the broad factors that were likely to affect a merchant's decision about whether or not to smuggle and the general fiscal or regulatory environment in which Tudor merchants operated. It engages in a more concrete analysis of the taxes and regulation on overseas trade in sixteenth-century England. The chapter aims to understand the world from the smugglers point of view; all the costs to which the Crown subjected merchants are best considered together. As an economic crime, the principal motivation for engaging in the illicit trade has always been financial: in particular, the evasion of duties and the circumvention of official restrictions that limited the opportunities for merchants to make profits. The chapter describes many of the general incentives to engage in the illicit trade are almost transhistoric in nature, in that traders have probably always sought to evade the official regulations and duties imposed on them.
