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This chapter shows that the evolving English state was ill equipped to combat the dramatic rise in illicit trade that erupted onto the scene in the early 18th century. Seamen with customs commissions were encouraged to tackle smugglers by being offered one-half of the produce of the seizure at the subsequent customs sale. In 1821, a battle with the waterguard involving 250 smugglers took place. Although the combined force of the waterguard, riding officers, cruisers, and coastal blockade took its toll on smugglers, it was also costing too much money and blood. A committee set up to investigate the prevailing system concluded that it suffered from a lack of central control. The result was the assimilation of the waterguard back into customs. The term ‘Coast Guard’ was coined to describe the new amalgamation of representative forces.

Human trafficking is the third largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world. It affects millions of people around the globe and reaps billions in profits. Trafficking is generally thought of as the movement of a person from one country to another. However, trafficking within countries is also common, and perhaps occurs to an even greater extent than transnational trafficking. The international regime to address human trafficking issues has evolved during the past decade, with the adoption and entry into force of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter called the Palermo Protocol) in 2003, which supplements the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. A complex set of institutional frameworks have developed as well, offering a wide array of programmes to address the three basic components of an anti-trafficking strategy: prosecution of traffickers, prevention of trafficking, and protection of trafficking victims. Gaps still exist, however, in the organizational capacities to address prevention and protection issues. As with other international regimes focused on movements of people, the legal frameworks and institutional responses tend to be focused only on those who have been forced to cross borders. While constraints of sovereignty undoubtedly make it far more difficult to address internal trafficking, a more comprehensive approach to combating this phenomenon requires broader international attention to this form of trafficking.

This chapter explores the emergence of Colombia as an opiate producer during the 1970s. It suggests that some of the factors that contributed to the development of the opiate industry in Colombia are natural and socioeconomic. These include the pre-existing cocaine industry, the existence of established drug-smuggling networks for the U.S. and the weakness of the Colombian government. This chapter contends that the emergence of Colombian heroin production is informative about what risk factors might lead to new countries entering the opiate trade.

This chapter discusses the problem of smuggling. The authorities recognized that punishment and the use of arms needed to be accompanied by a more constructive policy. Not only were new and old domestic Industries protected, but they also had to be as good as foreign equivalents to help stem smuggling. Excise stipulations were an important tool in nurturing quality improvements within Britain's backward industries.

Job brokering for profit has become an important institution in the market for foreign labour, especially where social networks are not yet established to facilitate migration or where states of employment and origin have not agreed on exclusive systems for recruiting labour. Job brokers or recruiters have successfully organized labour migration between many states, especially where few or no political or economic linkages have existed before. However, recruiting activities have been frequently characterized by fraudulent practices. Little evidence indicates that public authorities’ efforts to protect workers against such practices have been effective.

This chapter examines how U.S. prohibitions prompted the growth of border vice districts and alcohol and drug smuggling along the boundary line and explores the conflict that arose on both sides of the border over how the nation-states could or should use border controls to stymie these developments. By the 1920s, both Americans and Mexicans had become aware that the border control apparatus that the states had erected on the border for national defense and customs enforcement could also be used for new state prerogatives, including morality regulation. However, the conditional controls—including the early closing of border gates—raised questions about who had the right to regulate the boundary line and on what basis they should be allowed to enforce that control. While American reformers lauded the establishment of early closing hours, many business people, bureaucrats, and Mexican nationalists challenged the U.S. government's authority to unilaterally use the boundary line for the purposes of enforcing moral standards.

The first chapter focuses on the imperial conflict as it unfolded in the maritime and commercial spaces of Boston. Boston hosted a series crowd actions: the Knowles Riot of 1747, the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the Liberty riot of 1768, the Boston Massacre of 1770, and the Boston Tea Party of 1773. British authorities repeatedly tried to assert control over Boston's waterfront community, and each time, merchants and mariners mobilized in response to impressment (by resisting), customs duties (by smuggling), and other impositions of imperial authority. Five times the Bostonians banished imperial officials, soldiers, and other pariahs to Castle Island in the harbor. The central significance of the Boston waterfront had crystallized by 1774, when Parliament singled the city out for punishment. Boston's conspicuous leadership among the waterfront communities of North America demonstrated how mobilization could unify city dwellers from throughout the social spectrum and across the continent.

Cigarette taxes (specific and ad valorem excises plus VAT) in the EU at more than 300 per cent of the pre-tax retail price are the highest on any single product in the world (by comparison, the VAT is, on average, 19 per cent.) In the US, the overall average level is only half the EU level. Within the EU and the US, the level of cigarette taxation differs widely between states. Interestingly, the ad valorem excise is mainly an EU phenomenon; it tends to protect the cheap tobaccos grown in southern member states. Concern about revenue and the restraining effect high cigarette taxes appear to have on the young are the main reasons for the high level of tobacco taxation. The young tend to undervalue future health damage. But apart from this special case of information failure, the case for high tobacco taxes appears weak. If individuals are fully informed about the consequences of smoking, the net external costs, which allow for the cost savings of premature deaths, may be low or even negligible. Furthermore, illegal bootlegging and smuggling, which undermine public revenue and health objectives, have reached alarming proportions, particularly in the EU. Accordingly, the authors conclude that there are conceptual and empirical limits to excessively high levels of tobacco taxation.

This chapter focuses on opposition to the French regime, starting with the most widespread forms of disorder (smuggling, contraband and banditry) which as in much of the rest of Napoleonic Europe were direct consequences of the emperor's incessant wars; the commercial recession in the Mediterranean that dated back to the start of the revolutionary wars; and the attempts to enforce the Continental Blockade. It examines the many faces of brigandage, highlighting the ways in which powerful landowners used brigandage as a source of profit but also to protect their own interests. This was clearly understood by General Charles Antoine Manhès in 1810-11, whose savage repression of brigandage during that time was directed primarily against the brigands' powerful accomplices, which explains why his measures attracted unusual notoriety and protest.

This chapter draws a distinction between the intrinsic and instrumental values of India's development. It argues that since long before independence, there was a consensus on the intrinsic overarching objective of development of India among the polity and society — the eradication of mass poverty within a reasonable time horizon. The chapter identifies accelerating growth, ensuring its appropriate distribution and sustainability, and reforms as instruments for achieving this intrinsic objective. It focuses on the period of the ‘Hindu Rate of Growth’ from 1950–1 to 1979–80, when the infamous License-Permit-Raj was in full sway. It covers the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 and the 1970s when many draconian laws, such as the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) and its amendment, Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) Act, Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), and Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act (COFEPOSA) were enacted. It also discusses the severe macroeconomic and balance of payments crisis of 1966 and economic liberalization of 1966–8.

This chapter focuses on the wartime smuggling networks of Dai Li. It explains that wartime China was crisscrossed with smugglers' routes that linked the two realms through freebooters' trading posts and that Dai Li's smuggling empire was built upon a system of revenue collection enforcement that went back to the formation of a taxation police force during the early 1930s. The chapter discusses the Lin Shiliang case and suggests that the transfer of the control of the Smuggling Prevention Office from Dai Li to civilian authorities hardly crimped Dai Li's operations.

The Barbudos remained in the mountain ranges and the Batista troops faltered to track them. The 26th of July Movement guerrillas slowly increased their “Free Territory” in the Oriente Province, obtaining recruits and arms. With triangular shoulder patches to identify them as part of the rebel troop, Castro forces patiently developed the support of local guajiros (peasants), who provided them food, shelter, and their young sons as messengers and lookouts. Rebel sympathizers in America sent smuggled arms to Cuba by hiding bullets, machine guns, and pistols in cars shipped via the ferry boat from Key West to the Havana car agency. Female activists travelled from Miami to Cuba with small guns hidden under their skirts.

This chapter offers a global overview on the instruments of international law adopted in the last three centuries to fight against slavery, the slave trade, the white slave traffic, and trafficking in persons. It also examines the provisions of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons aimed at preventing human trafficking, prosecuting this offence and protecting the victims and differentiates trafficking in human beings from the smuggling of migrants. Some relevant soft law instruments are reviewed to complete the picture on the issue of the protection that States might grant to trafficked victims. Finally, the chapter points out that the prohibition of slavery is considered to be a well-established jus cogens principle and it is argued that under certain circumstances trafficking in persons ought rightly to be considered a part of it.