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authority and reach of the federal government. Smuggling, it turns out, has been as much about building up the American state as about subverting it. Through its long interaction with the underworld of smuggling, the United States has emerged not only with a sprawling law enforcement bureaucracy—and jails overflowing with convicted drug law offenders—but also as a policing superpower, promoting its favored prohibitions and policing practices to its neighbors and the rest of the world.
    Smuggler Nation covers a lot of ground, from pot to porn. It is the first book that re-narrates the story of America and its engagement with the world as a series of highly contentious and consequential battles over illicit trade. But the coverage is also inevitably selective. I make no pretense of being comprehensive. I paint in broad strokes, identifying and making sense of the most important historical episodes, trends, themes, and underlying dynamics.
    These are not merely colorful smuggling stories that are otherwise marginal to the overall American historical trajectory. Far from it. For better and for worse, smuggling was an essential ingredient in the very birth and development of America and its transformation into a global power. Only by including the lens of smuggling in looking back at the American experience can we fully answer some crucial questions. For instance, what provoked such intense colonial outrage against the British imperial authorities? How did George Washington manage to defeat the world’s greatest military power? How did America industrialize and catch up to England technologically? Why did the United States fail to annex Canada in the War of 1812? Why did the American Civil War last so long given the North’s lopsided military advantage? Why are the tomatoes we eat so cheap, and why is American agribusiness so globally competitive? Why do we now have such a massive criminal justice system, including the world’s largest prison population? In various ways and to varying degrees, smuggling—and the politics of policing it—provides an essential part of the answer to these wide-ranging questions. It is certainly not the only thing that matters. But Smuggler Nation shows how and why we should place it more front and center than in conventional accounts of the American epic.
    I should say a word of caution about the subject of this book. As one would expect, there are built-in limits and obstacles to doing research on smugglers and smuggling. Information on illicit trade is necessarily imprecise, to say the least; there are no quarterly business reports and annual trade balance statistics. Indeed, the very success of smuggling operations typically depends on not being seen or counted. Documentation therefore tends to be fragmentary and uneven, and it represents rough estimates at best. Readers should keep these inherent limitations in mind in the chapters that follow. In the end, I hope they will agree with me that it is better to tell the story with admittedly imperfect and incomplete data than to simply throw up one’s hands and pretend that the world of smuggling doesn’t exist because it cannot be precisely measured. After all, that would be the equivalent of a drunkard looking for his keys under the lightpost because it is the only place he can see.
    Writing this book was very much a collective endeavor, even if only one name appears on the cover. It was made possible by the generosity of Brown University, especially the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Department of Political Science, and a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. I gave presentations based on the book at Harvard University, MIT, Brown University, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the U.S. Naval War College, Stanford University, Connecticut College, Bates College, Pomona College, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the University of London, as well as at the annual conferences of the American Political Science