A01=Evan T. Jones
Ad Valorem Duties
Author_Evan T. Jones
bristol
Bristol Channel
Bristol's Merchants
Bristol's Sixteenth Century
Bristol’s Merchants
Bristol’s Sixteenth Century
Calais Staple
Category=KCZ
Category=N
Category=NHB
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTK
Category=NHW
Category=NHWF
contraband networks
Controller's Account
Controller’s Account
Country Cloth
court
customs
customs evasion
early modern commerce
economic regulation England
England's Overseas Trade
England’s Overseas Trade
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
exchequer
Exchequer Court
export
Gascon Wine
Glouc Ester
Gloucester
Head Port
Illicit Consignment
Illicit Export
Illicit Trade
john
Lord Treasurer
maritime trade history
Member Ports
merchant
Merchant Adventurers
merchant class analysis
ocers
overseas
Port Books
Prohibited Wares
Severn Estuary
sixteenth century smuggling operations
South West Iberia
trade
Welsh Ports
Wine Imports
Product details
- ISBN 9781409440192
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jun 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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From the moment governments began making money from levying duty on imported goods, a smuggling trade developed to avoid paying such taxes. Whilst the popular image of historic smuggling remains a romantic one, this book makes clear that the illicit trade could be a large-scale and systematic business that relied on the connivance of well-connected merchants. Taking the port of Bristol as a case study, the book provides the most sophisticated historical study ever undertaken of the smugglers’ trade, in England or abroad. Following on from the author’s prize-winning article in Economic History Review, the volume employs the business accounts of sixteenth-century merchants to reconstruct their illicit operations. It presents a detailed analysis of the merchants’ illegal businesses, assessing how individual merchants, and Bristol’s commercial class, were able to protect their contraband trade. More fundamentally, it examines how and why the illicit trade developed, why the Crown was unable to suppress it, and the role smuggling played within Bristol’s wider economy. Through an investigation of these matters the study explores a world that has long attracted popular interest, but which has always been assumed to be immune to serious historical investigation. The book offers a pioneering study, demonstrating that a detailed examination of a particular time and place, based on a close and integrated reading of both official and private records, can make it possible for historians to investigate illicit economies to a greater degree than has previously been believed possible.
Dr Evan T. Jones is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Bristol, UK
