Description
Smuggling has been one of the most common economic activities of all time, yet it is all but absent from the historical record. This practice has fed the poor and provided a half-decent living to the workers of the world when they faced no other choice but grinding poverty. It was the one way to get affordable goods. Smuggling was the one and only ‘discount store’ at nearly every place and in every period of history. It made life bearable.
One of the very few historians to acknowledge smuggling writes this: “Smugglers and their customers probably outnumber legal traders in many societies around the world; this is nothing new, they always have.”