During the Napoleonic Wars the Channel between England and France remained a major site for smuggling. Both the British and French governments faced this problem. From the French perspective, banned English textiles flooded continental markets; from the British perspective, smugglers evaded duties on continental goods landed on local shores and illegally shipped people and goods out of Britain to France and the Netherlands. While the smuggling of English textiles into Napoleonic-controlled Europe has become part of the history of the Continental Blockade, very little has been written on the contraband flows into and out of Britain and on the English smugglers who were the principal agents in a trans-Channel smuggling community.Footnote 1 This article aims to address this neglect, throwing new light on the nature of the Channel and its coastal communities and offering further insights into the contested historical questions of identity, patriotism, and Anglo-French relations during the Napoleonic Wars. At the same time that the British state and its people were at war with Napoleonic France and its satellite states, English subjects along the Channel shore continued to trade illegally with the enemy, with the Channel proving a permeable border rather than an impenetrable defensive barrier.

In general, English smuggling during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remains an underdeveloped field of historical inquiry.Footnote 2 In particular, English smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars has not been considered in its own right, typically appearing as a brief epilogue to histories of the “golden age” of eighteenth-century smuggling. However, the many scattered references to smuggling in British Customs and Admiralty records for the period 1800–1814, together with French police and administrative documents, reveal the extent and nature of Channel smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars. As in the past, tobacco, alcohol, and French lace and silk crossed the Channel into Britain. The war also brought new opportunities, with smugglers shipping gold guineas and escaped French prisoners of war across to the Continent. Indeed, in the final years of the conflict, Napoleon used English smugglers in the war against Britain, establishing English smuggling bases at Dunkirk and Gravelines.

This smuggling was possible only because of the Channel itself. In recent years, historians of the “Atlantic World” especially have conceptualized the sea as a place for the transnational exchange and transmission of goods, peoples, and ideas.Footnote 3 On a smaller scale, the same is no less true of the Channel, and smuggling played an integral role in this exchange. Historically, both the English and French have viewed the Channel as a natural frontier. Throughout English history, and rarely more so than during the Napoleonic Wars, the Channel has, more often than not, been conceptualized and appreciated as “England's moat.” Throughout the Napoleonic era, the Channel was one of the premier theaters of naval and economic war, with the British navy blockading French ports, capturing merchant shipping, and harassing fishermen. In particular, during the invasion scare of 1803–5, patriotic cartoons and broadsides regularly featured the Channel as separating and protecting the “island nation” from the tyranny of continental despotism.

Yet the history of smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars presents a more complex picture of the Channel and its place in shaping Anglo-continental exchange and relations. For English smugglers, the Channel was not so much a fixed political border as a permeable space that allowed commodities and people to pass into and out of England and France. Yet it was also a self-contained world, a body of water framed by distant facing shorelines, where maritime and commercial ties integrated coastal peoples from different regions and nations.

The practices of these smuggling communities, engaged as they were in an economic relationship with the enemy, add further complexity to important questions of patriotism and national identity that historians have debated over the past decade or more. For Linda Colley, ideas about France and the French were integral to the construction of British national identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 4 Patriotism grew in response to the many wars with France, a common identity forged in opposition to a common enemy. This patriotism, and its associated anti-French sentiment, reached new heights during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 5 Yet at this precise historical juncture, English smugglers—and there were thousands of people along the Channel directly or indirectly involved with contraband—interacted with the “enemy.” In plying their traditional clandestine trade during a period of international conflict, English smugglers subverted not only national borders but also national identities, interacting on a commercial and social level with the officially hated “other.”

Historians commonly regard the “classical age” of English smuggling as stretching from the first decades of the eighteenth century to the early 1780s.Footnote 6 During this time, smuggling grew in response to high British import duties imposed on tea, tobacco, and spirits. While smuggling varied in scale and complexity, according to Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna Mui it became increasingly sophisticated in the second half of the century.Footnote 7 English smugglers were an integral part of cross-Channel contraband networks involving capital formation, production, transportation, distribution, and sales. The larger-scale operations were clandestine international business enterprises, at the forefront of supplying eighteenth-century Britain's “consumer revolution” with cheap tea and tobacco.Footnote 8 From the English agricultural laborers who hauled contraband goods overland to the seamen who sailed clandestinely back and forth between Britain and the Continent, and from the continental suppliers to the British merchants and shopkeepers who sold the contraband goods, smuggling was an economic activity that cut across class and national boundaries. It provided an important source of employment for British and continental coastal communities and, at the same time, met the consumer tastes of the British popular and upper classes.

At any one time during the greater part of the eighteenth century, an estimated twenty thousand British people were full-time smugglers who illegally imported large quantities of tea, tobacco, gin, brandy, wine, French silks, and lace.Footnote 9 On the Continent, but most especially in France and Holland, gin factories, tobacco refineries, tea warehouses, and boat builders catered to the needs of the British smugglers. Tea was the most lucrative and popular smuggled item.Footnote 10 The British East India Company monopolized the British tea trade with China, and tea imports into Britain were subject to high duties. However, Continental East India companies—those of France, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden—could import tea into their own countries without high duties, and the price of tea was consequently much cheaper on the Continent. This continental tea was the principal supply source for British smugglers. Tobacco was also brought in from the Continent: English merchants reexported tobacco leaf (tobacco import duties were reduced with reexport) to the Continent for processing, most commonly at Dunkirk, and the finished product was then smuggled back into Britain.Footnote 11

Levels of British smuggling fluctuated over the course of the eighteenth century. It boomed so much in the early 1780s that the government commissioned reports, and a 1783 parliamentary committee inquired into illicit practices. The Customs Board claimed that smuggling had increased threefold between 1780 and 1783.Footnote 12 The parliamentary committee was informed that between 1773 and 1782 an estimated 7.5 million pounds of tea were smuggled into the country, representing 70 percent of the total tea domestically consumed.Footnote 13 Armed with such findings, William Pitt introduced a series of measures throughout the 1780s that directly or indirectly attacked smuggling: import duties were dramatically reduced, and the 1786 Eden Treaty established a free-trade agreement between Britain and France. But the centerpiece of reform was Pitt's 1784 Commutation Act, which slashed import duties on tea from 119 to 12.5 percent, effectively putting an end to the lucrative trade in illegal tea.Footnote 14 W. A. Cole, in his famous attempt to quantify eighteenth-century English smuggling levels, claimed that the act “probably contributed to a general decline in smuggling.” However, he added, “there is no reason to suppose that it came to an end.”Footnote 15

Indeed, as the era of the Napoleonic Wars highlights, smuggling continued and even flourished. The Napoleonic Wars had a mixed impact on smuggling between Britain and the Continent. In some ways, the era was not conducive to smuggling. Throughout the eighteenth century, smuggling levels generally declined during periods of international war, only to revive with the commencement of peace, as was the case following the end of the Seven Years' War.Footnote 16 War's disruption of trade routes and merchant shipping was never more apparent than during the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. From the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1793 until the end of hostilities in 1815, the two nations waged a European and global war, part of which was a struggle over global commerce and market share. The Royal Navy's blockade of French ports and control of the sea, especially following Trafalgar in 1805, effectively closed off international and inter-European trade routes to French shipping. Until 1806, with the exception of the Peace of Amiens, commerce between Britain and France was limited to cargoes carried by neutral vessels.Footnote 17 This indirect and limited trade, however, ended with the onset in 1806 of Napoleon's Continental Blockade. The Continent was starved of colonial goods, and the wars brought about the end of the European East India companies’ trade with China.Footnote 18 This meant that English smugglers lost many of their traditional continental supply sources.

Smuggling was also made more difficult through increased British coastal surveillance and defensive measures. This was particularly the case on the Kent and Sussex coasts during the Channel invasion scare of 1803–5, when Napoleon assembled his flotilla at Boulogne. Troop deployments and new garrisons, the construction of twenty-seven Martello towers in Kent and forty-six in Sussex, and the building of the Royal Military Canal in 1806 behind Romney Marsh, an area in east Kent favored by smugglers—all hindered smuggling during these years.Footnote 19

Nevertheless, other characteristics of the Napoleonic Wars encouraged British smuggling. The Royal Navy's resources were devoted to the war with France, leaving the fight against smuggling almost solely to the responsibility of customs and revenue cruisers. In 1809, the newly formed Preventive Water Guard had only thirty-nine revenue cutters and sixty-two boats to patrol the entire English and Welsh coastlines.Footnote 20 The Riding Officers who patrolled the coastlines and cliff tops numbered only 120 in 1811.Footnote 21 The war also brought added incentives to smugglers. French goods were banned from Britain, and the war, like those of the eighteenth century, led to an increase in import duties, as the British government sought to increase its war chest. Most significantly, the war ultimately led Napoleon to utilize the energy and resources of the English Channel smugglers.

In an Imperial decree of 15 June 1810, Napoleon opened the port of Dunkirk to English smugglers who were encouraged to bring across gold guineas and depart with French brandy, gin, and manufactured items.Footnote 22 The following year, on 30 November 1811, Napoleon switched the smuggling base to nearby Gravelines, which emerged as the “ville des Smoglers,” a community of English smugglers who worked the Channel on a regular basis during the final years of the war.Footnote 23 Napoleon hoped the smugglers’ trade would boost his own domestic manufacturing industry and help drain the British economy—in recession at the time—of its gold.

Of the contraband flowing into Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, alcohol, textiles, and, to a lesser extent, tobacco were the principal cargoes. During 1812, 604 English smuggling vessels left Gravelines with combined export cargoes worth F 4,579,346.Footnote 24 Lace, silk, and leather items accounted for 62.5 percent of the total export value, and alcohol made up 32 percent, with 933,000 liters of brandy and gin leaving for English shores. Gold flowed in the other direction, mainly in the form of guineas. In 1809, an economic recession and a falling British pound relative to continental currencies encouraged British merchants with debts to pay on the Continent, and also British financial speculators, to send guineas abroad.Footnote 25 The smugglers and Napoleon suitably obliged. French records reveal the astonishing extent of this illicit trade: in 1813, smugglers brought into Gravelines a total of 1.6 million guineas, valued at over 42 million francs.Footnote 26

In addition, English smugglers brought across escaped French prisoners of war. This new form of cross-Channel “people smuggling” arose after only 1803, in response to fundamental changes in eighteenth-century conventions concerning prisoners of war.Footnote 27 During the Napoleonic Wars, prisoners were no longer exchanged in cartels between belligerents, and officers were no longer granted parole to return to their home country. As a consequence, over 100,000 French prisoners of war were held in Britain between 1803 and 1814. Officers were granted parole but forced to reside in designated parole towns throughout Britain. Escape was common: 590 officers successfully escaped between May 1803 and August 1811, and another 299 between 1811 and 1814.Footnote 28 Ferrying them across the Channel became a profitable business for English smugglers. Some smuggling gangs took to specializing in this trade. Thomas Moore was the most famous of these smugglers, even visiting parole towns to hatch escape plans and establish deals with the local French officers. The trade proved very lucrative, as French officers could be charged up to 300 guineas each to affect their escape. John Rattenbury, the Devon smuggler made famous by his memoirs, was once caught with four French officers who had paid him £100 to take them to Jersey.Footnote 29

Between January and late November 1811, 141 French officers escaped to France, arriving in Channel ports.Footnote 30 The majority arrived in the ports of the Nord and Pas de Calais—Dunkirk, Boulogne, and Calais—onboard English smuggling vessels, which most commonly departed from Deal.Footnote 31 The Straits of Dover were not the only crossing point: smugglers brought eighteen French prisoners of war into the Norman departement of the Seine-Inférieure, and Dorset and Devon smugglers took thirty-four prisoners into Cherbourg, which was the closest French port to Wincanton in Somerset, which had the largest single concentration of paroled French officers in Britain.

In sum, then, the Napoleonic Wars did not spell disaster to the English smuggling communities. Although it did not reach the heights of the golden era, smuggling nevertheless was important to smugglers, merchants, local economies, and the Napoleonic state. The relationship between the Napoleonic Wars and English smuggling was a complex and shifting one: smuggling adapted, mutated, survived, and, in some senses, thrived.

While smuggling occurred all along the British coastline during the Napoleonic Wars, the Channel remained the most important smuggling area. In 1807, the commissioners of the Treasury singled out the Channel as the center of the smuggling problem.Footnote 32 The smuggling communities that operated between England and the Continent were defined by this common sense of geographical space. The coastal inhabitants on both sides of the Channel lived in frontier or border regions, with the sea dividing the British Isles and the Continent and acting as the demarcation line between distinct geopolitical entities. The Channel made smuggling possible, acting as both a customs boundary and the means to breach it. In this sense, the Channel region was similar to other “natural frontiers” where contraband was a way of life, such as the Pyrenees between France and Spain or the Rhine between France and Germany.Footnote 33 Yet, throughout the period, the Channel was not a fixed and monolithic smuggling environment. It comprised distinct local smuggling communities—whether they be Cornish, Kentish, Breton, or Norman—that were in turn part of larger national and transnational smuggling communities, whose economic ties changed over the course of the war and reached beyond the Channel region.

On the English coastline, Kent and Sussex, Dorset, and Cornwall and Devon remained, as they had during the eighteenth century, great centers of smuggling. Kent and Sussex had numerous geographical advantages for smugglers: close proximity to the French and Dutch coastlines, with the Channel at its narrowest, and near to the London market where many of the contraband goods were ultimately sold.Footnote 34 Visiting Sussex in 1813, Arthur Young wrote:

Of the Kent and Sussex coastal communities, Deal, Folkestone, Hythe, and Hastings were most strongly connected with smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1807, the secretary of the treasury claimed: “In some of the towns on the coast of Kent and Sussex, amongst which are Hastings, Folkestone, Hythe and Deal … the practice of smuggling is carried on so generally by such large gangs of men, that there can exist no hope of checking it but by the constant and most active vigilance of strong military patrols.”Footnote 36 These smugglers had extensive contraband ties, dealing with Flushing and Ostende on the Dutch coast, the French ports of the departements of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, and the Channel Islands, especially Guernsey. The Kent smugglers also plied their trade along other parts of the British coastline. For example, in 1807, the secretary of the treasury wrote of smuggling on the Northumbrian coast during the previous winter “by a number of ships belonging chiefly to Folkestone” that ran “twenty thousand casks of spirits … into the river Tweed” and had “agents (residing in Berwick) from Folkestone.”Footnote 37 Folkestone smugglers were still running contraband spirits from Holland into Scotland in 1813.Footnote 38

Unlike Kent, it was Cornwall's relative isolation and secluded coves that had made it a haven for smuggling and wrecking throughout the eighteenth century. It had traditional smuggling ties with Brittany, Ireland, and the Channel Islands, its links with the latter remaining strong during the Napoleonic period. Writing in December 1804, the collector and the controller of customs at Penzance claimed: “The smuggling practised on this coast, and within the limits of our port, has been carried on to the greatest extent imaginable, for this last summer by luggers, sloops, and other small craft from the islands of Guernsey, and still continues to be practised with equal success, by the persons concerned in this illegal traffick.”Footnote 39

The Channel Islands, especially Guernsey and Jersey, were a particular problem for the British government. Located only a short distance from the Breton and Norman coastlines, the islands featured a thriving smuggling trade during the previous century.Footnote 40 The islands were semiautonomous and fiercely independent, and British customs officials were only installed from the 1760s. These officials faced a constant battle against communities for whom smuggling was an open and accepted way of life. Contraband, especially spirits, was traditionally brought in from either France or passing English and foreign merchant ships. Smugglers used the islands as a staging point in the contraband flow between the Continent and Britain, stocking warehouses full of contraband goods waiting to be shipped out. The local coopers played a vital role in the trade, making specially sized spirit kegs that could be carried by horses and men. The smallest kegs (half-ankers), complete with accompanying ropes, were designed to allow a single man to haul a keg off the beach and, if need be, up through the coastal cliffs. British and local smugglers brought the contraband cargoes to the Irish, Cornish, Dorset, Sussex, and Kentish coasts.

Little had changed by the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Rattenbury, the famous Devon smuggler, recounts in his memoirs the many trips he made to Alderney during this period.Footnote 41 In January 1802, writing to the chief secretary of Ireland, John Croker noted: “The revenue of Ireland and I understand England is very materially injured by the trade carried on with the islands of Guernsey and Jersey, where … high duty goods run upon our coasts are made up in such convenient packages as to make their landing and conveyance very easy, such as wines and spirits in casks of 10 gallons, tobacco in packages of one hundred weight.”Footnote 42

In 1805, the British Parliament made a concerted effort to address the customs laxity in the Channel Islands by passing the “Bill for the more effectual Prevention of Smuggling.” The bill attacked smuggling per se, but the Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark) received particular attention. The bill prohibited the islanders from importing and exporting spirits, wine, and tobacco unless they were in legally sized packages and casks: tobacco could not be in packages of less than 450 pounds weight, spirits could not be in casks of less than 60 gallons, and wine could not be in casks less than a hogshead.Footnote 43 The bill, however, appears to have had little impact. There were problems with its implementation and enforcement; on Guernsey, the local court initially refused to register the act.Footnote 44 The Channel Islands smugglers continued to plague the British customs service. In 1807, the Customs Board claimed that the Channel Islanders were involved in smuggling “to an enormous extent,” and the Treasury singled out Guernsey for special comment: “from which island alone in the course of four months of the last winter, spirits and other items were clandestinely introduced into this Kingdom, the duties upon which would have amounted to a sum not less than 500,000 pounds sterling.”Footnote 45 The following year the collector and the controller of customs at Guernsey wrote: “Smuggling still is carried on with little interruption at Alderney and most probably from Jersey.”Footnote 46 And in 1810, English ships coming to the island of Jersey were strongly suspected of collecting contraband cargoes “from some of the creeks at the back of the island.”Footnote 47

One of the reasons why the Channel Islands figured so prominently in the smuggling world of the Channel during the Napoleonic Wars was that French ports were officially closed to British smugglers until 1810. This influenced the flow of contraband across the Channel. In 1807, the collector and the controller of customs at Penzance wrote: “And should the French ports be opened for smuggling (as is talked of here), or a peace concluded with that country, smuggling, in that case, will be carried on to a greater extent on this coast than it has been for many years last past, there being a greater intercourse during Peace with the French ports by smugglers from this neighbourhood than with the islands of Guernsey or Jersey.”Footnote 48

English smugglers enjoyed open access to the Dutch ports. The collector and the controller of customs at Dover wrote in 1800: “The information with respect to persons going to and from Folkestone to France appears very doubtful, as the English smuggling vessels are not admitted into the French ports—but … persons such as smuggling merchants and people of that description, go to and from there to Flushing.”Footnote 49 Flushing and Ostend were an integral part of British contraband trade: Dutch boats landed spirits on the Kentish coast, and in turn Kentish smugglers visited the Dutch ports.Footnote 50 Deal boats smuggled copper into Flushing in 1805, where a French general bought the copper and then sent it on to Antwerp.Footnote 51 In an 1804 intelligence report to the Home Office, Sir John Moore claimed that there was daily interaction between Folkestone smugglers and the Dutch ports, including Browers Haven, Campveer, and Zederikzea, but most especially Flushing. Much of this smuggling was based on family ties traversing the Channel: “There is hardly a family in Folkestone which has not relatives settled at Flushing and there is a constant intercourse.”Footnote 52

Following Napoleon's opening of Dunkirk and Gravelines, Kentish smugglers redirected their activity into France. Up to three hundred English smugglers, mainly from Deal and Folkestone, crossed to Gravelines on a regular basis from 1812. So great were their numbers, and the potential security risk they posed to the French state, that they were housed in a specially constructed compound near the fort of Saint-Philippe in the port of Gravelines.Footnote 53 For their return voyages to England, they collected goods from among seventy merchants officially granted permission by Napoleon to trade at Gravelines with the smugglers.Footnote 54

This world of Channel smuggling bound together a broad cross section of society. Paul Monod has remarked that smuggling in southeast England during the eighteenth century “may have strengthened the notion of a unified community by bringing together diverse social elements in a concerted clandestine enterprise.”Footnote 55 During the Napoleonic Wars, as in the past, laborers, fishermen, and merchants, albeit playing very different roles in the smuggling networks, were drawn together by common economic interests. Smuggling sustained entire coastal communities. All 250 families on the island of Alderney, for instance, were believed to be involved in keg making for the contraband trade.Footnote 56 The beaches of Kent were the domain of very large smuggling bands. In 1801, a group of 130 men tried to prevent revenue officers from seizing a smuggling lugger, the May of Dover, that had been driven ashore at Dungeness with 1,100 casks of spirits on board.Footnote 57 In 1804, the commissioners of excise reported that smugglers from the beach at Hastings regularly “carry away their cargoes of their vessels in bodies of near two hundred men.”Footnote 58 Seamen and farm laborers were normally responsible for carrying the goods off beaches and hauling them up cliff faces. And smuggling paid more handsomely than manual labor. According to Arthur Young, the average daily wage for Sussex laborers in 1813 was between 16d. and 18d., yet smuggling paid much more: “In the neighborhood of the sea are seen many old laborers, as the young and active find smuggling a more lucrative employ. … The principals engaged in the business have about 10s. 6d. each night: the common men a guinea a week; and in the conveyance from the vessel to the shore, from 2s. to 7s. per night.”Footnote 59

Sailors and fishermen generally crewed the English smuggling boats. Indeed, the fishing industry and smuggling were inextricably linked. Fishermen were frequently caught smuggling, and fishing vessels were commonly used in contraband trade. The coastal fishing communities of Kent and Sussex were under constant suspicion from the authorities. The collector and the controller of customs at Dover claimed that “vessels under the guise of Fish Taker and Fish carriers are often employed in smuggling.”Footnote 60 The same was true of oyster fishing boats in the Channel Islands, with the oyster season seeing a rise in smuggling.Footnote 61 Fishermen were naturally drawn to smuggling not only because of their seafaring expertise and knowledge but also because fishing boats could provide a cover for illegal operations. All fishermen were issued with licenses, stipulating the size of the boat and crew and the geographical limits of the fishing grounds in which the boat could operate. Smuggling occurred on the fishing grounds themselves, where English and French boats met: “Hastings and Rye fishing boats, which trawl on the diamond ground about 8 leagues to the South East of Hastings, have lately been concerned in smuggling by taking out parts of the cargoes of boats from France which meet them on that ground.”Footnote 62 Licenses granted for fishing off the Dutch coast, particularly those that failed to state how close the vessels could come into shore, were conducive to smuggling and naturally raised concerns for the authorities.Footnote 63 More commonly, though, smugglers went beyond the geographical limits of the fishing licenses to pick up their contraband cargoes. This was the case with the fishing boats that plied the smuggling route to Gravelines.Footnote 64 So strong was the connection between the fishing and smuggling industries that law-abiding fishermen who wished to extend the geographical limits of their licenses were subject to considerable scrutiny from the authorities who sought assurances that the said boat was “really a fishing boat” and the said fishermen a “bona fide fisherman.”Footnote 65

The poorer classes, therefore, provided both the navigational skills and the physical labor for successful trans-Channel smuggling operations. Rarely, though, did they have a direct stake in the financing or sale of the cargoes. As an official observed, “Few of the men clandestinely employed in navigating smuggling vessels have any property either in them or their cargoes.”Footnote 66 When revenue cutters seized smuggling vessels, it was difficult for the authorities to follow the smuggling chain beyond the men in the boat. One of the biggest problems, as highlighted by the landing waiter at Poole, were the very applications for boat licenses: “There is no proof necessary … as to the real and bone fide ownership of the property. … The party actually concerned and the promoter of fraudulent practices largely remains undiscovered, and in certain degree is himself kept aloof from punishment.”Footnote 67 The financing, certainly for large ventures, came from the wealthy commercial classes.

The involvement of merchants and bankers in Channel smuggling took various forms. English bankers and merchants from London and Kent were in contact with their French counterparts in Dunkirk and Gravelines, helping to finance and organize much of the smuggling trade with France between 1810 and 1814.Footnote 68 Smugglers also collected goods at sea belonging to British and foreign merchants. Boats from Margate, for example, were known to liaise with “homeward bound East and West India ships” for the purpose of smuggling.Footnote 69 Neutral merchant ships were an integral part of this type of smuggling. Indeed, in 1807, the collector and controller of customs at Dover wrote: “We know it to be true that during the last summer scarcely a neutral vessel passed up or down the Channel that was not boarded by boats from the shore, particularly from Folkestone, with a view of purchasing whatever articles might be on board for the purpose of smuggling on shore.”Footnote 70 Sometimes, English smuggling vessels lay in wait off the French coast for arranged rendezvous with neutral trading vessels.Footnote 71 Neutral vessels also ran contraband goods directly onto the English coastline. In 1807, vessels from France, Spain, and especially from the “Neutral West India islands,” and “fast sailing vessels” from Holland, were bringing contraband cargoes onto the Kent coast.Footnote 72 During periods of neutrality, Danish vessels brought contraband “to an enormous extent” to the coast of Cornwall near Penzance.Footnote 73 And English privateers also carried smuggled goods: in 1812, for instance, the privateer Matchless from Guernsey was seized for contraband trafficking.Footnote 74 All of these examples demonstrate varying degrees of smuggling sophistication, with lines of communication, navigation, and delivery and pickup crisscrossing the Channel and beyond.

The fact that smuggling connections persisted across the Channel when Britain and France were at war has implications for our understanding of Anglo-French relations and the problems of British or English patriotism and national identity. Gerald Newman and Linda Colley, among others, have stressed the importance of France—as the Catholic and Absolutist “other”—to British notions of self-identity and difference during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 75 Newman argues that France as the enemy was “one of the very few articles of belief that in some way or another was capable of influencing all Britons beneath otherwise immense diversities of wealth, locality, dialect, occupation, religion and political faith.”Footnote 76 This anti-Frenchness reached its height during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 77 Stuart Semmel, however, in his recent study of Napoleon in late-Georgian British political culture has stressed the challenge that Napoleon posed to ideas of France as the old enemy. At least for a number of British radical writers, Napoleon's enigmatic and hybrid nature (as both democrat and despot, Corsican and French), his complex relationship with Catholicism, and the legitimacy or otherwise of his rule problematized the construction of France as the differentiated “other.”Footnote 78 In their own way, too, the English smuggling communities along the Channel did not fit neatly into “popular gallophobia” during the Napoleonic Wars. They continued to trade with France regardless of the war, exemplifying the importance of place and local socioeconomic practices to the formation of identity and state-societal relations. Their economic livelihoods depended on defying their own state's customs laws and making contact with the enemy, enabled by the porous transnational space of the Channel and its coastline.

The smugglers’ practices were an important form of Anglo-continental and Anglo-French interaction. For all the Anglo-French rivalry, conflict, and enmity over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were still close cultural ties.Footnote 79 Dominic Rainsford has remarked that “it is extraordinary how much cross-channel cultural exchange went on at the same time as all the killing.”Footnote 80 And Jacques Gury noted: “When peace came, even before a treaty had been signed, the English nobility would resume their trips to France, seeking out their friends … and, after a fashion, picking up their former conversations.”Footnote 81 This is precisely what happened during the Peace of Amiens, when travel resumed between Dover and Calais. Crowds of English tourists—including William Wordsworth and William Turner—reacquainted themselves with France.Footnote 82 However, Anglo-French relations have typically been conceptualized in terms of elites and Francophilia, at the expense of economic and popular modes of interaction. Operating alongside the traditional “Grand Tour” were official and unofficial economic ties—trade and smuggling.Footnote 83 The resumption of war in 1803 brought an abrupt end to English trade with most of the Continent and to holidays in Paris for the English aristocracy and middle class. Yet cross-Channel interaction persisted via the clandestine world of smugglers.

This interaction with the Continent, though, did not necessarily mean that English smugglers were immune to the call of patriotism or free from the fear of invasion. This is demonstrated through the participation of Kent and Sussex smugglers in the volunteer movement. Only in recent years have British historians turned their attention to the mass armed mobilization of the British nation during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 84 Linda Colley has stressed the importance of the militias and volunteer movements as exemplars of British patriotism. Although there were important regional variations in recruitment, a great many British males volunteered for the militias, especially during the Napoleonic invasion scare of 1803–5. Given the vulnerability of Kent and Sussex to a French invasion, it is not surprising that they had relatively high rates of loyalism, at least those measured by the volunteer movement and the 1803 returns on the Defence of the Realm Act. By 1804, for example, 53 percent of males aged between seventeen and fifty-five from the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Sandwich, Dover, Romney, Hythe, Rye, and Winchelsea—many of which were smuggling centers) had volunteered for militia service.Footnote 85

Significantly, smugglers appeared in this local volunteer movement. In Sussex, for example, Lord Sheffield commanded a volunteer unit comprising a “bad breed of Smugglers, Poachers, Foresters, and Farmers’ Servants” alongside his regular volunteers.Footnote 86 Among the volunteer forces, it was the Sea Fencibles, above all, that attracted smugglers. The Sea Fencibles were created in 1798 as a part-time volunteer force for defending the English coastline and patrolling local waters.Footnote 87 They were disbanded in 1803 but revived in 1805, and they numbered 23,455 when finally disbanded in 1810. They drew on men from the local fishing and shipping industries, many of whom, naturally, were involved in smuggling.

Authorities frequently commented on this fact and were deeply concerned with the effectiveness of the Sea Fencibles. Captain Schomberg, who commanded the Sea Fencibles at Dungeness, complained: “Notwithstanding the number of men who volunteered to go afloat, it is inconceivable the difficulty I find when the time arrives to persuade them to embark. … The people, who are mostly smugglers and wreckers, object to go on board the Revenue cutters.”Footnote 88 Lord Keith, commander of the Channel Fleet and ultimately responsible for the Sea Fencibles, was furious at the actions of Sea Fencibles from Deal and Dover who refused to help escort merchant convoys down the Thames unless they were paid nine or ten guineas each: “It is evident that most of the men at Deal, Dover, Folkestone etc. who are protected from serving either in the Militia or at sea seem to regard themselves in a manner completely independent of the service, and as having a kind of prescriptive right to defraud the revenue and pillage individuals.”Footnote 89

Individuals joined the British volunteer movement for a variety of reasons.Footnote 90 Financial inducement was one such motive, with Sea Fencibles, like other volunteers, paid 1s. per day while on duty.Footnote 91 As Lord Keith's comments indicate, Sea Fencibles were also able to exploit their position for financial gain. More important, those who joined the Sea Fencibles were immune from naval impressment. In 1807, the Treasury argued that this was precisely the reason why smugglers joined, impressment being a common punishment for those found guilty of smuggling.Footnote 92 It is conceivable that some smugglers may also have been attracted by the prospect of finding out more details on the operations of revenue cruisers and coastal patrols. Yet, in keeping with other volunteers, there is no compelling reason to discount that smugglers in Kent and Sussex may have been motivated, in part or in full, by a commitment to protecting the coastline, their homes, and their families. “Fear” and “anger” were primary motivating forces behind voluntarism.Footnote 93 And the smuggler communities were, after all, literally on the cutting edge of the planned French invasion: smuggling with the French and Dutch was one thing; experiencing a French invasion of their community and country was quite another.

For the English smuggler during the Napoleonic Wars, then, the Continent was an ambiguous space, a source of economic livelihood and of a threatened invasion. Smugglers were forced to negotiate their way through both the war and their traditional ties to the Continent. Patriot and smuggler, therefore, may not have been mutually exclusive identities. On the one hand, the smugglers were encouraged to consider themselves as part of a national community at war with the French. On the other hand, the smugglers were part of a local criminal subculture that defied the English state and a cross-Channel contraband community linked by common economic interests and family and personal ties. Contraband networks persisted across the Channel through periods of both peace and war, operating outside the context of whether those on the other side of the frontier were designated in official discourse as friend or foe.

Much of the Channel smuggling world—at least its eighteenth and early nineteenth-century forms—did not last long after the fall of Napoleon. The peace from 1814–15 ended the smuggling of escaped French prisoners of war and guineas, the former entirely contingent on the war, and both encouraged by the Napoleonic regime. In the short term, though, the end of the conflict led to an escalation in Channel smuggling, as 250,000 demobilized British soldiers and sailors returned home seeking employment.Footnote 94 Responding to the increase in smuggling, the Royal Navy blockaded the Kent coast from 1817, using ships that no longer had to combat French Men of War.Footnote 95 This blockade, together with the creation of the National Coast Guard in 1822, effectively ended large-scale smuggling across the straits of Dover.

Earlier, though, an entire generation of English Channel smugglers negotiated their lives through the period of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars, which brought both restraints and new opportunities. At a broad structural level, the smugglers were unchanged by the war, continuing to act as central agents in a clandestine commercial world whose traditions stretched back far beyond the early nineteenth century. On another level, they were inextricably caught up in the war, their position complex and shifting. For a variety of reasons, Kent and Sussex smugglers were drawn into their own national community's defensive effort in the early years of the conflict, yet they maintained smuggling links with the Netherlands, and their later activities with guineas and prisoners of war served the interests of Napoleon to the potential detriment of the British state and the welfare of its people. These smugglers, therefore, were not merely continuing their traditional contraband ties with the Continent despite the war but became active participants in various economic and military forms of the war itself—they were defending their country as volunteers one moment and assisting the enemy the next. Their responses to the war and to the call of loyalism were shaped to a large degree by their own local traditions, practices, and priorities. For the smugglers, the Channel was always, and above all else, a source of livelihood that helped shape social and economic identities. Ultimately, personal economic interests and historic ties to the Continent took priority over loyalty to the British state—a state whose claims over these communities was tenuous and contested.

These communities experienced the Channel as a permeable space rather than a tightly closed border. As Lucien Febvre observed in his pioneering piece on frontiers, there is nothing “natural” about “natural frontiers”—rather, they emerge as a political process, a product of the territorial limits of countries and empires.Footnote 96 Despite the Royal Navy's dominance over the Channel during the Napoleonic Wars, it was never completely “England's lake.” The Channel was neither distinctly “English” nor “French” but remained a contested terrain, an open frontier where conflict and cooperation coexisted. Smugglers, neutral ships, French fishermen, coastal merchants, sailors, and privateers all continued to ply their trade on this narrow body of water.Footnote 97 The Channel separated two nations, but it was also a unifying force, allowing contact across the shores and the basis for common commercial pursuits. In this way, the history of smuggling offers exciting new possibilities for reconceptualizing the history of the Channel and its peoples. We might move beyond the paradigms of both national and local history in favor of understanding the interconnectedness of the region as a distinct maritime “Channel world,” characterized by the environmental, commercial, and cultural ties of its seafaring peoples—fishermen, traders, and, of course, smugglers.