Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in Northeast, 1783-1820. By Joshua M. Smith. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. 160. Cloth, $55.00.)Reviewed by Gautham RaoIn this slender and often elegant monograph, Joshua M. Smith recounts remarkable struggle a regional smuggling culture and national politics that shaped everyday life on early republican MaineNew Brunswick borderlands. Smith, an assistant professor of history at United States Merchant Marine Academy, draws upon ample evidence from archives and government repositories in Canada and United States to sustain his central claim: creation of a political border dividing Passamaquoddy Bay spawned a sprawling smuggling economy that came to anchor local social and cultural identities, while challenging formation in early United States and British Canada.Smuggling began in Passamaquoddy region almost as soon as white settlers - both loyalists seeking political refuge and patriots in search of economic opportunity - arrived in wake of Revolutionary War. What settlers encountered was a seascape seemingly predisposed to illicit commerce: a miniature archipelago astride Bay of Fundy, St. Lawrence River, and Atlantic Ocean. They also happened upon U. S. -Canada border, which arbitrarily divided settlements and, worse yet, divided markets. For local seamen, farmers, lumbermen, and fishermen, pragmatic response to bothersome trade regulations was to smuggle (26).Smuggling within merchant community around Passamaquoddy Bay was more complicated. These merchants, like elsewhere in Atlantic world, drew upon international networks of communication, capital, and credit, and employed a familiar commercial calculus of and profit (27). Foremost among region's contraband commodities was flour and of paris, a fertilizer of ground gypsum stone. Typically, flour flowed north from American mid-Atlantic region, through Passamaquoddy, into British markets for transshipment. Plaster followed reverse path to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. In both cases, these illicit markets required mercantile speculation, not only on forces of supply and demand but also on related questions of policy and politics, such as of Napoleonic Wars, and shifting legal interpretations of tariff provisions.Accordingly, much of Smith's history is devoted to explaining complicated relationship Passamaquoddy's local smugglers and the state (3) of customhouses, revenue cutters, legislatures, and courts. What Smith uncovers is a pattern of local governmental corruption that was so systematic as to promote, rather than regulate, illicit trade. A fascinating example is explicit agreement (ca. 1803) struck American and Canadian customs officials to facilitate shipment of New Brunswick plaster by American merchants. In contravention of federal laws preventing international trade by American coasting, or domestic trading vessels, these officials deemed a portion of harbor between New Brunswick and Maine as 'neutral waters,' where American and British vessels could exchange cargoes unmolested from either side (45).The neutral waters agreement was perhaps most official and systematic instance of innumerable acts in which officials chose to accommodate smugglers, rather than enforce law. …