Download Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America AudioBook Free
America is a smuggler nation. Our long background of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th hundred years, to British professional systems and African slaves in the 19th hundred years, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th hundred years, to Mexican staff and Colombian cocaine in the present day period. Contraband capitalism, as it happens, has been an integral part of American capitalism. Providing a sweeping narrative background from colonial times for this, Smuggler Land is the first booklet to retell the storyplot of America--and of its proposal with its neighbors and the rest of the world--as some highly contentious battles over clandestine business. As Peter Andreas shows in this provocative and fascinating account, smuggling has played a pivotal and too often overlooked role in America's birth, westward extension, and economical development, while anti-smuggling campaigns have dramatically enhanced the federal government government's policing forces. The great irony, Andreas instructs us, is that a country that was born and grew up through smuggling is today the world's leading anti-smuggling crusader. In tracing America's long and frequently tortuous marriage with the murky underworld of smuggling, Andreas offers a much-needed antidote to today's hyperbolic depictions of out-of-control edges and growing global criminal offense threats. Urgent calls by politicians and pundits to gain back control of the country's borders have problems with a serious case of historical amnesia, nostalgically implying that they were ever actually in order. This is clean mythology, says Andreas. For better as well as for worse, America's edges have always been highly porous. Definately not being a new and unprecedented hazard to America, the illicit underside of globalization is really an old American traditions. As Andreas shows, it dates back not just ages but centuries. And its own impact has been decidedly double-edged, not only subverting U.S. laws but also assisting to fuel America's development from a remote English colony to the world's pre-eminent superpower.
