Smuggling is the illegal transport of goods across a border without paying the required customs duties, taxes, and fees. In this sense, it is a form of peculation, in that is defined as illegal appropriation of goods that are not one’s own. Smuggling is therefore closely related to the misappropriation of produced goods in order to evade a tax on production or use, such as an excise tax. In territories that are highly fragmented politically, like the Old Empire at the beginning of the early modern period, the in…