smokkelen

The English verb 'to smuggle' derives from Low German smoggeln or Dutch smokkelen, both meaning to trade secretly or move goods covertly to avoid customs duties. The word appears in English from the late seventeenth century, precisely the period when smuggling became an organized industry along the English Channel and North Sea coasts. The Low German and Dutch roots are themselves uncertain in deeper origin, but the word belongs to a cluster of Germanic terms for secret or furtive movement; some linguists connect it to a root meaning 'to creep' or 'to squeeze through,' though this etymology is not conclusively established.

Smuggling between England and the Continent was ancient practice — woolen cloth was smuggled out of England to avoid export taxes as far back as the medieval period — but it became industrially organized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as customs duties escalated. The primary smuggled goods changed with taxation policy: wool out of England, wine and brandy in, tea in enormous quantities, and later silk, lace, and tobacco. The Kent and Sussex coasts facing France were the centers of English smuggling, with organized gangs running networks of boats, pack horses, lookouts, and bribed officials. Dutch and Flemish sailors and merchants were the natural partners and sometimes competitors of English smugglers in North Sea trade.

The Dutch word smokkelen entered English through precisely these networks: the coastal community of Anglo-Dutch commercial contact that produced both legitimate trade and its clandestine mirror. In Dutch, the word was used for the evasion of customs by any means; English adopted it with the same meaning. 'Smuggler' as a noun appears in English records from the 1680s, and within decades it was fully naturalized, with no sense of being a foreign borrowing.

The great age of English smuggling — roughly 1680 to 1840, ending when free trade policies reduced import duties sufficiently to undercut the profitability of smuggling — produced an enormous popular literature of adventure, romance, and social sympathy. Smugglers were often portrayed as folk heroes in coastal communities where customs enforcement was resented as interference by distant government. The word 'smuggle' itself, in this cultural context, carried a whiff of adventure rather than criminal stigma, a connotation that has largely survived into modern usage.