The Smugglers' City
Department of History, University of Bristol

Unit Outline

HIST26010: Special Field (20 Credit Points) and Special Field Project (20 Credit Points)

Tutor: Dr Evan Jones
Structure: 10 x 2 hour seminars, 10 x 1 hour seminars, 2 x 20 min tutorials, 1 x 2 hour exam
Teaching block: 2 - linked to 5000 word project

During the sixteenth century Bristol became, in a very literal sense, a ‘smugglers’ city’. This was not just because smugglers lived here. Rather, it was because Bristol itself was ruled by a group of merchant-smugglers that were heavily involved in illicit trading. This Special Field will explore how Bristol’s ruling elite created, operated, and protected their smuggling operations during the sixteenth century, employing strategies that ranged from the persecution of informers to the restriction of interlopers. By studying Bristol’s black-economy and comparing it to that of other times and places, the unit will seek to determine how organised crime worked in this period and why it was so difficult to suppress. The unit is based on Dr Jones’ award-winning research and offers students the opportunity to participate in an ongoing project, learning, in the process, much about how one can investigate secret histories.

Introductory reading:

P. Croft, ‘Trading with the enemy, 1585-1604’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989)
E.T. Jones, ‘Illicit business: accounting for smuggling in mid-sixteenth century Bristol’, Economic History Review , 54 (2001)
John U. Nef, ‘Richard Camarden’s “A Caveat for the Quene” (1570), Journal of Political Economy , 41 (1933), 33-41
G. D. Ramsay, ‘The Smugglers’ Trade: A Neglected Aspect of English Commercial Development’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, II (1952)
N.J. Williams, ‘Francis Shaxton and the Elizabethan port books’, English Historical Review , LXVI (1951)