B
The British Customs Service in Colonial America
y the eve of the War of Independence, customs houses and customs house officers were the most visible manifestation of British authority in colonial America. Having been established by Parliament in 1275 during the reign of King Edward I, the English customs service had a long history by the start of England’s colonization of North America. Local tariffs on imports and exports had an even longer history, but Edward’s “great and ancient custom”—a tax on exported wool, sheepskins, and leather—was national in scope and managed by Crown officials.1 With varying degrees of success, the king’s customs expanded over the following two centuries to encompass alien duties, “tonnage and poundage” fees, and a host of short-lived impositions. The growth of trade in the sixteenth century under the Tudors was accompanied by improvements in administrative efficiency. In the 1560s, for example, Queen Elizabeth introduced port books, the first registers of ships and cargoes, and a book of instructions establishing uniform practices. There were periods when the customs duties were farmed out, wholly or in part (that is, transferred by the Crown to individuals who paid fees for the privilege of collecting the money).
by Thomas M. Truxes
Contracting out continued intermittently until 1671, when King Charles II created the Board of Customs Commissioners as an agency subordinate to the Treasury.2 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the customs service had grown into a huge operation whose Byzantine regulations governed over 2,000 dutiable goods. Broad supervision of this sprawling institution—with thousands of employees and many customs districts on both sides of the Atlantic—was the responsibility of the Commissioners of the Customs, headquartered in the London Custom House. Before 1707 Scotland had its own customs board, as it was considered a foreign country in its commercial interactions with England. A distinct Scottish customs board continued after the Acts of Union (1706 and 1707) but was abolished in 1723 following strident complaints by English merchants that anomalies in the law encouraged smuggling and unfairly advantaged Scotland.3 Ireland was a special case. Though it shared a monarch with England and was constrained by complex constitutional ties to Great Britain, the Kingdom of Ireland was, in fact, a separate country. As such, it had its own customs service and its own enforcement apparatus—though
carefully synchronized to conform to practices across the Irish Sea. The customs establishment in America, on the other hand, operated under the supervision of the London Commissioners. It was not until 1767 that Great Britain established the American Board of Customs Commissioners to oversee the customs service in British North America.4 Much has been written about inefficiency and venality in the British customs service, particularly as it related to colonial trade. The marvel is—given the herculean task before it—how well it functioned. The showpiece of the customs establishment was the London Custom House. There have been several iterations of the London Custom House since the reign of Queen Elizabeth.5 “The stateliness of the building,” Defoe wrote in 1724, “showed the greatness of the business that is transacted there: the Long Room is like an Exchange every morning, and the crowd of people who appear there, and the business they do, is not to be explained by words, nothing of that kind in Europe is like it.”6 A huge volume of trade passed through the labyrinth of the customs service—in London, the English outports, and ports in Scotland, Ireland, and British America.
Custom House, London. Colorized drawing from Several Prospects of the Most Noted Buildings in and about the City of London. 20
SEA HISTORY 176, AUTUMN 2021