1. Interview with Torgbui Baku and twenty other chiefs, elders and queen mothers, held at Denu, 5 August 2000.
2. The interviews were interpreted and transcribed by Mr Cephas Afetsi.
3. The Keta District Civil Record Books and Criminal Record Books are held in the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) in Accra (hereafter PRAAD/A). I also used other local Keta District files, the files about smuggling, at PRAAD/A, as well as in the branch in Ho, eastern Ghana (hereafter: PRAAD/H). The Gold Coast Original Correspondence (CO96) series in the UK National Archive in Kew, London (hereafter UKNA), also contains a lot of relevant detail, particularly for the earlier period.
4. This was of course not unique to smuggling in colonial Africa. See, for example, Grahn's exploration of the Spanish authorities' inability to curb smuggling in eighteenth-century New Granada, or Ashworth's exploration of the workings and limitations of customs and excise in England. Lance Grahn,The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada(Boulder, CO, 1997), pp. 15–64; William J. Ashworth,Customs and Excise: Trade, Production and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 165–83.