The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela reinterprets the meaning of illicit commerce in the early modern Atlantic. More than simply a transactional relationship or a political economy concern of empires, smuggling became a societal ethos for the communities in which it was practiced. For most of the colonial period, subjects of the commercially neglected province of Venezuela depended on contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. These illegal yet scarcely patrolled rendezvous came under scrutiny in the eighteenth century as Bourbon reformers sought to regain control and boost productivity in the province. Subsequent crackdowns on smuggling sparked colonial tensions. Illicit trade created interimperial connections and parallel communities based around provisioning as a moral necessity. It threw the legal status of people of color aboard ships into chaos. Smuggling’s participants normalized subversions of imperial law and proffered mutually agreed-upon limits of acceptable extralegal activity. Venezuelan subjects defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures and occasionally through violent political protests. This commercial discourse between the state and its subjects was a key part of empire making and maintenance in the early modern world.