Abstract: While historiography has mostly focused on the causes of smuggling, the factors explaining its persistency have remained largely underexposed. Scholars have usually attributed the inability to stop smuggling to the inefficiency or inadequacy of authorities. Even though this is true to some extent, historians have rarely looked at this from the perspective of smugglers. By applying new perspectives from criminology and the history of crime, this research has shown that the organization and adaptability of smuggling networks was partly responsible for the resilience of smuggling. Combining different sets of sources, most notably sentence books from the Antwerp correctional court and analyses made by the Parisian anti-fraud commission which contained new unique sources such as ego-documents written by smugglers themselves, this research flipped the perspective to study smugglers ‘from below’. This novel approach has shown that smugglers operating in the Belgian departments between 1797 and 1810 developed an elaborate and sophisticated smuggling organization to deal with the mounting repressive measures that increased throughout the period. Enforcement of custom laws was primarily a responsibility of the customs, which saw its number of agents rising during in the years between 1797 and 1810. On occasion, their numbers were supplemented by members of the gendarmerie and, in rare cases, the army. Although it could be explained as a laxity in repression, the decrease in the number of confiscations near the end of the decade might actually indicate a success on behalf of repressive measures as part of the Continental Blockade. The French government reinforced its struggle against smuggling with the establishment of an extra-judicial anti-fraud commission, established in 1808 to retroactively investigate the networks of internationally operating merchants in the Belgian departments and levied heavy fines to ‘hit them where it hurts’. Smugglers adapted to these measures on many different levels and showed ...