"Noted geographer, Lawrence Herzog, once admonished his discipline's failure to explore the rich potential for research on the spatial patterns of illicit flows and that border scholarship was abhorrently absent on this matter. This dissertation takes up Herzog's challenge to investigate the spatial relationships of border smuggling. Borders are conflicting spaces that are in many ways the epitome of Foucault's idea of the heterotopia; a place that is both real and imaginary, which is capable of juxtaposing numerous incompatible spaces simultaneously. This dissertation employs a landscape approach and uses the Spanish West Florida/Southern Alabama border between 1815 and 1822 as a case study. Along this border, white settlers occupying the southern Alabama side of the boundary engaged in subsistence smuggling and the illegal trafficking of African slaves after the 1807 Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Act was enacted. It is proposed that the smugglers constructed the border landscape to facilitate illicit flows and then abandoned them after the closing of the border in 1822. It is concluded that both the social role of the southern Alabama smuggler and the Spanish West Florida/South Alabama border landscape were dialectical creations of the 1807 Slave Trade Act."--Abstract.
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