The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century

Balance of Power, Balance of Trade

Antonella Alimento, Koen Stapelbroek, Antonella Alimento, Koen Stapelbroek

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319535739
• eBook ISBN: 9783319535746
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book is the first study that analyses bilateral commercial treaties as instruments of peace and trade comparatively and over time. The work focuses on commercial treaties as an index of the challenges of eighteenth-century European politics, shaping a new understanding of these challenges and of how they were confronted at the time in theory and diplomatic practice. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the time of the Napoleonic wars bilateral commercial treaties were concluded not only at the end of large-scale wars accompanying peace settlements, but also independently with the aim to prevent or contain war through controlling the balance of trade between states. Commercial treaties were also understood by major political writers across Europe as practical manifestations of the wider intellectual problem of devising a system of interstate trade in which the principles of reciprocity and equality were combined to produce sustainable peaceful economic development.

Table of contents

• The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century
• Trade and Treaties: Balancing the Interstate System
• Égalité, réciprocité, souveraineté: The Role of Commercial Treaties in Colbert’s Economic Policy
• The Anglo-Portuguese Methuen Treaty of 1703: Opportunities and Constraints of Economic Development
• The Anglo-French Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 Revisited: The Politics of Rivalry and Alliance
• The Treaty of Asiento between Spain and Great Britain
• Negotiating the Balance of Power: Russian–Spanish Commercial Relations in the Early Eighteenth Century
• Reinventing the Dutch Republic: Franco-Dutch Commercial Treaties from Ryswick to Vienna
• The Conditions of Trade in Wartime: Treaties of Commerce and Maritime Law in the Eighteenth Century
• From Privilege to Equality: Commercial Treaties and the French Solutions to International Competition (1736–1770)
• Securing Asian Trade: Treaty Negotiations between the French and English East India Companies, 1753–1755
• The Rise of a Trading Nation: Prussia and the Convention préliminaire de commerce with France (1753)
• War, Neutrality and Commercial Treaties: The Savoyard State 1660–1789
• Negotiating a Trade Treaty in the Imperial Context: The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century
• French Representations of the 1786 Franco-British Commercial Treaty
• Haiti’s Commercial Treaties: Between Abolition and the Persistence of the Old Regime
• What Trade for a Republican People? French Revolutionary Debates about Commercial Treaties (1792–1799)
• Index