The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century

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.

Antonella Alimento is an Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of Pisa, Italy. Her main research interests are European eighteenth-century political and economic history, with a special focus on France. Koen Stapelbroek is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His research focuses on political economic thought in eighteenth-century Europe.

1. Trade and Treaties: Balancing the Interstate system; Antonella Alimento & Koen Stapelbroek.- 2. Égalité, réciprocité, souveraineté. The role of commercial treaties in Colbert's economic policy; Moritz Isenmann.- 3. The Anglo-Portuguese Methuen Treaty of 1703: Opportunities and Constraints of Economic Development; José Luís Cardoso.- 4. The Anglo-French Treaty of Utrecht Revisited: The Politics of Alliance and Rivalry; Doohwan Ahn.- 5. The Anglo-Spanish Asiento treaty in the early eighteenth century; Maria Virginia León & Niccolò Guasti.- 6. Negotiating the balance of power: Russian-Spanish commercial relations in the early eighteenth century; Olga Volosyuk.- 7. Reinventing the Dutch Republic: Franco-Dutch commercial treaties from Ryswick to Vienna; Koen Stapelbroek,- 8. The conditions of trade in wartime: treaties of commerce and maritime law in the eighteenth century; Eric Schnakenbourg.- 9. From privilege to equality: commercial treaties and the French solutions for international competition (1705-1790); Antonella Alimento,- 10 Securing Asian Trade:  Treaty Negotiations between the French and English East India Companies, 1753-1755; John Shovlin.- 11. The Rise of a Trading Nation. Prussia and the 'Convention préliminaire de commerce' with France (1753); Marco Cavarzere.- 12. War, Neutrality and Commercial Treaties: The Savoyard State 1660-1789; Christopher Storrs.- 13. Negotiating a trade treaty in the imperial context: The Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth century; Christine Lebeau.- 14. French Representations of the 1786 Franco-British Commercial Treaty; Pascal Dupuy.- 15 Haiti's Commercial Treaties: Between Abolition and the Persistence of the Old Regime; Paul Cheney.- 16. What trade for a republican people? French Revolutionary debates about commercial treaties (1792-1799); Marc Belissa.