Lord North's measures in 1779–1780 to free the Irish trade, Pitt's Irish Propositions in 1785, and the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, have long been regarded as marking the start of a new and more liberal commercial policy on the part of the British government: as the harbingers, in fact, however uncertain and qualified, of a free-trade summer which the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars then delayed. The importance of the treaty of 1786, in particular, has been generally stressed. It was not, however, the only commercial treaty with a European Power to be attempted at the time. Between 1785 and 1793 there were seven other such treaties under prolonged and at times serious negotiation—with Portugal, Spain, Russia, Poland, Prussia, The Two Sicilies, and Holland; and others—with Sweden, with Turkey, and with the Austrian Netherlands—were briefly considered within the same short period. Disregarding the negotiations with non-European Powers—with China through Macartney's Mission, and with the United States of America—the decade between the end of the War of American Independence and the outbreak of war with France seems therefore to have witnessed an exceptional degree of commercial activity on the part of the British Government. The existence of most of these negotiations has been noted, and the course of a few followed from the British end. But it may be worth looking from that point of vantage at the group as a whole, to see what, if any, conclusions can be drawn from what one well-placed observer called in 1786 ‘the present Rage for Commercial Treaties'.

This is not the less worth while because, with the exception of France, all these pre-war negotiations failed; and even in the spate of treaties and conventions following the declaration of war in 1793 only one—that with Russia—contained a commercial arrangement on lines debated earlier. Why therefore, we may ask, did the Anglo-French treaty alone succeed, when conditions for an agreement with France, the hereditary enemy, might have seemed less favourable than with almost any other Power? Whose was the blame in other cases, if one is to attach blame? How far did the different negotiations originate with the British Government, and did it envisage a connexion between any of them, or—in view of their number and variety—a comprehensive European system?