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.
