Commercial treaty

A commercial treaty is a formal agreement between states for the purpose of establishing mutual rights and regulating conditions of trade.

[1] Another example, between the close of the Napoleonic Wars of 1815 and the year 1860, the tariff system of United Kingdom was changed from elaborate protection to practically complete free trade.

In that year Pitt concluded a commercial treaty with France, providing for large reductions of duties in both countries.

In 1828 the sliding scale was introduced, under which the duty went up and down as the price of grain went down and up; and it was against this form of the Corn Law that the great agitation led by Cobden and Bright was directed after 1830.

In 1842, however, Sir Robert Peel made the first important concession, by modifying the sliding scale, his opponent, Lord John Russell, having proposed in the previous year a fixed duty of 8 shillings a quarter.

In 1846, Peel surrendered, and proposed in 1846 the admission of grain with only a fixed duty of one shilling a quarter as a registration fee.

After having been maintained till the middle of the century, apparently with irresistible support, they suddenly collapsed under the strain of a season of exceptionally short crops.

Both their continued maintenance and their final sudden abolition are in some respects divergent from the general course of British tariff history.