Commercial treaty Commercial treaty A commercial treaty is a formal agreement between states for the purpose of establishing mutual rights and regulating conditions of trade. It is a bilateral act whereby definite arrangements are entered into by each contracting party towards the other—not mere concessions. For example, the Methuen Treaty was a commercial treaty between Portugal and England. Another example, between the close of the Napoleonic wars of 1815 and the year 1860, the tariff system of Great Britain was changed from elaborate protection to practically complete free trade. An attempt had indeed been made in 1786 to modify the rigidly protective
Treaty of Whampoa Treaty of Whampoa The Treaty of Whampoa () was a commercial treaty between France and China, which was signed by Théodore de Lagrené and Qiying on October 24, 1844 aboard the warship "L’Archimède". It is considered an unequal treaty by many sources. Based on the terms of the accord, China granted the same privileges to the Kingdom of France as it had done to Britain in the Treaty of Nanking and subsequent treaties. These privileges included the opening of five harbors to French merchants, extraterritorial privileges French citizens in China, a fixed tariff on Sino-French trade and the right of