Commercial treaty 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. 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
Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation from that date became subject to the jurisdiction of Japanese courts. Other countries soon followed suit and the system of separate laws, which governed all the foreigners who were obliged to reside in the treaty ports, was thus abolished. A copy of the treaty can be found in the Foreign Office treaty database. The treaty was signed in London by John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley for Britain and Aoki Shūzō for Japan. It was a necessary pre-condition to the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, as an alliance cannot be formed between unequal contracting parties. One of the important contributors to