Africa and elsewhere, as well as the infamous Opium Wars which forcibly opened
Chinese markets to trade. Meanwhile, the United States expanded overland across North
America, while Russia continued to expand in Asia. European states forced more or less
free trade on their Imperial possessions or on nominally independent nations such as
China, Japan and Siam.
The period also saw a gradual move towards trade liberalisation in Europe. Early
liberalisers were typically smaller countries, such as the Netherlands and Denmark. The
latter country had abolished import prohibitions and adopted low tariffs as early as 1797,
while the Dutch moved to a relatively liberal trade policy in 1819, having seen the Dutch
East India Company being destroyed during the war. The first major economy to
liberalise was Britain, where power was shifting to export-oriented urban interests.
Liberal reforms in the 1820s and 1830s were followed by Robert Peel's historic decision
to abolish the Corn Laws in 1846, and move the United Kingdom to a unilateral policy of
agricultural and industrial free trade, against the objections of landlords and much of his
own Tory party. There followed further moves towards liberalisation in countries such as
Austria-Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway and Denmark
(Bairoch 1989, pp. 20-36). For example, in 1849 Spain abolished its navigation laws and
suppressed prohibitive tariffs, and the Spanish went on to liberalise imports of inputs into
railway construction in the mid-1850s. Average tariffs were falling throughout the 1850s
in the major European powers (Accominotti and Flandreau 2006).
Trade liberalisation was not universal. Russia and Austria-Hungary remained
extremely protectionist throughout almost all the period, only liberalising slightly in the
late 1860s. The Ottoman Empire actually became more protectionist during the period,
not less, although this is explained by the fact that it had previously been limited to a
maximum 3% tariff as a result of various treaties signed with Western European powers.
In 1838, the Turks obtained the right to raise their tariffs to 5%, but at the cost of
abolishing all monopolies and prohibitions. Overall, however, the period between
Waterloo and 1870 was one in which both trade policy and technology were integrating
international commodity markets. The switch from mercantilism to modernity was now
complete.