THE TREATY OF PARIS, securing the independence of the United States from Britain in September 1783, had been preceded by a British Order in Council of 2 July that year, changing the terms under which Americans had traded as colonial Britons. It was thought by some that Britain's major trading partners were about to become foreign trading rivals. John Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, argued in his influential pamphlet that to allow the Americans any trading advantages for which they no longer qualified could threaten Britain's long-term commercial and maritime supremacy. Conversely, the West India Committee, lobbying Parliament on behalf of the plantation owners, shippers and merchants of the British West Indies, argued as early as April 1783 that permission for ‘American ships as heretofore, freely to bring the produce of the dominions of the United States to the sugar colonies and to take back our produce in return is … essential’.

Despite the debate, in fact, ‘a single Atlantic economy’ soon re-asserted itself, an ‘extensive flow of goods, ideas, skilled migrants and capital’ again contributing to a great degree of economic interdependence between the United States and the United Kingdom.