Although Britain's contacts with Japan stretched back to the last years of Elizabeth I's reign, they had made little impact on either government or commercial thinking until the nineteenth century. Memories of the relative poorness of early trade did not incline either merchants or governments to push very hard for its resumption, even though the steady growth of the China trade in the eighteenth century brought Britain ever closer to Japan. Japan was seen as an even more remote and even more difficult market than China, and while for Americans it seemed a logical stepping stone to China, for the British, it was on the road to nowhere.

Two developments were to modify that position. As Britain's relationship with China changed following the end of the East India Company's monopoly over the China trade in 1834 and even more as a consequence of the first Opium War (1839–42), to many it seemed that the ‘opening of Japan’ was a logical next step. There were also those who believed that, as more and more British ships plied East Asian waters, it would be helpful to British merchant and naval shipping to have unhindered access to at least some Japanese ports. The second development was the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, and subsequent attempts to prevent Russian vessels seeking refuge in Japanese ports. A third factor, though perhaps of lesser importance, was not to be left behind as the United States pressed in on Japan.

Two treaties were concluded, in 1854 and 1858. The first, like the American treaty of the same year, was negotiated by a naval officer, Admiral Stirling, and found little favour among British merchants either in China or at home. The second treaty, concluded in haste in the summer of 1858 by the Earl of Elgin, largely derived its language from the second American treaty, and its contents from the British experience in China. British subjects could not be left to the mercy of Japanese laws (though there was to be no question about Japanese being subjected to British laws), the Japanese right to tariff control would be restricted, and trade more generally protected by a most favoured nation clause – this last was the main difference from Harris's treaty, and one which was to have important repercussions in the future.