First League of Armed Neutrality
The First League of Armed Neutrality was an
Beginnings
Empress
The league members remained otherwise out of the war but threatened joint retaliation for every ship of theirs searched by a belligerent. In 1781, Prussia, Austria and Portugal joined the League; in 1782 the Ottoman Empire joined; and in 1783 the Two Sicilies.[5]
As the Royal Navy outnumbered all their fleets combined, the alliance as a military measure was what Catherine later called it,[citation needed] an "armed nullity". Diplomatically, however, it carried greater weight; France and the United States were quick to proclaim their adherence to the new principle of free neutral commerce. Britain, which did not, still had no wish to antagonise Russia and avoided interfering with the allies' shipping. While both sides of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War tacitly understood it as an attempt to keep the Netherlands out of the League, Britain did not officially regard the alliance as hostile.[6] Throughout the war, most of the naval stores of the Royal Navy continued to come from the Baltic Sea.
Endings
The League ceased to have any practical function after the Treaty of Paris (1783) ended the war.
It was followed in the Napoleonic Wars by the Second League of Armed Neutrality, which was far less successful and ended after the British victory at the Battle of Copenhagen.[7]
See also
References
- ^ Armed Neutralities – International maritime law in the eighteenth century
- ^ Albion and Pope, Sea Lanes in wartime, p. 35
- ^ AS, Genoa, AS. 2293, letter, Ageno to Serenissima, London, 29 September 1778
- ^ "March 11 in Russian history. Armed neutrality. Barsov's grammar". 11 March 2009.
- ^ a b John D. Grainger, The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: A Reassessment (Boydell, 2005), p. 10.
- ISBN 978-0-684-80657-0
- ^ "War with England 1801- 1814". Archived from the original on 26 September 2008. Retrieved 2 November 2008.
Further reading
- De Madariaga, Isabel. Britain, Russia, and the Armed Neutrality of 1780: Sir James Harris's Mission to St. Petersburg During the American Revolution(Yale UP, 1962).
- Kaplan, Herbert H. (1995). Russian Overseas Commerce with Great Britain During the Reign of Catherine II. American Philosophical Society. pp. 127–31. ISBN 9780871692184.
External links
- Russia's declaration of Armed Neutrality Archived 8 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine—from a Russian naval history