An Abstract of the Evidence Lately Taken in the House of Commons, Against the Orders in Council : Being a Summary of the Facts There Proved, Respecting the Present State of the Commerce and Manufactures of the Country.

Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons.

New-York : Wm. Elliot, 1812

iv, 36 p. ; 21 cm. Octavo. First American edition. Later leather backed marbled boards. Lacking spine.  Minimal shelfwear. Spine absent. Soiling. toning and tanning to pages.

The Orders in Council were a series of decrees made by the United Kingdom in the course of the wars with Napoleonic France which instituted its policy of commercial warfare. Formally, an "Order in Council" is an order by the King or Queen at a meeting of the Privy Council, roughly equivalent to an Executive Order in the United States, by which the British government decrees policies. However, especially in American history, the term "Orders in Council" is also used collectively to refer to the group of such decrees in the late-18th and early-19th centuries which restricted neutral trade and enforced a naval blockade of Napoleonic France and its allies. The Orders in Council are important for the role they played in shaping the British war effort against France, but they are also significant for the strained relations and sometimes military conflict they caused between the United Kingdom and neutral countries, whose trade was affected by them.<BR><BR> In Europe, restrictive British trade policy led to the formation of the Second League of Armed Neutrality, and deteriorating relations with other neutral powers, notably Denmark (with whom the British would fight a series of wars) and Russia. In the Atlantic, the Orders in Council were one of the main sources of tension between the United Kingdom and the United States which led to the War of 1812. In total, the collective "Orders in Council" refers to more than a dozen sets of blockade decrees in the years 1783, 1793, 1794, 1798, 1799, 1803-1809, 1811, and 1812.

The British made their greatest concession to the United States in June 1812 just as the United States was declaring war. On 16 June 1812, two days before the United States declaration of war, Lord Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs announced in Parliament that the Order in Council would be suspended. Kress B5950; Shaw and Shoemaker 25559. Goldsmiths 20416. Black 2737.