They were designed to make commerce legal rather than to encourage it. Still, for a year or more after the war the demand for American products was great enough to satisfy almost everybody. But in 1784 France and @Spain closed their colonial ports. That excluded the shipping of the United States. This proved to be so disastrous for their colonies that the French Government soon was forced to relax its restrictions. The British also made some compromises. And where their orders were not changed, they were usually avoided. In the course of a few years, the West India trade managed to recover.
More surprising to the men of that time was the fact that American foreign trade fell under British commercial control again. It may have been because British merchants were used to American ways of doing things and knew American business conditions. It may have been because other countries found the trade less profitable than they had expected, as certainly was the case with France.
