The one condition was that they had to be carried in British vessels. And the United States was no longer British. Certain goods that they wanted to produce within their own realm, they put on a prohibited list. The Americans objected. They felt that this was an attempt to punish the former colonies for revolting. It is perhaps more true, though, that the British Government was simply looking after their own interests and ignoring those of the United States. There was probably little direct hostility in their policy.
@European nations had thought of American trade as a profitable field of business and probably responsible for much of Great Britain's wealth. Because of this, it was fairly easy for the United States to enter into commercial treaties with foreign countries after the war. These treaties, though, were not very successful. With only a few small exceptions, they left the high import duties of the colonial system in place. 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.
