Descripción
7 notebooks: numbered 2 - 6, 8 & 'A'. Each volume with index except for No. 6: "Alterations on the Tariff Duties on Exports 1820 to 1824". 10-1 4" x 9", except Vol. 2: 9-1 2" x 7-1 2". When Jean Bernadotte was crowned Charles XIV King of Sweden and Norway in 1818, he began to introduce the ecomomic policies that would revitalize the country and move it towards industrialization. His government encouraged free enterprise and industrialized manufacturing, which soon helped to establish Sweden as a more powerful trade partner for major European countries and especially Great Britain. Sweden already had a complicated customs system in place that charged major levies on foreign trade. Charles XIV improved and promoted the tariff system, soon paid off all foreign debt, increased the national revenue, and greatly enriched his government. His next step was to develop a policy of peace abroad and beneficial diplomatic relations with Swedenâ s trade partners. Benjamin Bloomfield, 1st Baron Bloomfield, was Englandâ s answer to blunt the edge of Swedenâ s aggressive customs policies. Named by his friend and confidant the Prince Regent as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Bernadotte, Lord Bloomfield arrived in Stockholm in 1823. He apparently used these notebooks as a reference, as he and his legation took steps to influence the customs process to Englandâ s advantage. As he took up his official duties in Stockholm, Lord Bloomfield encountered a wilderness of commercial negotiations that interrupted and particularly discouraged the trade of British manufactured goods for Swedenâ s valued bar iron, Baltic timber and oats. Fortunately, King Charles XIV appreciated the manners and conversation of a foreign minister who had spent the best part of his life at the center of a brilliant court. In no time, Lord Bloomfieldâ s work seemed to consist chiefly of feasting, dancing and drinking champagne. He and Bernadotte became friends, cementing the harmony of the two nations, and as Lord Bloomfield hinted at the justice of rescinding the harder regulations, he began to establish a freer and more favorable importation system. The delighted King George IV noted that Lord Bloomfieldâ s patriotism was unbounded. George Canning, the brilliant politician and orator, was Britainâ s head of the Foreign Office at the time of Lord Bloomfieldâ s mission to Sweden. Lord Bloomfieldâ s dispatches of which these notebooks were a part, were directed and addressed to him and his officers, and it was his liberal polices that Lord Bloomfield carried out. Most volumes contain columns of individual commodities and their tariffs printed in Swedish, with the same commodities, amounts traded in import and export, and their costs handwritten in English translation on opposite pages. The ordinances and proclamations are handwritten in English. There are no official court seals, but spaces are left for them. Although at this time the Swedish government was working toward a declaration against slave trafficking, the slave trade was still flourishing in the Caribbean. King George, Lord Canning and Lord Bloomfield were determined to create an alliance between their countries for the suppression of the slave trade.These lists do not mention slaves as a commodity, but laid in to the volume lettered A is a proclamation regulating slave trading in Saint-Barthelemy, a Swedish-owned island with a thriving duty-free port. The listed commodities vary from volume to volume and reveal the vast quantity of goods in almost all cases traveling between countries by ship: a single page from one notebook includes tariffs for arrack, brandy, coffee, glass, rum, wood (spars, staves), woven goods, ribbons of silk and velvet, cinnamon, cardamom, currants, fennel seeds, almonds, vanilla, liquorice, ginger, cloves, pepper, porcelain, tea, oranges, agates, alabaster, feathers, tiles and bricks, furs and hides, cannon, and gun stocks. Contents of Notebooks by Vo. N° de ref. del artículo 37520
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