Ivan the Terrible Quotes
We ... are willing that you send unto us your ships and vessels, when and as often as they may have passage with good assurance on our part to see them harmless and if you send one of your Majesty's counsel to treat with us whereby your country's merchants may with all kinds of wares, and where they will make their market in our dominions, they should have their free mart with all kinds of wares to come and go at their pleasure, without any let, damage or impediment.
Ivan the Terrible
Ivan IV, 1530-1584, , Czar of Russia, Letter to King Edward VI of England, February 1554
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The right of English merchants had been attained earlier when Ivan IV, the Terrible, was Czar. However the Czar35266s were so autocratic that one might or might not live up to agreements made by their predecessors. So Queen Elisabeth's diplomats had to repeatedly negotiate free trade agreements with Russian Czars.
This was typical of a free trade agreement of the time. It also provided that Englishmen residing for trade in the Ottoman Empire be free of Ottoman poll and head taxes. The Ottomans had such arrangements with France and Venice—then an independent city. In addition to the trade advantages, the Ottomans were militarily concerned with Spain and the English-Spanish hostility was supported and welcomed by the Ottomans. See Murad’s 1590 letter to Queen Elizabeth.
Jefferson as one of the many firsts for America proposed that we enter into the first free trade agreement and advocated the principle of free trade with all nations—a notion that has not yet come to pass.
Harris opened up trade with Japan for the United States. The problem at the time had nothing to do with the potential economic effects of trade on domestic industry or balance of payments, but for the Japanese was strictly a cultural problem. They were in great fear of what today some call “cultural imperialism”--the adoption of a foreign culture. The Japanese had been so fearful of cultural influence of foreigners that when some Japanese fishermen’s boat had been sunk and they had been rescued by foreign seamen and returned to Japan, they were executed as they had been “contaminated” and could “contaminate” the rest of the population.
Democratic politicians of that era mostly opposed free trade because the experience ever since NAFTA showed that many manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States although many new jobs were created but few of these were good paying jobs that Americans with limited educations could perform as they were able to with manufacturing jobs. And during that period, the requirements for fair trade and foreign workers rights have been very poorly enforced. The Democrats split between those who thought that new trade treaties could be negotiated and enforced, correcting the problems of the past, and those who did not believe that such proper free trade was very likely.
Sealed under duress and later repudiated by the King with Papal assistance. This was one of the most important freedoms that established free trade as a principle—one of the reasons that England became so prosperous." John Lackland
Ivan IV Vasilyevich (25 August 1530 – 28 March 1584), commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, was Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia from 1533 to 1547, and the first Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584. Ivan's reign was characterised by Russia's transformation from a medieval state to an empire, but at an immense cost to its people and long-term economy.
