Free Trade and Frustration

Three treaties were signed between Britain and Austria in the decade of the 1860s, as British businessmen and diplomats tried to spread to gospel of Free Trade amid the protectionist gloom. Britain's patient endeavours to convert other nations to the policy of Free Trade were made in the hopes of advancing economic liberalism and furthering the trend towards free exchanges and international divisions of labour, a development which, it was hoped, would prove conducive to worldwide economic growth