Allied trade committee in the Netherlands

The British chronology of the war records under 9 May 1918 the creation in the Netherlands of a joint trade committee of the Entente states. In The Hague the trade representatives of Great Britain, the United States, France and Italy, attached to their countries’ legations, then began working together. The documents of American diplomacy, published in the series Foreign Relations of the United States, call it the Inter-Allied Trade Committee at The Hague. They do not give the exact date of its first meeting, but they show that the plan for such committees in the capitals of the neutral states had already been agreed in February, and their tasks settled at the beginning of April.

Committees in the neutral capitals

In mid-February 1918 the American War Trade Board and the British Embassy in Washington agreed to abolish the so-called navicerts, certificates that a cargo bound for a neutral country raised no objections. The trade representatives of both states in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway were henceforth to form informal joint local committees, which would supervise the organisations there that controlled imports. In the Netherlands such an organisation had existed since 1914: the Netherlands Overseas Trust, an association of merchants and shipowners that guaranteed to the Allies that goods it imported would not be resold to Germany. A merchant’s import application was to go, with its number, to the local committee, and from the committee, with comments, to London.

In March the Allied Blockade Committee began work in London. At one of its first two meetings it dealt with the committees in the neutral capitals. On 2 April the Foreign Office sent the British ministers in The Hague, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Christiania, today’s Oslo, instructions to be passed on to their American, French and Italian colleagues. The committees were to be in principle advisory, not executive, and their composition and methods could vary from capital to capital, provided they ensured close co-operation among the four Allies in matters of blockade. Their duties included collecting information on import applications, forwarding to London the guarantees given by importers, checking whether the local organisations kept their undertakings against re-export, checking whether the Allies received the goods due to them, and studying rations, embargoes and conditions of trade. On 8 April the War Trade Board approved these instructions.

The Netherlands without an agreement

The committee in The Hague came into being at a difficult moment. In March the United States and Great Britain had requisitioned Dutch ships lying in their ports, and a few days before 9 May the Netherlands had given way to Germany over the transit of sand and gravel to Belgium. There was no general agreement with the Dutch on rations of goods such as the Allies were just then concluding with Norway and Sweden. Strict export restrictions were kept in place against the Netherlands, relaxed only for goods unimportant to the conduct of the war, and according to the British official historian Ernest Fayle the country was practically cut off from overseas supplies apart from what it could import from its own colonies or from sources not controlled by the Allies. For the time being, therefore, the committee was above all to observe and report, and only later could it become an instrument for controlling imports.

In the autumn its position had to be clarified in Washington. In September the American commercial attaché in The Hague, who was also the War Trade Board’s representative, asked to whom the committee was actually subordinate. The Board replied that the inter-allied trade committees in neutral countries were a kind of blockade sub-committee of the offices of the individual governments. They were not subordinate to the Allied Blockade Committee in London or to the ministers, although their members were to act in the closest accord with the ministers and with the London committee. The committee in The Hague was still at work in the last weeks of the war. In the summer of 1918 it was even proposed that it should sign, on behalf of the four governments, a new agreement with the Netherlands Overseas Trust.