ABSTRACT
The idea for a conference commemorating the third centenary of the Treaty of Utrecht came from the Ambassador of Spain, and it seemed appropriate that historians and legal scholars from Britain and Spain should meet for the occasion to reflect on the War of the Spanish Succession. Actual fighting in North America during the War of the Spanish Succession was on a relatively small scale compared with the conflict in Europe, but the stakes were high, and this was reflected in the terms of the Utrecht settlement. In June 1714 Spain made peace with the Dutch, and in February 1715 with Portugal. This general peace settlement brought to a rather untidy end a string of later seventeenth-century European conflicts and wars. The War of the Spanish Succession and the peace settlement of Utrecht therefore had enormous implications for the whole Atlantic world.
