ABSTRACT
According to the historian Nils Ørvik, the ‘essence of the neutral problem can in fact be compressed into one gross oversimplification’, namely the complicated matter of trade. 1 A major reason why European states adopted neutrality in the nineteenth century was the commercial benefits it provided in wartime. The Declaration of Paris in 1856 was one of the first international laws that recognised the immunity of goods aboard neutral ships. 2 It also legalised the principle of contraband, and, thereby, restricted neutral trade only in terms of ‘articles destined for a belligerent state which are useful for the conduct of war and which an opposing belligerent has declared shall not be carried to that belligerent’. 3 But a serious deficiency of the Paris Declaration was that it did not specify items that fell under the label ‘contraband’. 4 During deliberations in London between 1908 and 1909, representatives of the major powers (Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia) attempted to rectify this shortcoming by creating a list of goods defined as ‘absolute’ and ‘conditional’ contraband. 5 Although most of the nations present in London signed the agreement, many of their respective governments subsequently did not ratify it, which had inevitable consequences for the sanctity of neutral commerce during the Great War. 6
