Copenhagen Convention
The Copenhagen Convention, which came into force on 14 March 1857, abolished the dues and all Danish Straits were made international waterways free to all military and commercial shipping. It had been increasingly evident that the Sound Dues had a negative impact on the port and merchants of Copenhagen, although the dues delivered by then one eighth of the Danish state income; and the world's sea-using nations were becoming less and less tolerant of these tolls and restrictions. In compensation for the abolition, the Danish state received a one-time fee of 33.5 million Danish rigsdalers, paid to Denmark by the other European shipping nations who signed the Convention. Of the total fee, Great Britain paid approximately one third, and Russia another third. A similar convention between Denmark and the United States, signed in Washington the same year, gave American ships free passage in perpetuity for a one-time fee of $393,000.
Read more about this topic: Sound Dues
Famous quotes containing the word convention:
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)