Treaty of Utrecht

The Treaty of Utrecht, more precisely the Peace of Utrecht, refers to the series of individual peace treaties signed in the Dutch city of Utrecht between April 1713 and February 1715, bringing an end to the War of the Spanish Succession, the decade-long conflict fought over which royal house would inherit the throne of Spain after the death of the childless Charles II. The settlement, concluded among France, Spain, Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Portugal, Savoy and the Holy Roman Empire, allowed Philip V, grandson of France's Louis XIV, to keep the Spanish throne on condition that the crowns of France and Spain would never be united in a single person. Britain emerged as the settlement's principal beneficiary, gaining Gibraltar and Menorca from Spain, securing the Asiento de Negros, the monopoly right to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, and receiving French territorial concessions in North America including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Hudson Bay territory. By checking French ambitions on the European continent and dramatically expanding British overseas power, the Peace of Utrecht is generally regarded as marking the point at which Britain overtook France and the Dutch Republic as Europe's leading maritime and commercial power, and it established the balance-of-power principle that would guide European diplomacy for much of the eighteenth century.