For over three centuries the Levant Company – aided by the British government – struggled to maintain and develop its monopoly over trade between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, trade in the eastern Mediterranean was undergoing fundamental changes as a result of two prevailing forces: global economic growth and on-going European military conflicts. These two forces undermined the protectionist policies practised by Britain and France in trading with the region and opened markets and sea lanes to two neutral nations, the United States and the Ottoman Empire. It was not only governments in Washington, London or Paris, but the economic actors on the ground that, depending upon their interests, saw either new opportunities or unwarranted obstacles in these changing dynamics.

At home, the Levant Company was facing pressure in Parliament to relax its regulations, while in the Levant it was facing the growing threat of American commercial competition. On 15 January 1800 the British merchant community in Izmir through the British consul, Francis Werry, wrote to the Directors of the Levant Company in London that

In fact, the consul and the British merchant community in Izmir hoped that such “good treatment” on their part might make the Americans more inclined to send consignments to British houses rather than seeking agents among other European merchants or establishing their own trading houses. Dealing with the merchants from the new Republic, however, went beyond setting a competitive rate of duty.