Trade Issues

Trade Background, Issues & Agreements

“Our interest will be to throw open the doors of commerce, and to knock off all its shackles, giving perfect freedom to all persons for the vent [sale] of whatever they may choose to bring into our ports, and asking the same in theirs.”
-Thomas Jefferson

Fun Fact

Chambers of Commerce Go International
Posted by Global Reach on May 10, 2011

From the earliest days, international trade has been a major concern for local chambers of commerce. The first U.S. chamber was born in 1768 in New York out of struggles with the Stamp Act. Shortly afterward, in 1773, the Charleston Chamber of Commerce was formed to help land British tea safely on shore. In 1819, the Savannah Chamber’s leading members sent the first steamship across the Atlantic. Other chambers lobbied for a railroad and a canal across Panama, helped lay the first transatlantic telegraph cables, and even named and financed Lindbergh’s plane, The Spirit of Saint Louis, for its world-shrinking trip across the ocean in 1927.

 Commerce – not surprisingly – is in the institutional bones of chambers of commerce.