FOREIGN TRADE ZONES 3 manufactures therefrom may be reloaded and shipped to foreign destinations, all without the imposition of the customs formalities and duties applicable to similar goods entering customs territory. To understand fully the functions of the free port it is necessary to distinguish between ports which are free in their entirety, at least in certain particulars, and ports in which the freedom of shipping and international trade is restricted to assigned zones. It is also necessary to bear in mind that there are great transshipment and consignment ports in countries having low or limited tariff schedules which do not interfere to any extent with the development of business of the nature which the free port is designed to foster. The free port, as the term is used in this report, has reference only to segregated zones, including the limited application of the principle found in the free warehouses maintained in some ports, this being a simplified form of the free port. Another application of the principle is found in the victualing warehouses which exist in certain European towns where vessels may put in to obtain provisions on which no duty has been paid. Where the customs authorities exercise control, however, as in the case of the bonded warehouses or bonded manu- facturing warehouses, the purpose is no longer accomplished, and the word “free” does not properly apply. DEVELOPMENT OF THE FREE PORT PRINCIPLE The free port is a development of comparatively recent times con- ined for the most part to territories other than those having free trade, either wholly or to a predominating extent. Until the last century the foreign commerce of the great nations of the world con- sisted in the main of the distribution of goods other than their own. The chief maritime nations were those which brought to their own shores the products of other countries or of their own provinces and redistributed these products, either in original or modified forms, to other nations. A nation was not great in commerce so much because of her own internal industry or the exports of products of her own production as because of her position in international trade. In the fourteenth century Bruges, which was located in the region which is now Belgium, was the greatest market of northern Europe. The Venetians brought to Bruges their manufactures of glass, fine tex- tiles, weapons, paper, etc., and the products of their oriental trade; the great league of merchants centering in the cities of the south- western corner of the Baltic which grew up in the fourteenth century, known as the Hanseatic League, made Bruges the terminus of many of their western voyages; and many other countries, both Christian and Mohammedan, fed the market with their commodities. In the fifteenth century the place of Bruges as the great market of northern Europe was taken bv Antwerp, a Spanish possession in what is now