170 FOREIGN TRADE ZONES 
etc., and had its own mail service from 1570 on with Bremen, Ham- 
burg, Cologne, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and other cities. By its trade 
and by the admittance of some thousands of refugees from France, 
Flanders, Holland, and England, which they had left or been expelled 
from for religious reasons, the town of Emden had at the end of the 
sixteenth century about 20,000 inhabitants. This period was the 
city’s most prosperous one. The number of vessels whose home port 
was Emden amounted in the year 1570 to more than 1,000. 
In the meantime many foreign merchants made the town of 
Emden their home and traded successfully from there. This, how- 
ever, caused jealousy in the Hansa towns, which caused the English 
merchants, called the merchant adventurers, to be expelled from 
Emden. With this act, and also owing to disputes between the city 
and its rulers, the Counts of Ost Friesland, the decline of Emden’s 
trade began. 
The endeavors of the Prince of Brandenburg, at the end of the 
sixteenth century, to revive the trade of the port of Emden by 
transferring the navy as well as the Brandenburgisch-Afrikanische 
Kompagnie in 1683 from Pillau to Emden did not show the desired 
results. The efforts of Frederick the Great were also unsuccessful. 
He induced Emden merchants to found three trade companies—the 
Asiatic in 1750, the Bengal in 1753, and the Levantic company in 
1767. The Asiatic company was particularly promising, but none of 
them showed the desired results. They did only a little trade up 
to the Seven Years’ War, suffered under the influence of the su- 
premacy of foreign nations, and collapsed under the effects of the 
Seven Years’ War. 
The year 1806, in the Napoleonic period, cleared nearly the total 
Emden fleet away. Emden lost to English privateers in this year 
3,000,000 gulden in property and all its seagoing vessels, so that if 
had to start again afterward. Later Emden demanded from the 
Prussian State the restitution of its old rights and privileges, but 
before this had been decided upon the Congress of Vienna had 
decided in 1815 that Ostfriesland and Emden should be ceded to the 
English-Hanoverian sovereigns. Under this régime the Emden trade 
declined considerably. This is best shown by the following figures: 
1805: Seagoing vessels of 2,400 tons (of 2,000 kilos burden each)... ..__-- 368 
1864: Seagoing vessels of 4,572 tons (of 2,000 kilos burden each) _______- 75 
After the Hanoverian war (1865-66) Emden came again under the 
sovereignty of Prussia, and thereby, in 1871, of the German Empire- 
During the first years after the Franco-German War the developmen? 
of the Emden trade was satisfactory. Emden had: 
In 1872: Vessels of 7,751 registered tons 
In 1873: Vessels of 8,888 registered tons 
In 1R74: Vessels of 9.380 registered tons