[Sidenote: Entrance of Great Britain and Spain]
A trade war had broken out between Great Britain and Spain in 1739,
[Footnote: Commonly called the War of Jenkins's Ear. See above, p. 311]
which speedily became merged with the continental struggle. Great
Britain was bent on maintaining liberal trading privileges in the
Belgian Netherlands and always opposed the incorporation of those
provinces into the rival and powerful monarchy of France, preferring
that they should remain in the hands of some distant and less-feared,
less commercial power, such as Austria. Great Britain, moreover, had
fully recognized the Pragmatic Sanction and now determined that it was
in accordance with her own best interests to supply Maria Theresa with
money and to dispatch armies to the Continent to defend the Netherlands
against France and to protect Hanover against Prussia. On the other
side, the royal family of Spain sympathized with their Bourbon kinsmen
in France and hoped to recover from Austria all the Italian possessions
of which Spain had been deprived by the treaty of Utrecht (1713).
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