The Dutch plenipotentiaries in Paris signed the peace treaty, by which the United Provinces ceded the Nagapattinam base in India to Great Britain and opened trade in the Dutch East Indies (or, at least, the Moluccas) to British ships. After the end of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch guilder rapidly collapsed as a global trade currency. The Dutch first lost to the English, and then suffered a French invasion. This marked the end of the Dutch Empire, which had lasted a century and a half, and which would give way to the British Empire, which, at the beginning of the 20th century, would give way to the American Empire.
