Although after the Peace of 1713 the Anglo-Dutch alliance of 1689 formally remained in place. With the Republic a guarantor of the Protestant Succession in Great Britain, it was obliged to send troops to England during the 1715 and 1745 uprisings of the Jacobite pretenders. Otherwise and in practice, the Republic embarked on a policy of neutrality during most of the 18th century. This placed Dutch shipping in an enviable protected position during the many wars of that century, provided the British Admiralty court was prepared to recognize the Dutch claim of "free ships make free goods"; this enabled the Republic to provide efficient shipping services with its still very large fleet to all European countries. But it eroded the power of the "stapelmarkt", as did the emergence of competitors like London and the German North Sea ports Bremen and Hamburg. This weakening of the province of Holland as a trade hub in its turn contributed to a disarticulation of the Dutch economic sectors trade, industry, banking and insurance, that had been highly integrated in the Golden Age. Each of those sectors embarked on its own growth path in the 18th-century Dutch economy.