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Article: Indemnities
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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INDEMNITIES
INDEMNITIES,
a diplomatic term for a nation's payments to compensate foreign citizens for injuries to their persons or properties. Such payments were more commonly described late in the twentieth century in terms of settlement of international claims. Indemnities differ from reparations, which have often denoted postwar nation-to-nation payments with punitive (and compensatory) functions.
Significant historical examples of indemnities paid to the United States have come in the context of damage to American merchant shipping. France paid millions of dollars in the 1830s for Napoleonic era spoliations
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seizures of neutral American ships and cargos during the European ...