With their legal personhood, permanent capital with transferable shares, separation of ownership and management, and limited liability for both shareholders and managers, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and subsequently the English East India Company (EIC) are generally considered a major...

The dynamics of European market development before the Industrial Revolution are demonstrated to good effect by the Low Countries, which underwent several distinct phases of economic growth between 1000 and 1800. This case study presents a highly illuminating contrast between a considerable...

Building on recent work by Collins et al. this paper aims to explain the failure of corporate and public initiatives to alleviate poverty before the twentieth century by unravelling the financial rationale behind the various combinations of private efforts, family and neighbourhood help,...

Applying insights from recent literature on the financial behaviour of poor households in developing countries to the nineteenth-century Netherlands, we show that micro finance type institutions failed to alleviate the country¡¯s persistent poverty for the same reasons found today. The...

The debate over the institutions that link economic growth to public finance tends to disregard the need for savings to finance growing public debt. In seventeenth-century Holland the structure, size, and issuing rates of the debt were determined by investors' preferences, wealth accumulation,...

Cities of Commerce develops a model of institutional change in European commerce based on urban rivalry. Cities continuously competed with each other by adapting commercial, legal, and financial institutions to the evolving needs of merchants. Oscar Gelderblom traces the successive rise of...