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...

Trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very different...