Economy and Society in the Low Countries before 1850

PhD Project
- The first century of share trade: seventeenth-century investor behaviour and institutional development in the Dutch Republic.
  The history of modern day stock markets goes back to the Dutch seventeenth century. The secondary market for shares in the Dutch East India Company (founded 1602) came into being more or less by accident, and the traders used trading techniques that had been in use in the commodities trade. During the seventeenth century, institutional developments transformed the share market in a fairly well-functioning, much more anonymous, liquid market. Through analysis of trading decisions and informa-tion gathering of individual investors, supplemented with government regulations and court rulings, I will assess the factors that determined the development of the Amster-dam share market. At the end of the century, the London market took over the Dutch institutions.