Merchants and Trading in the Sixteenth Century

Merchants’ agents and the process of bottom-up harmonization between European towns, fourteenth to sixteenth centuries

“…A large number of procurations were issued in Antwerp since several hundreds of merchants frequented the town. 31 Since the aldermen and notaries not only issued the procurations but also wrote a draft of them in their registry books, we know the names of many proxies working for the merchants during Antwerp's golden age. Notarial and urban registry books survive not only from Antwerp, though, but also from a number of other towns.…”

Detecting the function of finance through history.

“…The outward appearance of these earlier financial systems is often so different from what we see in the world today that we have to look for similarities (or differences) in function, not form. Thus we find early modernists exploring the ways in which investors managed and priced risks, 90 organized payments and loans, 91 pooled resources, 92 and worked their way around information asymmetries. 93 Admittedly, there remains a strong desire among these scholars to identify forerunners or early examples of modern institutions, but the actual research they do reveals, for example, how financial systems function in medieval grain milling in southern France, in the silver and copper mines of Central Europe, the iron and coal mines of seventeenth-century Liège, and in trade, transport, and insurance in eighteenth-century England.…”

Sepan quantos esta carta vieren: poderes notariales y comercio transnacional en Sevilla, 1570-1600

“…Este déficit no es exclusivo en España, en donde apenas encontramos alguna excepción (Herrero Jiménez et al, 2015). Recientemente, se ha iniciado un estudio de este tipo basado en la documentación notarial de Amberes, gracias a los esfuerzos los investigadores de Van Hofstraeten (2016) y Puttevils (2015). Los resultados de estas investigaciones, centradas en la formalización de asociaciones comerciales y en el uso de cartas de obligación, ponen de manifiesto la importancia de la notaría pública en la expansión mercantil de Amberes y sirven, además, para apreciar la gran similitud entre las prácticas notariales en los Países Bajos y la Península Ibérica.…”