(c) 2025 Columbia University Press. All Rights reserved.
The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 2 (11 of 305)
Powered by Tizra® |
Extracted Text (may have errors)
A World-Famous Book
When the speculators talk, they talk shares; when they run an
errand, the shares make them do so; when they stand still, the
shares act like a rein; when they look at something it is shares
that they see; when they think hard, the shares provide the con-
tent of their thoughts; if they eat, the shares are their food; if
they meditate or study, they think of the shares; in their fever
fantasies, they are occupied with shares; and even on the death
bed, their last worries are the shares.2
These quotations come from a remarkable book, Confusión de
confusiones (or, in the English translation, The Confusion of Con-
fusions) published in 1688. The writer is Joseph Penso de la Vega,
a member of a Jewish family with roots in Spain who, although
he was probably born in Amsterdam in 1650, spoke and wrote
in Spanish. De la Vega was involved in trade, as so many men
were in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, but he was not the typi-
cal merchant. In the hours he stole from his sleep, as he put it, he
also wrote novels on a range of subjects, plays in verse form, and
marriage and mourning odes for prominent Jewish residents of
Amsterdam. All his work is remarkable for the unusually flowery
Spanish in which it is written. And in one work, his most famous,
de la Vega chose a subject that makes his book unique: Confusión
de confusiones focuses on the trade in shares in Amsterdam.3
There is no evidence either way to tell us whether Confusión de
confusiones attracted much attention when it was published. In
the twentieth century, however, as the world’s earliest book on the
stock market, it gradually became world famous. A German trans-
lation came out in 1919, followed by a Dutch edition in 1939 and
an abridged version in English in 1957.4 In the 1980s the book
increasingly picked up momentum. As the stock market began to
occupy an ever more prominent place in society—and in times
of boom and crisis regularly dominated the news—interest in the
earliest history of the stock exchange grew. And the only source
of that history was Confusión de confusiones.
2
