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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 245 (254 of 305)
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Acknowledgments and Overview of
Literature and Sources
searching through archives can be very dull work. I spent
many hours at the microfilm viewers in the National Archives and
Amsterdam City Archives in my search for court cases involving
share dealers and notarial instruments about share transactions that
would show precisely how the Amsterdam stock market worked.
A whole day peering at poor images of difficult seventeenth-
century handwriting often produced nothing more than a splitting
headache.
But sometimes apparently minor details that deepened my un-
derstanding of seventeenth-century share trading would suddenly
emerge. The notarial writs dating from the spring and summer of
1672, when traders told the notary Adriaen Lock in no uncertain
terms that they would invoke the edict prohibiting naked short sell-
ing, are an example. Confusión de confusiones told us that dealers
sometimes defaulted on their obligations on the grounds of the edict
prohibiting naked short selling. But Confusión de confusiones is a
literary source. No one knew how much Joseph de la Vega made up.
These writs did more than confirm de la Vega’s story—they also
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