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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 251 (260 of 305)
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Acknowledgments and Overview of Literature and Sources
Nederlanden, ende van de Staten van Hollandt en West-Vrieslandt
(9 volumes, 1658–1796), collected by Cornelis Cau and others.
The best and most complete general history of the Republic is
Jonathan Israel’s The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and
Fall, 1477–1806 (1995). The First Modern Economy: Success,
Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815
(1997) by Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude is rather hard
going but provides a very extensive overview of the Republic’s
economic history.
The capital accounts of the VOC’s Amsterdam chamber were
the basis for my archival investigation into the trading of VOC
shares. These financial records are part of the Archive of the VOC
in the National Archives in The Hague. The journal in which the
bookkeeper recorded the share transfers in order of receipt for
the 1602–1612 period has survived. The ledgers with the capital
accounts of all shareholders are available for the years after 1628.
The capital accounts are a superb source, but they present a
limited picture of share trading. They only contain information
about the change of ownership of shares, without reporting the
price at which the transaction took place. However, very many
deals were done without a share changing hands, and there are
virtually no traces of all these bargains to be found in the archives.
They were executed privately. While the edict of 1610 specified
that all traders must have their transactions recorded by the
VOC’s bookkeeper, only an occasional dealer complied. A simple
contract was drawn up for most transactions, and it was torn up
after settlement. There were also deals between traders that were
only agreed to verbally. All this meant there was no way I could
make an estimate of the volume of the Amsterdam share market.
The only possible quantitative yardstick was the number of trad-
ers who appeared before the bookkeeper in East India House to
transfer a share.
Nevertheless some data about these private transactions, scat-
tered among many different archives, have survived. There are
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