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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 252 (261 of 305)
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Acknowledgments and Overview of Literature and Sources
some share dealers’ family archives, for instance, in which traces
of these deals and share price information can be found. For the
beginning of the seventeenth century, there is the Thysius Archive,
housed in the beautiful seventeenth-century Bibliotheca Thysiana
in Leiden. This library was founded in 1653 with a bequest from
Johannes Thysius, and all the family documents were moved to it
then. This family is of great interest in the history of share trad-
ing. Thysius’s father, Anthoni, and his grandfather, Hans—who
both still used plain Thijs as their last name—were very active
merchants in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in
Amsterdam and also bought and sold shares. Parts of both men’s
financial accounts have survived. Among Hans Thijs’s documents
is a one of the very rare “VOC shares,” the receipts that inves-
tors were given when they paid the last installment of their sub-
scription. As well as documents belonging to the Thijs family, this
archive also stores papers from families related by marriage, in-
cluding the l’Empereurs. None of the financial records of Antoine
l’Empereur (Johannes Thysius’s great-uncle) have survived, but
the very interesting correspondence with Jacques de Velaer and
his son Jacques Jr. has.
The most important documents in the Thysius Archive date
from around 1610. There are almost no surviving documents be-
longing to dealers in VOC shares that date from subsequent de-
cades. Although Louis Trip’s accounts cover a long period (from
1633 to 1684, the year Trip died), the information about the trade
in VOC shares they contain does not start until the 1660s. Sadly
Trip’s accounts, now in the Amsterdam City Archives, are super-
ficial and so of little interest. If he purchased an option, for in-
stance, he only noted the name of the counterparty and the size
of the option premium he paid or received. The type of option
(put or call), the exercise date, the strike price, and the underlying
value remain guesswork.
The financial accounts kept by Joseph Deutz and his moth-
er Elisabeth Coymans (which can be found in the Deutz family
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