(c) 2025 Columbia University Press. All Rights reserved.
The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 255 (264 of 305)
Powered by Tizra® |
Extracted Text (may have errors)
Acknowledgments and Overview of Literature and Sources
civil law part of this court’s archives has not survived. The papers
were destroyed when the court had to move out of the town hall
in Dam Square when Louis Bonaparte moved in and the town hall
became a palace. As a result, little if anything remains of the many
court cases between share dealers. If the parties concerned did not
agree with the judgment of the aldermen’s court, they could lodge
an appeal with the Supreme Court of Holland. Share traders fre-
quently undertook the journey to The Hague to obtain the opin-
ion of the justices of the Supreme Court of Holland, particularly
during the first half of the seventeenth century, when there was
as yet no clear jurisprudence about every aspect of share trading.
Virtually the whole of the Supreme Court of Holland’s archives
are in the National Archives in The Hague. The cases heard by
this court are indexed only by the names of the litigants. I looked
up in the index all the known names of share dealers—by which
I mean the names of people who were known from other sources
(the VOC’s capital accounts, family archives, the notarial archives)
to have bought and sold shares—and all names sounding Portu-
guese. I then searched for the written judgments of the cases in
which these people were a party. These written judgments con-
tain a record of both parties’ arguments, in which there was also
always a note of the aldermen’s court’s opinions, any reply and
rejoinder, and the judges’ decision. Generally speaking the rul-
ing only tells you which claims were allowed, which claims were
denied, and who had to pay the legal costs. The judges’ reasons
remained secret.
After every case, the Supreme Court of Holland kept the docu-
ments submitted by the parties in the case concerned in a bag.
Normally speaking the parties received their part of the docu-
mentation in the court case after the judges had given their ruling.
Now and again this did not happen, and these bags of documents
can now be found in the civil case document collection in the
Supreme Court of Holland’s archives. We usually do not know
why the document bag was not collected, but it could well be that
255
