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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 256 (265 of 305)
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Acknowledgments and Overview of Literature and Sources
the parties simply could not be bothered to travel to The Hague
yet again to fetch it. Whatever the reason, there are a few bags of
documents relating to cases involving a dispute about share trad-
ing. The printed contract for a futures transaction between Willem
Muijlman and Philips de Baccher, reproduced in this book, came
from one such bag. Each party had submitted his half of the con-
tract as proof. In the photograph, the two halves have been placed
one above the other.
After the judges of the Supreme Court of Holland had issued
their judgment, the parties had the right to lodge an appeal with
the Supreme Court of the Republic. This court’s archives are also
nearly complete, and the index is similarly limited to a list of names.
Here I repeated the procedure of looking up the written judgments
in the cases where the names of both parties were known.
I have modernized the sums of money quoted in this book.
In the Republic the guilder was divided into twenty stivers (five-
cent pieces). One stiver was worth sixteen pennings. The Flemish
pound was also frequently used as a monetary unit. One Flemish
pound was equal to six guilders. In this book I have converted
everything into guilders, where each guilder has a hundred cents.
Seventeenth-century sources tell us, for example, that the VOC
bookkeeper received a fee of twelve stivers for a share trans-
fer. Converted into guilders of a hundred cents, this was sixty
cents. Finally I have used the modern names of streets, canals,
and squares that now have names different from those in the
seventeenth century. The house numbers in this book refer to the
present situation.
I did not do my research into the trading of VOC shares in
complete isolation. On the contrary, many people were involved
to a greater or lesser degree. I would like to take this opportunity
to thank a few of them. Leo Noordegraaf and Clé Lesger, my su-
pervisor and co-supervisor at the University of Amsterdam, helped
me set up the research, oversee it, and bring it to a successful
conclusion. Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker, two economic
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