This database was compiled as part the EURYI/VIDI research project ‘The Evolution of Financial Markets in Pre-Industrial Europe (1500-1800): A Comparative Analysis’, led by Oscar (O.C.) Gelderblom and Joost (J.P.B.) Jonker.
The research project explores why sophisticated capital markets emerge in some economies, but not in others. To explain the divergent development of capital markets in pre-industrial Europe, this project will compare the financial instruments and intermediaries that entrepreneurs in various parts of Europe used to fund their businesses, how often they used them, and what price they paid for them. Then the project will consider five factors that might explain the development of more or less sophisticated financial markets: economic opportunities, migration, legal rules, public finance, and inequality.
To demonstrate the benefits of the comparative approach, and measure the relative importance of the different explanations, the project will offer a historical analysis of the financial institutions that developed in the Low Countries – the present day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg – between 1500 and 1800. Despite the limited size of this area, it offers a unique opportunity to explore long-term changes of financial institutions under very different political and economic circumstances. Indeed, the history of the Low Countries yields a kind of natural experiment within an area that in course of the fifteenth and sixteenth century displayed an ever greater legal, political, and economic unity, until a civil war (the Dutch Revolt) set the northern and southern part of the Netherlands on very different paths of economic and political development.
For this dataset we collected, for eight benchmark years (1500, 1540, 1580, 1620, 1660, 1700, 1740 and 1780) both the private annuities and schepenkennissen recorded by the aldermen of six cities: Ghent, Antwerp, Den Bosch, Utrecht, Leyden, and Amsterdam. We only collected private annuities which were functionally equivalent to the schepenkennissen or IOUs in allowing borrowers and lenders to set terms and conditions without any prior constraint.
There is a total number of 140.608 recorded transactions with 1.123 alderman/notarissen.
For more detailed information on the research project, sources, codebook, etc., please check Description of the Notaries and Aldermen Database.docx
