How, in historical societies, did people finalise transactions? Over the past few decades many economic and social historians have concerned themselves with this question, following the examples set by Douglass North and Craig Muldrew. Surprisingly, they have almost completely disregarded the most straightforward solution that historical societies had to offer, namely by using coins and currencies

In the past decades, numeracy has taken an increasingly important place in the study of human capital formation, as well as in literacy studies and studies on formal education and book production. In order to understand levels of education, scholars have recently tried to develop new ways to measure the level of education, particularly because it has since become apparent that the measures of lite

Our article aims to detect differences in behaviour towards the capital and land market of households of different sizes and levels of income. Participation in markets for real estate, capital, and ships was considerable, not only among middling and elite groups but also among the poor. Large households were most active in markets, incurring significantly greater debt. Poor households with a low s

In the past one of the main challenges to households was that of coping with adversity. War, plague, famine, and flood were a constant threat, and could reduce what little improvements families had made in productivity. Economic growth therefore required a means of absorbing external adversities. To see how well late medieval households coped with adversity, this investigation focuses on the house

Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illumina

In this paper, we analyse the functioning of private capital markets in Holland in the late medieval period. We argue that in the absence of banks and state agencies involved in the supply of credit, entrepreneurs' access to credit was determined by two interrelated factors. The first was the quality of property rights protection and the extent to which properties could be used as collateral. The

In the second half of the fifteenth century the largest towns in the county of Holland created substantial public debts. This article puts forward the hypothesis that towns speculated on sovereign monetary policy in the process. They exposed themselves and their creditors to fluctuations in the exchange rates between silver and gold coins, which initially caused the reduction of their real 'intere

The entail was one of the few instruments that allowed pre-industrial testators to organize long-term strategies with respect to asset management: it allowed them to decide which goods descendants could alienate, and also after how many generations restrictions would be lifted. This article looks into the somewhat neglected topic of entailment in merchant towns, and thus contributes to our underst

Historians often use the concept of financial revolutions to explain the rise of the Dutch Republic, claiming that innovations in government funding allowed for marked progress in the field of public finance. The article focuses on the medieval precursors of the financial revolution, which the States of Holland brought about when they introduced province-wide public debt in the sixteenth century.

Historians of the Dutch Revolt have suggested that the success of the rebellious provinces can be explained by sixteenth-century financial innovations that improved the creditworthiness of the States of Holland. This article claims that this development was triggered by a severe crisis of public finance in these States at the end of the fifteenth century. An analysis of the ensuing reorganization

Public debt soared in the late-medieval Low Countries: towns borrowed considerable sums from creditors and often ended up defaulting on their financial obligations. The author uses a tax inquiry from 1514 to demonstrate that villages also managed to create funded debt, which they secured on the public body of the village. As a result, around 1500 the majority of the villages in Holland owed annuit