Cities as breeding grounds: legal change in financial law (c. 1620-c. 1750)

This project analyzes the development of rules surrounding financial instruments (bills of exchange,
bills obligatory, promissory notes) in the dynamic interactions between financial actors and municipal
institutions of cities. The project will examine this for three major cities of finance (London,
Amsterdam and Hamburg). Sources used will be bylaws, compilations of local law and comments
thereon, as well as judgments of the municipal courts. In addition, the rules of other banking hubs
will be analyzed in a comparative analysis of their published legislation. The project hypothesizes
that rules could develop from the bottom up and that even with strong connections between banking
centres, rules could remain locally divergent. The empirical study proposed here will nuance
persistent ideas about the high convergence of rules of finance and the restricted role of cities; at the
same time, it will shed light on dynamics of legal change in the development of commercial law. The
project is synergizing the expertise of two ERC projects and one CNRS project