The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason

This work establishes the existence of a sophisticated and smoothly functioning system of financial markets in the mercantile states of northwestern Europe throughout the 1700s. Based on computer analysis of thousands of price quotes from the financial press of the eighteenth century, the results should force both historians and economists to re-evaluate their understanding of the evolution of financial markets and their importance for the economic developments of that era.