How should economic historians use ledgers without allowing the vocabulary of finance to erase the people subjected to it?

A failed voyage didn't make the wider institution any less brutal. Participation and profitability varied across places and periods; a particular...

Financial records can reveal profits and losses but must never be treated as a complete measure of a system built on coerced labor. Profit-and-loss bo...

Ships, investors, insurers and creditors financed voyages and plantations while the people enslaved bore immeasurable human harm. Every insurance poli...

What would have convinced you to back Amsterdam over a rival port?

Dutch strength rested on geography and institutions as well as political circumstances; none of those advantages guaranteed permanent leadership. That...

Public credit and private trading houses depended on credibility, but their fortunes should not be conflated with the welfare of every sailor or worke...

A busy port is impressive; the credit systems behind it are even more interesting. Amsterdam's merchants operated within institutions that reduce...

At what point does a company cease to be mainly a merchant and become a government in financial terms?

Commercial profit and territorial taxation raise different questions about accountability, coercion and the allocation of risk. This is where corporat...

It wasn't a simple switch from local rule to imported bureaucracy, either. Company officers, Indian intermediaries and existing institutions inte...

After the 1765 grant of diwani rights in Bengal, revenue collection became entangled with company commerce and political authority. The 1765 turning p...