Nouvelle acquisition : Court, credit, and capital : Amsterdam’s insolvency legislation in the Dutch Golden Age
DEN HOLLANDER Maurits
Court, credit, and capital : Amsterdam’s insolvency legislation in the Dutch Golden Age
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025, XIV-295 p.
Collection Studies in legal history
ISBN 978-1-00-963105-1
HO 504
Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth, the expansion of overseas trade, and a high level of religious tolerance sparked great institutional, socioeconomic and legal changes, a period generally known as ‘the Dutch Golden Age.’ In this book, Maurits den Hollander discusses how insolvency legislation contributed to the rise of a modern commercial order in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. He analyzes the procedure and principles behind Amsterdam’s specialized insolvency court (the Desolate Boedelskamer, 1643) from a theoretical perspective as well as through the eyes of citizens whose businesses failed. The Amsterdam authorities created a regulatory environment which solved insolvency more leniently, and thus economically more efficiently, than in previous times or places. Moving beyond the traditional view of insolvency as a moral failure and the debtor as a criminal, the Amsterdam court recognized that business failure was often beyond the insolvent’s personal control, and helped restore trust and credit among creditors and debtors. (4e de couv.)
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Corinne HÉLIN (6 février 2026). Nouvelle acquisition : Court, credit, and capital : Amsterdam’s insolvency legislation in the Dutch Golden Age. IRHiS-Bibliothèque. Consulté le 12 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15n09
