This volume examines financial economic intermediation in Europe, Canada, and the United States since the seventeenth century.

List of contributors; Preface; Introduction; Part I. Financial Intermediaries in Europe: 1. Markets and institutions in the rise of London as a financial center in the seventeenth century Larry Neal and Steven Quinn; 2. The Paris bourse, 1724-1814: experiments in microstructure Eugene N. White; 3. No exit: notarial bankruptcies and the evolution of financial intermediation in nineteenth century Paris Philip T. Hoffman, Giles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal; Part II. Financial Intermediaries in the Americas: 4. The mortgage market in Upper Canada: window on a pioneer economy Angela Redish; 5. Integration of US capital markets: southern stock markets and the case of New Orleans, 1871-1913 John B. Legler and Richard Sylla; 6. The transition from building and loan to savings and loan, 1890-1940 Kenneth A. Snowden; Part III. Other Forms of Intermediation: 7. Intermediaries in the US market for Technology, 1870-1920 Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Kenneth L. Sokoloff; 8. Beyond Chinatown: overseas Chinese intermediaries on the multiethnic North-American Pacific coast in the age of financial capital Diane Newell; 9. Finance and capital accumulation in a planned economy: the agricultural surplus hypothesis and Soviet economic development, 1928-39 Robert C. Allen; 10. Was adherence to the gold standard a 'good housekeeping seal of approval' during the interwar period? Michael Bordo, Michael Edelstein, and Hugh Rockoff; Afterword: about Lance Davis; Index.