Regulating the Market: Law and the History of Economic Life from Medieval Merchants to Corporate Law

HIST 183 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

What can thinking about the law tell us about the history of economic life? In this thematic seminar we will investigate the ways in which the law has been an integral part of economic life at local, national and global scales. The law is intimately connected to the expansion of markets from the medieval period to the modern world. It structures negotiations over the extension of credit and to the kinds of trust that allow for the possibility of exchange between economic actors. It is, at the same time, a site of intense conflict that reflects and shapes the history of social, moral and political anxieties over the proper place of the economy in life. Whether in attitudes to debt’s influence on society, the order of imperial commerce or the question of economic speculation, law emerges as a terrain in which contending visions of social order have been negotiated. 

At the same time, methodologically, legal sources (whether court cases, notarized documents, account books or law codes to name some) are one of the great archives for investigating the history of economic life. As a springboard for doing your own research we will probe the ways that historians have read these sources, and the possibilities and absences that emerge from reading legal texts. How, for example, can legal sources tell us about women’s economic lives? What can it tell us about economic success and failure? How does commercial litigation tell us about everyday attitudes to credit and debt? 

Course Notes

This course meets the "Beyond North America" History Concentration requirement.