Abstract
Research for this article was supported by a Barra International Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship at the New York Historical Society. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and criticisms. Yuval Millo and Franck Jovanovic have also provided very useful suggestions and information. A previous version of this article was presented in November 2000 at a workshop titled“Financial Cultures” organized at the University of Bielefeld,Germany.

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