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

Harvard FAS

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…