With a view to hold: The emergence of institutional investors on the Amsterdam securities market during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511757419.004

3 - With a view to hold: The emergence of institutional investors on the Amsterdam securities market during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010

Oscar Gelderblom and

Joost Jonker

Edited by

Jeremy Atack and

Larry Neal

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Jeremy Atack: Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Larry Neal: Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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Summary

Institutional investors such as insurance companies and mutual funds are a prominent feature of today's financial systems. To some extent they serve as a hallmark of modernity and as such Richard Sylla has included them in his list of six features of successful financial revolutions inaugurating economic leadership. Sylla did not specify his reasons for doing so, but we may summarize the importance of institutional investors as, on the one hand, providing access to the securities market for savers otherwise unable to enter it, and on the other hand as providing a ready demand for secure investments suited to fund long-term liabilities.

Institutional investors in themselves are an old phenomenon in Europe. Already by the late Middle Ages ecclesiastical institutions derived income from the land and houses which they owned. In several parts of early modern Europe revenue from real estate contributed to the funding of hospitals and orphanages. Investment in financial assets remained limited, however. Only in sophisticated financial markets, i.e., Venice, Genoa, and Amsterdam, did charities have portfolios with a considerable volume of public and private securities. Until the eighteenth century, when the first joint-stock insurance companies were created in London, there were no large insurance firms or pension funds either. Non-permanent syndicates of underwriters remained the norm throughout pre-modern Europe.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Origins and Development of Financial Markets and Institutions
From the Seventeenth Century to the Present
, pp. 71 - 98

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511757419.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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