d the invention of the check. Joint stock companies generated another form of negotiable security, their own shares. Quotation of these in London coffee-houses in the seventeenth century was overtaken by the foundation of the London Stock Exchange. By 1800 similar institutions existed in many other countries. It was also the time of some spectacular disastrous investment projects, one of which was the great English South Sea Bubble. But all the time the world was growing more commercial, more used to the idea of employing money to make money, and was supplying itself with the apparatus of modern capitalism. One effect quickly appeared in the much greater attention paid to commercial questions in diplomatic negotiation from the later seventeenth century and in the fact that countries were prepared to fight over them. The English and Dutch went to war over trade in 1652. This opened a long era during which they, the French and Spanish, fought again and again over quarrels in which questions of trade were important. Governments not only looked after their merchants by going to war to uphold their interests, but also intervened in other ways in the working of the commercial economy. One advantage they could offer were monopoly privileges to a company under a charter; this made the raising of capital easier by offering some security for a return. Such activities closely involved government and therefore the concerns of businessmen shaped both, policy and law. The most impressive structural development in European commerce was the sudden new importance to it of overseas trade from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards. This was part of the shift of economic activity from Mediterranean to northern Europe. By the late seventeenth century. Rising populations and some assurance of adequate transport (water was always cheaper than land carriage) slowly built up...
