The Amsterdam Exchange, 1609
An engraving of the Beurs van Hendrick de Keyser, the Amsterdam exchange completed in 1611 where VOC shares were traded continuously.
The VOC issued transferable shares in 1602 and the Amsterdam exchange gave them somewhere to change hands at any hour. Within a few years traders were dealing in forwards, options and short sales, and a market in expectations existed alongside the market in goods. The building is the physical form of a genuinely new idea: that a share in a company could itself be the commodity. Read the full story in our article on How the Dutch East India Company Transformed Global Trade Networks.
CC0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
