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This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive account of the juridiction consulaire, or Merchant Court, of eighteenth-century Paris. Drawing on extensive archival research, Amalia D. Kessler reconstructs the workings of the court and the commercial law that it applied and uses these to shed new light on questions about the relationship between commerce and modernity that are of deep and abiding interest to lawyers, historians, and social scientists alike.
Kessler shows how the merchants who were associated with the court—and not just elite thinkers and royal reformers—played a key role in reconceptualizing commerce as the credit-fueled private exchange necessary to sustain the social order. Deploying this modern conception of commerce in a variety of contexts, ranging from litigation over negotiable instruments to corporatist battles for status and jurisdiction, these merchants contributed (largely inadvertently and to their ultimate regret) to the demise of corporatism as both conceptual framework and institutional practice. In so doing, they helped bring about the social and political revolution of 1789.
Highly readable and engaging, A Revolution in Commerce provides important new insights into the rise of commercial modernity by demonstrating the remarkable role played by the law in ideological and institutional transformation.
Other publications by this author
- Constructing an Ideal: Chancellor Kent, Justice Story, and the Surprising Revival of Equity in Early Nineteenth-Century America
- The Making and Debunking of Legal Tradition
- Marginalization and Myth: The Corporatist Roots of France's Forgotten Elective Judiciary
- Power, Not Progress
- Marginalization and Myth: The Corporatist Roots of France's Forgotten Elective Judiciary
- Book Review (Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge)
- Deciding Against Conciliation: The Nineteenth-Century Rejection of a European Transplant and the Rise of a Distinctively American Ideal of Adversarial Adjudication
- Approches procédurales et institutionnelles de la justice: La réponse contrastée américaine et française á l’augmentation des procés civils “orientés public”
- Our Inquisitorial Tradition: Equity Procedures, Due Process, and the Search for an Alternative to the Adversarial
- Revisiting the Question of French and American Difference
Author
- Amalia D. Kessler
- Stanford Law School
- akessler@law.stanford.edu
- 650 725.5800