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Money, Trade, and Payments in Preindustrial Europe

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Abstract

The means of payment and remittance initially available in preindustrial Europe—coin and bullion—were quite inadequate to the needs of commerce. So commerce developed its own system of payment and remittance based on the transfer of IOUs. We will examine how this system of payment and remittance evolved—first its initial development during the Commercial Revolution, and then its continuing evolution in subsequent centuries. We will conclude by considering how the evolution of this system contributed to the development of commerce and to economic progress in general.

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Correspondence to Meir Kohn .

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Kohn, M. (2020). Money, Trade, and Payments in Preindustrial Europe. In: Battilossi, S., Cassis, Y., Yago, K. (eds) Handbook of the History of Money and Currency. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0596-2_15

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