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The Early History of the Law of Bills and Notes: A Study of the Origins of Anglo-American Commercial Law. Cambridge Studies in English Legal History. By James Steven Rogers Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxv + 267 pp. Tables, index, and bibliography. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-44212-5.
Reviewed by Fred V. Carstensen
Markets are socially constructed arenas within which discretionary exchange develops; in Anglo-American history, that social construction takes the form largely of law, developed through a complex evolutionary process. Rogers has succeeded remarkably well in giving life to that process, and ought to command the attention both of those directly interested in what created the institutional context for England's commercial and then industrial revolutions and of anyone interested in appreciating the way in which courts were central to articulating modern (capitalist) property rights, contracts, and contingent claims-that is, created modern (free) markets.
Rogers has a simple objective: to correct the persistent notion that English commercial law finds its origins "in the struggle between the law merchant and the common law" (p. 4), that the law merchant was drawn from continental sources. In ten tightly wrought chapters, Rogers proves that the law merchant developed wholly within the common law and its English courts. Moreover, he offers critical insights of interest to business and economic historians on the evolving interdependency and reciprocity between business practice and the matrix of legal rules and obligations that frame such practice.
To make his case, Rogers first reconstructs not the law, but exchange transactions that gave rise to bills and the ensuing cases. Traditional analysis relied upon an assumption that mercantile practice of the eighteenth century had not changed from the medieval period. The...