” The first derivative contracts were written in cuneiform script on clay tablets, which, luckily for financial historians, are extremely durable. These derivatives were contracts for future delivery of goods that were often combined with a loan. Van de Mieroop (2005) reproduces a tablet in which a supplier of wood, whose name was Akshak-shemi, promised to deliver 30 wooden [planks?] to a client, called Damqanum, at a future date. The contract was written in the nineteenth century BC.”
“The emergence of startup companies during the takeoff of the second industrial revolution could have spurred a new framework for the financial market to provide them with cash. Conversely, family capital inherited from existing firms and assets accumulated at merchant banks by interests consolidated during the nineteenth century contributed largely to the ‘economic revolution’.”
“The title of a 1697 pamphlet about London’s stock-jobbers referred to the ‘extravagant humour of stock-jobbing,’ using the imagery of contemporary medical knowledge to suggest
that stock-jobbers represented a potentially unbalancing element within the English body-politic.”
