This volume includes ten essays dealing with financial and other forms of economic intermediation in Europe, Canada, and the United States since the seventeenth century. Each relates the development of institutions to economic change and describes their evolution over time, as well as discussing several different forms of intermediation, and deals with significant economic and historical issues INDICE Part I. Financial Intermediaries in Europe: 1. Markets and institutions in the rise of London as a financial center in the seventeenth century Larry Neal and Steven Quinn; 2. The Paris bourse, 1724#1814: experiments in microstructure Eugene N. White; 3. No exit: notarial bankruptcies and the evolution of financial intermediation in nineteenth century Paris Philip T. Hoffman, Giles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal Part II. Financial Intermediaries in the Americas: 4. The mortgage market in Upper Canada: window on a pioneer economy Angela Redish; 5. Integration of U.S. capital markets: southern stock markets and the case of New Orleans, 1871#1913 John Legler and Richard Sylla; 6. The transition from building and loan to savings and loan, 1890#1940 Kenneth A. Snowden; Part III. Other Forms of Intermediation: 7. Intermediaries in the U.S. market for Technology, 1870#1920 Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Kenneth L. Sokoloff; 8. Beyond Chinatown: social networks, economic development, and overseas Chinese intermediaries on the multiethnic North-American Pacific coast in the age of financial capital Diane Newell; 9. Finance and capital accumulation in a planned economy: the agricultural surplus hypothesis and Soviet economic development, 1928#1939 Robert C. Allen; 10. Was adherence to the gold standard a #good housekeeping seal of approval# during the interwar period? Michael Bordo, Michael Edelstein, and Hugh Rockoff