Organization
DissolvedThe Bank of Amsterdam
Amsterdam · 1609 – 1819
The exchange bank was closed in 1819, after the Napoleonic wars had already emptied its reputation.
The Amsterdam Wisselbank opened in 1609 because the city's trade was drowning in bad coins. Merchants deposited metal and received a credit on the bank's books. Payments between depositors were transfers, not bags of silver of uncertain weight.
It was a city institution, not a private bank and not, at first, a lender. Its value was trust. A bill settled at the Bank of Amsterdam was settled. For a century and a half that trust was part of why Dutch trade worked at a scale the goods alone cannot explain.
The clerks of a stable money
The work was deposit, assay, and the ledger. Cashiers and bookkeepers made a transfer final. The bank allowed Amsterdam to price goods in a unit that did not depend on which mint had cheated this year. The VOC and the great merchant houses kept their accounts there. A merchant's clerk had to know the bank's rules the way a later clerk had to know a clearing house.
Quiet insolvency
During the eighteenth century the city lent the deposits onward, including to the VOC and to the Dutch East India trade, against the bank's own stated rules. The books hid it. When the French occupied Amsterdam and the truth came out, the bank was finished in fact. It was formally closed in 1819. Central banks later copied the idea and added the honesty, or the statute, that this one lost.
The work it organized
- Cashier
- Assayer
- Bookkeeper
- Merchant's clerk
On the timeline
Related
- The Dutch East India CompanyDissolved
- The Bank of EnglandActive