| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Stuart Banner. Anglo-American Securities Regulation: Cultural and Political Roots, 1690–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 318. $69.95.

It is tempting to believe that today's financial markets innovate ceaselessly, continually generating new financial instruments like derivatives, options, indexes, swaps, and futures. Such markets surely offer a moving target to governments, who must adapt endlessly in a Sisyphean game of regulary catch-up. But according to Stuart Banner, how Americans think about and regulate such markets is deeply rooted in the past. There is much less new under the sun than we suppose, and the origins of securities market regulation in the United States extend back into the seventeenth-century London stock market. 1

A simple model of legal regulation underlies Banner's thoroughly researched argument. Regulations are produced by popular attitudes, and attitudes are shaped by experience with markets. Such attitudes are embedded in cultural traditions and so do not change quickly. Since misguided beliefs are as easily enshrined in law as accurate ones, Banner sets aside the issue of the truth of collective perceptions. 2

From the beginning, trading in financial securities suffered from its association with speculation. Early modern English law sanctioned forestalling, regrating, and engrossing in the market for food, and so stock market speculation looked suspicious from the start. But speculation, whether in shares or wheat and whether legal or not, simply would not go away. . . .

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