Business networks: merchants’ (hi)stories and lawyers’ reflections (19th-20th centuries)

The social and economic transformations that occurred in tandem with the upheavals in commercial life had an inevitable effect on commercial law. One of the most controversial and most difficult issues for European commercial lawyers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to grasp was the complex and pluralist nature of economic activity. The legal dynamics of commercial and industrial networks in many cases appear not to have been rigorously defined by jurists, who theorised on the basis of the codified national rules of private law. The interest in the history of trade and the commercial networks of the past represented a moment of reflection on complex relationships and systems of rules, albeit now in the past.