Prior to the revival of trade in the early middle ages, few institutions underpinned commercial activity; there was no state to enforce contracts, let alone to protect merchants from pirates and brigands. In contrast, modern Western economies possess highly specialized systems of enforcing contracts and protecting merchants, resulting in widespread geographic specialization and impersonal exchange. The story of this evolution has been told elsewhere (e.g., Lopez, 1976; North and Thomas, 1973). Our purpose in this section is to suggest the outlines of an important step in this evolution, namely the early development of commercial law prior to the rise of large-scale third-party enforcement of legal codes by the nation-state.

XREF: Connects to institutional economics and the question of how informal/private ordering sustains markets before the state (cf. Ellickson's work on order without law). Builds on: "Merchants created private law systems without state enforcement"

PAUL R. MILGRO, PAUL R. MILGRO - THE ROLE O…, loc. 22