Palace of Commerce

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Palace of Commerce invites you to discover the hidden past of Amsterdam’s Royal Palace. It reveals this magnificent buildings’ origin as Amsterdam’s City Hall in the seventeenth century, the ‘Dutch Golden Age’. Contemporaries praised the  building for its beauty. Its size and splendour reflect the city’s prime position in international trade across the globe, as well as the dignity of its urban regents and administrative officials. Those who enter the Royal Palace today can hardly imagine that this building was once a bustling collection of offices and courtrooms. It even included a prison! What originally happened in its now so serene marble halls? Who could be found in its rooms full of paintings and sculpture on a daily basis, when the building’s corridors were still swarming with citizens and businessmen from all corners of the world? Using the art and architecture visible today as our point of departure, the authors shed light on the history of early modern Amsterdam through the eyes of those who ruled and dispensed justice. The regents and administrative officials who frequented the floors of Amsterdam’s global centre of commerce, finance, law, and governance are introduced in a compelling selection of short and richly illustrated stories.

Bob Wessels (1949) is a lawyer. He has over 50 years of business law experience. He acted as independent (international) legal advisor and arbitrator. From 1988-2014, he has been a part-time professor of commercial law and international insolvency law at Universities in Amsterdam and Leiden. He was a deputy justice at the Court of Appeal in The Hague for more than 25 years. For over four decades he is a prolific author. He is the single author of the 10-volume Dutch series ‘Wessels Insolvency Law’, which appeared in a fifth edition between 2018 and 2022. In 2021 he published the book Rembrandt's Money about the legal and financial life of the famous artist-entrepreneur in seventeenth-century Holland. In 2024 he has been providing a bi-weekly podcast on these topics and Amsterdam’s ‘Golden Age’ more in general, at rembrandtsmoney.com.

Maurits den Hollander (1994) is a historian. He is assistant professor of legal history at Tilburg University. In 2021, he obtained his PhD with a dissertation on Amsterdam’s insolvency law in the seventeenth century. The commercial edition of this book, Court, Credit, and Capital, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. He has published in, among others, The Legal History Review and the Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History. He currently leads the research project 'Professionals and the People' (2023-2029), which analyses the impact of urban administrative officials involved in making and implementing law and policy in late medieval and early modern Dutch cities.