What Lessons for Economic Development Can We Draw from the Champagne Fairs?

of European trade. From the late 1290s, as the French crown ceased to provide
generalized security and contract enforcement at the fairs, and instead began to tax and
constrain particular groups of merchants to serve its fiscal, military and political ends,
long-distance trade deserted Champagne and moved to centres such as Bruges where
public goods were more impartially provided. The Champagne fairs succeeded
because the public authorities provided generalized institutional services open to all
traders; they declined when the regime switched to particularized institutional
provision which discriminated in favour of (and against) specific groups of merchants.

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