On Sunday 10 May 2026, dr. Maurits den Hollander was awarded the Human Solvency Prize 2024-2026 for his book Court, Credit, and Capital. Amsterdam’s Insolvency Legislation in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge University Press, 2025) [link]. The biennial prize was granted by the Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini, during the opening of its LVII Settimana di Studi in Prato.

This biennial prize, worth 10,000 euros, is awarded “in recognition of the commitment of the scholar who has completed the work of excavation and historical framing by presenting innovative methodological and epistemological approaches based on solid sources and data.”

The secretary of the prize, prof. Paolo Evangelisti, praised the interdisciplinary character of the book: ”The research was deemed worthy of the prize because it addresses precisely the question of insolvency as an economic, legal, and social issue, approaching it from a historical perspective grounded in substantial primary sources that have hitherto been largely unstudied. […] Insolvency, regarded as an involuntary inability to honour a debt, […] becomes, in concrete terms, a condition of poverty […] which within the institutional reality of the Dutch Republic, is not concealed or erased. Instead, it is acknowledged as a collective problem, one that extends well beyond the binary relationship of an individual unpaid debt.”

dr. Maurits den Hollander

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