This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive account of the juridiction consulaire, or Merchant Court, of eighteenth-century Paris. Carefully reconstructing the workings of the Court and the commercial law that it applied, Amalia D. Kessler situates these within the broader context of the contemporaneous social order. The Merchant Court, she shows, serves as a useful lens through which to examine the origins of modern commercial law and society. The book explores how elite merchants, seeking to navigate a complex set of legal institutions, helped to transform both commercial practice and conceptions of commerce. These transformations in turn contributed to the demise of corporatism and, ultimately, to the social and political revolution of 1789. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kessler offers fresh insights into the power of the law to enable and drive ideological and social transformation.