Letras de cambio e correspondência comercial como materiais da História : o acto de cooperar sob olhares distintos

Economic history has been made of prices, wages, weights and measures, but also of individuals.Agents who, in the past, had to establish relations with others to produce and to trade. In the sixteenthcentury, with a global intensification of exchange, these agents aspired to cooperate, sporadically orpermanently, in pursuit of profit to accomplish a common goal. Bills of exchange and commercialcorrespondence are historical materials, which have here been chosen as the basis to study the mechanismsof cooperation among the merchants of the 1500s and the factors that influenced them, like risk, trust orreputation. This article aims to compare them in their form and content, as two faces of the same coin,understanding their complementarities in the different historical dynamics they translate.