The research and study that resulted in this book was prompted not by an interest in legal history as such, but by a concern with the state of modern commercial law. Some years ago, in the process of teaching American law school courses in commercial law, I came to the realization that something was amiss with the law of negotiable instruments as embodied in Articles 3 and 4 of the American Uniform Commercial Code, which serves as the basis for much of the law governing payments by cheque. Standard sources on modern law included enough historical background to make it clear, even to one unschooled in legal history, that the transactions involved in the eighteenth-century English cases in which what we now know as negotiable instruments law developed bore little if any resemblance to modern payment and credit transactions. The basic rules and conceptual structure of the law, however, seem to have remained unchanged. I could not help but suspect that many of the problems in current law might be attributable to the profession's failure to give serious consideration to whether the basic concepts of negotiable instruments law remained a sound basis for modern law. That concern was heightened by the realization that we were rapidly moving toward a payment system in which the pieces of paper that form the basis of negotiable instruments law would be replaced by electronic media. Ironically, the concern for the future of commercial law led me to examine its past.