Alle radici dei “contratti differenziali”: l’evoluzione degli strumenti giuridici in ambito finanziario a partire dal caso francese (secc. XVIII-XIX)

The early commerce of stocks and securities saw the progressive growing of various types of buying and selling contracts. Many of them were created or adapted by the market itself, as forward contracts and naked short selling, that were used by speculators to make money without a real transfer of shares or securities and only by differences in price. This kind of contracts were in use in Amsterdam since the beginning of the XVII th century and from there began to spread across the Europe, along with the creation of stock-exchanges. The text try to explain their growing in the security market of Paris in the XVIII th century, the French legal reaction and how that one influenced the understanding of similar contracts by the italian legal scholars in the late XIX th century.