“Non potranno essere gettati”. Assicurazione e schiavitù nella dottrina giuridica del XVIII secolo

“Non potranno essere gettati”. Assurance and slavery matters in the eighteenth century law doctrine

Abstract

Trade and maritime traffic mean dealing with the instruments and contractual forms that emerged in the Middle Ages directly by the traders, and that progressively receive a discipline and a legal configuration through the work of the jurists of common law. This is especially evident when one is confronted with contracts that, almost unknown in the ancient world, were created to respond to the new needs, linked to the life of commerce, like the insurance, one of the best examples of this. The jurists, forced to move within a regulatory system based on the Roman law, took a long time to recognise its characteristics of autonomy and typicality. For some centuries they will tend to bring the insurance fictitiously within known contractual schemes, such as buying and selling and mortgage, although they recognized some specificity, and in this sense stands out the work of the Genoese jurist Giuseppe Lorenzo Maria Casaregi.