The Rice Exchange

In 1730 the shogunate authorised «book-entry rice trading» at Dojima in Osaka. No physical rice moved; only the difference was settled, on the books — futures in all but name. Participants needed only to post shikigin, a margin, so the skeleton of modern margin trading was running in the eighteenth century. The judgement that this was the world's first organised futures market is, unusually for this map, backed by scholarship (Mark D. West, Michigan Law Review, 2000). The story that the Chicago Board of Trade modelled itself on Dojima, on the other hand, does not rise above hearsay and no direct influence has been shown. Scholarship and hearsay are kept apart here.