Insurance
- LAST REVIEWED: 22 August 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 22 August 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0227
- LAST REVIEWED: 22 August 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 22 August 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0227
Introduction
The insurance of oceangoing vessels and their cargoes, known as marine or maritime insurance, underpinned the commerce of the Atlantic world. Emerging in recognizably modern form during the Italian Renaissance, marine insurance was adopted by large numbers of Atlantic merchants over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These merchants paid, or bound themselves to pay, premiums to their insurers to insure specific vessels or cargoes. If the insured property was lost, damaged, or destroyed in transit, the merchants’ insurers reimbursed them for their losses. As the volume and value of Atlantic commerce increased, marine insurance became big business, attracting more capital, more customers, and more political attention. At the same time, other forms of insurance took root. Evolving ideas about risk, society, and commercial enterprise accompanied experimentation with a wide variety of risk-reduction initiatives. Insurance projects, broadly defined, proliferated in the financializing port cities at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and within empires competing for control of the Americas. The state was deeply involved in some insurance projects: modernizing European states chartered large corporations to sell insurance against the risk of fire, for example, and launched “tontines” that offered a form of annuity tied to an individual’s life. Other forms of insurance were essentially gambling: individuals could, for periods of time, “insure” against the occurrence of specific, unpredictable events. Still other forms of insurance, such as mutual aid societies, allowed people of humbler backgrounds to ameliorate one another’s risks. While in some respects these projects had little in common, the Atlantic insurance business itself brought wildly diverse stakeholders into conversation with one another. Atlantic merchants communicated with speculators, who read the works of political economists, who made their opinions known to governments, which increasingly made their marks on the lives of working people. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new forms of insurance (life, accident, property) grew to prominence in what had become a formidable global industry. The legacy of Atlantic insurance includes, but is not limited to, these modern forms of business. Contemporary conversations about risk, security, the government/business nexus, and the value of human life also owe a great deal to the insurers and insurance buyers of the Atlantic age.
General Overviews
Business and economic historians have the longest track record of writing about insurance. They have profiled individual corporations and explained the rise of the insurance sectors of various cities, regions, and states. Economic historians, drawing on the enormous archives retained by large, careful insurance corporations, have shown how insurance became a prosperous national or global capitalist enterprise, and they have debated the efficacy of various institutional forms within the insurance industry. General overviews of insurance history produced by these two groups tend to emphasize the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than the age of Atlantic empire and to focus extensively on the corporate form. For broad overviews of the business of insurance around the world over the past two centuries, see Borscheid and Haueter 2012 or Pearson 2010. These works provide only a little content of interest to scholars of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or early nineteenth centuries, but they demonstrate that a movement toward an overall framework for the study of insurance is underway. Merkin 2021 provides a sweeping history of marine insurance, with an emphasis on insurance law, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Pearson and Yoneyama 2016 offers insight into the corporate forms that have emerged within the insurance industry, particularly over the past two centuries. Those interested in the variety of institutional forms that have emerged within the marine insurance business should begin with Leonard 2016 and Hellwege and Rossi 2021; those interested in insurance and society should begin with Clark 2010. Cockerell and Green 1976 as well as Thomson 2020 focus on the history of insurance in England and Britain. While dated, Trenerry 1926 is valuable for its plain language and its capacious definition of insurance, which allows for coverage of such important (though now obscure) maritime practices as bottomry and respondentia.
Borscheid, Peter, and Niels Viggo Haueter, eds. World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
With chapters on twenty separate countries, this compilation envisions a “British system” of insurance spreading around the world through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continuing to evolve up to the present day.
Clark, Geoffrey. The Appeal of Insurance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Focusing on a variety of insurance practices that rose to prominence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on life insurance, this collection as a whole offers a broad set of ideas about the evolving relationships among insurance, the public, and the state.
Cockerell, Hugh Anthony Lewis, and Edwin Green. The British Insurance Business, 1547–1970. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976.
A brief overview of the evolution of British life, fire, marine, and accident insurance, with a guide to extant business records.
Hellwege, Phillip, and Guido Rossi, eds. Maritime Risk Management: Essays on the History of Marine Insurance, General Average and Sea Loan. Comparative Studies in the History of Insurance Law 11. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2021.
A collection of new essays addressing diverse aspects of the business of maritime insurance in ancient Rome, medieval Castile, early modern Genoa, Scotland, France, Livorno, Spain, Antwerp, and the Netherlands.
Leonard, Adrian, ed. Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300–1850. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Separate chapters narrate the history of marine insurance, organized around important business locations such as Amsterdam and London; a general overview is also provided.
Merkin, Rob. Marine Insurance: A Legal History. Vols. 1 and 2. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2021.
Volume 1 surveys marine insurance from the eighteenth century through the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The history of international conflict is central to the narrative; Merkin also demonstrates the emergence of certain modern legal principles.
Pearson, Robin, ed. The Development of International Insurance. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.
While most of the nine essays in this compilation address the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lengthy introduction to this volume proposes a broad framework for the study of insurance as an international practice.
Pearson, Robin, and Takau Yoneyama, eds. Corporate Forms and Organizational Choice in International Insurance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
An edited volume with chapters addressing various corporate forms employed in the insurance business around the world, primarily during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Thomson, Jeffrey. “A History of English Marine Insurance Law: Merchants, Their Practices, the Courts and the Law.” In Research Handbook on International Commercial Contracts. Edited by Andrew Hutchison and Franzisca Myburgh, 196–222. Cheltenham, NY: Edward Elgar, 2020.
Surveys the history of the rules (laws as well as customs, practices, and understandings) of insurance as it was practiced in England from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.
Trenerry, C. F. The Origin and Early History of Insurance, Including the Contract of Bottomry. London: P. S. King, 1926.
Traces the history of insurance (primarily life and marine) from the ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans through the beginning of the Early Modern period in Europe (c. 1500s). Places a wide variety of insurance-like practices (e.g., bottomry) within the same framework; few recent works have made similar attempts.
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- Abolition of Slavery
- Abolitionism and Africa
- Africa and the Atlantic World
- African American Religions
- African Religion and Culture
- African Retailers and Small Artisans in the Atlantic World
- Age of Atlantic Revolutions, The
- Alexander von Humboldt and Transatlantic Studies
- America, Pre-Contact
- American Revolution, The
- Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery
- Argentina
- Army, British
- Arsenals
- Art and Artists
- Asia and the Americas and the Iberian Empires
- Atlantic Biographies
- Atlantic Creoles
- Atlantic History and Hemispheric History
- Atlantic Migration
- Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries
- Atlantic Trade and the British Economy
- Atlantic Trade and the European Economy
- Bacon's Rebellion
- Baltic Sea
- Baptists
- Barbados in the Atlantic World
- Barbary States
- Benguela
- Berbice in the Atlantic World
- Black Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Bolívar, Simón
- Borderlands
- Bourbon Reforms in the Spanish Atlantic, The
- Brazil
- Brazil and Africa
- Brazilian Independence
- Britain and Empire, 1685-1730
- British Atlantic Architectures
- British Atlantic World
- Buenos Aires in the Atlantic World
- Cabato, Giovanni (John Cabot)
- Cannibalism
- Capitalism
- Captain John Smith
- Captivity
- Captivity in Africa
- Captivity in North America
- Caribbean, The
- Cartier, Jacques
- Castas
- Catholicism
- Cattle in the Atlantic World
- Central American Independence
- Central Europe and the Atlantic World
- Charleston
- Chartered Companies, British and Dutch
- Cherokee
- Childhood
- Chinese Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World
- Chocolate
- Church and Slavery
- Cities and Urbanization in Portuguese America
- Citizenship in the Atlantic World
- Class and Social Structure
- Climate
- Clothing
- Coastal/Coastwide Trade
- Cod in the Atlantic World
- Coffee
- Colonial Governance in Spanish America
- Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism
- Colonization, Ideologies of
- Colonization of English America
- Communications in the Atlantic World
- Comparative Indigenous History of the Americas
- Confraternities
- Constitutions
- Continental America
- Cook, Captain James
- Cortes of Cádiz
- Cosmopolitanism
- Cotton
- Credit and Debt
- Creek Indians in the Atlantic World, The
- Creolization
- Criminal Transportation in the Atlantic World
- Crowds in the Atlantic World
- Cuba
- Currency
- Death in the Atlantic World
- Demography of the Atlantic World
- Diaspora, Jewish
- Diaspora, The Acadian
- Disease in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas
- Dreams and Dreaming
- Dutch Atlantic World
- Dutch Brazil
- Dutch Caribbean and Guianas, The
- Early Modern Amazonia
- Early Modern France
- Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World
- Economy of British America, The
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Elites
- Emancipation
- Emotions
- Empire and State Formation
- Enlightenment, The
- Environment and the Natural World
- Ethnicity
- Europe and Africa
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Northern
- Europe and the Atlantic World, Western
- European Enslavement of Indigenous People in the Americas
- European, Javanese and African and Indentured Servitude in...
- Evangelicalism and Conversion
- Female Slave Owners
- Feminism
- First Contact and Early Colonization of Brazil
- Fiscality
- Fiscal-Military State
- Food
- Forts, Fortresses, and Fortifications
- Founding Myths of the Americas
- France and Empire
- France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean
- France and the British Isles from 1640 to 1789
- Free People of Color
- Free Ports in the Atlantic World
- French Army and the Atlantic World, The
- French Atlantic World
- French Emancipation
- French Revolution, The
- Gardens
- Gender in Iberian America
- Gender in North America
- Gender in the Atlantic World
- Gender in the Caribbean
- George Montagu Dunk, Second Earl of Halifax
- Georgia in the Atlantic World
- German Influences in America
- Germans in the Atlantic World
- Giovanni da Verrazzano, Explorer
- Glasgow
- Glorious Revolution
- Godparents and Godparenting
- Great Awakening
- Green Atlantic: the Irish in the Atlantic World
- Guianas, The
- Haitian Revolution, The
- Hanoverian Britain
- Havana in the Atlantic World
- Hinterlands of the Atlantic World
- Histories and Historiographies of the Atlantic World
- Honor
- Huguenots
- Hunger and Food Shortages
- Iberian Atlantic World, 1600-1800
- Iberian Empires, 1600-1800
- Iberian Inquisitions
- Idea of Atlantic History, The
- Impact of the French Revolution on the Caribbean, The
- Indentured Servitude
- Indentured Servitude in the Atlantic World, Indian
- India, The Atlantic Ocean and
- Indigenous Knowledge
- Indigo in the Atlantic World
- Insurance
- Internal Slave Migrations in the Americas
- Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World
- Ireland and the Atlantic World
- Iroquois (Haudenosaunee)
- Islam and the Atlantic World
- Itinerant Traders, Peddlers, and Hawkers
- Jamaica in the Atlantic World
- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jesuits
- Jews and Blacks
- Labor Systems
- Land and Propert in the Atlantic World
- Language, State, and Empire
- Languages, Caribbean Creole
- Latin American Independence
- Law and Slavery
- Legal Culture
- Leisure in the British Atlantic World
- Letters and Letter Writing
- Lima
- Literature and Culture
- Literature of the British Caribbean
- Literature, Slavery and Colonization
- Liverpool in The Atlantic World 1500-1833
- Louverture, Toussaint
- Loyalism
- Lutherans
- Mahogany
- Manumission
- Maps in the Atlantic World
- Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, The
- Maritime Literature
- Markets in the Atlantic World
- Maroons and Marronage
- Marriage and Family in the Atlantic World
- Maryland
- Material Culture in the Atlantic World
- Material Culture of Slavery in the British Atlantic
- Medicine in the Atlantic World
- Mennonites
- Mental Disorder in the Atlantic World
- Mercantilism
- Merchants in the Atlantic World
- Merchants' Networks
- Mestizos
- Mexico
- Migrations and Diasporas
- Minas Gerais
- Miners
- Mining, Gold, and Silver
- Missionaries
- Missionaries, Native American
- Money and Banking in the Atlantic Economy
- Monroe, James
- Moravians
- Morris, Gouverneur
- Music and Music Making
- Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World
- Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History
- Nation, Nationhood, and Nationalism
- Native American Histories in North America
- Native American Networks
- Native American Religions
- Native Americans and Africans
- Native Americans and the American Revolution
- Native Americans and the Atlantic World
- Native Americans in Cities
- Native Americans in Europe
- Native North American Women
- Native Peoples of Brazil
- Natural History
- Networks for Migrations and Mobility
- Networks of Science and Scientists
- New England in the Atlantic World
- New France and Louisiana
- New York City
- News
- Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
- Nineteenth-Century France
- Nobility and Gentry in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- North Africa and the Atlantic World
- Northern New Spain
- Novel in the Age of Revolution, The
- Oceanic History
- Oceans
- Pacific, The
- Paine, Thomas
- Papacy and the Atlantic World
- Paris
- People of African Descent in Early Modern Europe
- Peru
- Pets and Domesticated Animals in the Atlantic World
- Philadelphia
- Philanthropy
- Phillis Wheatley
- Piracy
- Plantations in the Atlantic World
- Plants
- Poetry in the British Atlantic
- Political Participation in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic...
- Polygamy and Bigamy
- Port Cities, British
- Port Cities, British American
- Port Cities, French
- Port Cities, French American
- Port Cities, Iberian
- Ports, African
- Portugal and Brazile in the Age of Revolutions
- Portugal, Early Modern
- Portuguese Atlantic World
- Potosi
- Poverty in the Early Modern English Atlantic
- Pre-Columbian Transatlantic Voyages
- Pregnancy and Reproduction
- Print Culture in the British Atlantic
- Proprietary Colonies
- Protestantism
- Puritanism
- Quakers
- Quebec and the Atlantic World, 1760–1867
- Quilombos
- Race and Racism
- Race, The Idea of
- Reconstruction, Democracy, and United States Imperialism
- Red Atlantic
- Refugees, Saint-Domingue
- Religion
- Religion and Colonization
- Religion in the British Civil Wars
- Religious Border-Crossing
- Religious Networks
- Representations of Slavery
- Republicanism
- Rice in the Atlantic World
- Rio de Janeiro
- Rum
- Rumor
- Russia and North America
- Sailors
- Saint Domingue
- Saint-Louis, Senegal
- Salvador da Bahia
- Scandinavian Chartered Companies
- Science and Technology (in Literature of the Atlantic Worl...
- Science, History of
- Scotland and the Atlantic World
- Sea Creatures in the Atlantic World
- Second-Hand Trade
- Settlement and Region in British America, 1607-1763
- Seven Years' War, The
- Seville
- Sex and Sexuality in the Atlantic World
- Shakers
- Shakespeare and the Atlantic World
- Ships and Shipping
- Signares
- Silk
- Slave Codes
- Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic
- Slave Owners In The British Atlantic
- Slave Rebellions
- Slave Resistance in the Atlantic World
- Slave Trade and Natural Science, The
- Slave Trade, The Atlantic
- Slavery and Empire
- Slavery and Fear
- Slavery and Gender
- Slavery and the Family
- Slavery, Atlantic
- Slavery, Health, and Medicine
- Slavery in Africa
- Slavery in Brazil
- Slavery in British America
- Slavery in British and American Literature
- Slavery in Danish America
- Slavery in Dutch America and the West Indies
- Slavery in New England
- Slavery in North America, The Growth and Decline of
- Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa
- Slavery in the French Atlantic World
- Slavery, Native American
- Slavery, Public Memory and Heritage of
- Slavery, The Origins of
- Slavery, Urban
- Smuggling
- São Paulo
- Sociability in the British Atlantic
- Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts...
- Soldiers
- South Atlantic
- South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos
- South Carolina
- Sovereignty and the Law
- Spain, Early Modern
- Spanish America After Independence, 1825-1900
- Spanish American Port Cities
- Spanish Atlantic World
- Spanish Colonization to 1650
- Subjecthood in the Atlantic World
- Sugar in the Atlantic World
- Swedish Atlantic World, The
- Technology, Inventing, and Patenting
- Textiles in the Atlantic World
- Texts, Printing, and the Book
- The American West
- The Danish Atlantic World
- The French Lesser Antilles
- The Fur Trade
- The Spanish Caribbean
- Theater
- Time(scapes) in the Atlantic World
- Tobacco
- Toleration in the Atlantic World
- Transatlantic Political Economy
- Travel Writing (in the Atlantic World)
- Tudor and Stuart Britain in the Wider World, 1485-1685
- Universities
- USA and Empire in the 19th Century
- Venezuela and the Atlantic World
- Violence
- Visual Art and Representation
- War and Trade
- War of 1812
- War of the Spanish Succession
- Warfare
- Warfare in Spanish America
- Warfare in 17th-Century North America
- Warfare, Medicine, and Disease in the Atlantic World
- Weavers
- West Indian Economic Decline
- Whitefield, George
- Whiteness in the Atlantic World
- William Blackstone
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)
- William Wilberforce
- Wine
- Witchcraft in the Atlantic World
- Women and the Law
- Women Prophets