History of Insurance

Abstract

History of Insurance, Seven Volumes, edited by David Jenkins and Takau Yoneyama, 2000, London: Pickering & Chatto Reviewer: Warren T. Hope, Temple University Writing history rests on an act of faith. It requires a belief in humanity's ability to rummage through the records of its own past, gather and evaluate evidence, and produce from the results a coherent narrative that will interest if not instruct the present and, perhaps, the future. This faith, strong in the nineteenth century, suffered a rude shock in the twentieth century-the shock of World War I if nothing more. This shock found two contradictory expressions early in the century. George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher, famously announced that people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Henry Ford, the car maker, just as famously announced that history is bunk. These two contradictory expressions sprang from the same loss of a nineteenth century faith. Santayana feared the consequences of that loss of faith. Henry Ford welcomed them. History is still written, of course, but not in the way the historic masterpieces of the nineteenth century were written. Some historians now write for other historians on the question of whether or not history can be written, throwing doubts on or finding fault with the historians of the past. Others tackle very limited fields of study-a history of farming techniques among the Pennsylvania Dutch from 1875 to 1880, for instance. In any case, it can be said that professional-which often means academic-- historians now face obstacles, suffer doubts, that their predecessors were blissfully unaware of or simply accepted as a necessary part of the game. Jenkins and Yoneyama, in their seven-volume History of Insurance, are certainly aware of these obstacles and doubts. As a result, they do not attempt to produce a narrative, to tell a story. Instead, they more modestly assume the role of editors and perform the massive and admirable task of collecting, organizing, reproducing, and commenting on the documents-the raw materials-that would provide the basis for a traditional history. This is not at all to complain that they have shirked the historian's duty to make an interesting if not instructive narrative of evaluated evidence. It is instead to say that Jenkins and Yoneyama accept the contemporary lack of faith in that duty and therefore do all they can-provide their readers with the basis for writing their own history of insurance, if they wish, or, more likely, studying selected documents that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain. …