Insurance

Abstract

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.