Insurance: A 4000 year old Industry
Caravans and Ships
For centuries, mankind has resorted to insurance to protect property. In fact, the earliest references to insurance appear around 2000 BC, in the form of written contracts outlining procedures for sharing losses incurred during transport, particularly by caravan or by ship. This was a time, of course, when pirates, bandits and looters were a fact of life, both on land and at sea!
Thus, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi stipulated that if merchandise were stolen or lost, the designated transporter would be relieved of his responsibility for delivery, as long as he could prove he was not an accomplice to the crime. The loss was then shared by the merchants who participated in the caravan.
The "bottomry loan", the precursor of shipping and transport insurance, appeared at the beginning of the first millennium. Merchants lent funds to the transporter, who repaid them only once he returned to port safe and sound, without having sustained damage or fallen victim to pirates.
Insurance actually came into being early in the second millennium, more precisely in 1063, when Italian and English merchants found a way to protect themselves against losses incurred as a result of shipwrecks or seizure of their ships by pirates. The merchants formed an association, creating a fund to which they made regular contributions and from which they drew compensation. This was known as the Amalfi Sea Code.
Italy, Portugal and France all take credit for inventing marine insurance. In fact, each of these countries holds archives dating from the 13th and 14th centuries that deal with maritime law and stipulate terms of insurance.
Insurance: Proscribed
In the 14th century, the "verbal agreement" was the rule in commerce. Written agreements, when used, were simply a means of establishing proof, and then only when the document was drawn up by a notary. A decree published in Genoa in 1369 refers to "unofficial insurance" or "secret insurance."
In 1468, Venice became the first state to adopt a law on insurance, to establish procedures for dealing essentially with fraud. At the end of the 1500s, Venetian authorities attempted to tax insurance policies. Notaries were opposed to it, stating that insurers and insured parties would reach private agreements in order to avoid the tax and would treat all business as "secret insurance."
Until the 16th century, the Church's ban on usury delayed the development of insurance as we know it today. In Rome's view, insurance was equivalent to a wager. Betting and insurance were equally considered to be wagers on an event. This stance, however, would change with time, allowing insurance to evolve according to need.
Early Mutual Societies
Early 17th century Germany gave rise to the first mutual societies. As their name suggests, these were societies collectively held by the policyholders. In many cities, an expert appointed by the sovereign would estimate the value of property and list it in a register. Every property owner who belonged to the society had to pay a sum proportional to the value of his property. These sums were pooled to create a fund that was used to indemnify those whose houses suffered damage.
By the 17th century, marine insurance was already well structured: terms were established and codified, and true insurance companies began to appear. These companies saw the need to band together for the general benefit of their new profession.
Paris, in 1657, had its 'Offices de notaires – Greffiers des assurances'. These 'insurance chambers' served as a sort of club where insurers, brokers and clients could meet and exchange information.
From London all the way to Québec
At about the same time, other European countries witnessed the appearance of a form of fire insurance, which experienced stunning growth after the Great Fire of London of 1666, when four fifths of the city were destroyed.
This was the era of the prestigious Lloyd's of London company which, ironically, saw the light of day in Edward Lloyd's tavern – a place frequented by ship owners, seafarers and merchants. Initially, the establishment was an insurance "exchange", later becoming the ship and cargo insurance centre.
It was also during this time of dynamic international commerce that public companies practising true insurance, such as the General Fire Office, were formed in Germany. Risks were categorised, and annual premiums were charged in proportion to the maximum amount of insurance coverage.
Closer to home, the 1700s saw the establishment of America's first insurance companies. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin – celebrated physician, man of politics and inventor of the lightning rod – founded a mutual insurance company.
The first British insurance company to open its doors in Canada was the Phoenix Insurance Co. Ltd, in 1804. Five years later, the first Canadian company, the fire Association of Halifax (which later became the Halifax Insurance Co.), was founded. In Québec, the first truly homegrown company was The Québec Fire Insurance Company, founded in 1819. Then, beginning in 1833, a number of Québec mutual societies specializing in fire insurance opened for business in Montréal and in the Eastern Townships.
Several members of IBC are the descendants of these venerable institutions.
http://www.bac-quebec.qc.ca/en/what_is_ ... _years.asp
Thinking about charting the rise of insurance chambers and those of masonry? And the chambers of Law, maybe?
The Development of Commercial Law: Negotiability, Marine Insurance, Usury
While the responsibility for the transformation of most areas of private law fell upon (or was appropriated by) the state courts, the development of a body of commercial law — having to do with negotiability, usury, and marine insurance — was the preserve of the federal judiciary. Of these areas, negotiability, which lay at the heart of all commercial relations, presented the most difficult contradictions with the common law for it intruded upon the privity of contract.
Ideally, full negotiability requires that endorsed notes “should circulate as freely as money,” which, if one thinks about what money is, means that a subsequent innocent holder of the note “might depend on payment, regardless of any unknown defects in the obligation arising out of the original transaction between distant parties” (p. 213). To illustrate, following Horwitz: A, debtor to B, can be sued by C to whom B had transferred A’s note, even if no understanding had passed between A and C. And if C had endorsed the note over to D not knowing that A had defaulted, D could sue B, a prior endorser. Most crucial — and this is what distinguishes fully negotiable instruments from assignments — suppose A has already paid the note to B; the courts will protect D, an innocent purchaser of the instrument, from the assumption of any risk arising from B’s attempts to defend himself against D’s suit. It was with respect to this last particular that the state courts, particularly in Massachusetts, balked, until the federal court overruled them in 1809, thereby taking the first step in creating a general commercial law. For Horwitz this step was doubly important: it established full negotiability, and it deposited commercial disputes in the jurisdiction of the federal courts, thereby taking them from the “uncongenial anti-commercial environment often found (sic!) in state courts” (p. 252).
Marine insurance in the eighteenth century had been operated out of taverns, inns, and coffee-houses, by merchants and shipowners for their mutual protection; “it had never been intended for profit” (p. 227). Each voyage was a unique event; each transaction was personal; only extraordinary perils at sea were covered; and the underwriters held themselves strictly liable in all cases, unless it could be proved that the ship was unseaworthy, or an agent was negligent (called ‘barratry’).
Sometime during the remarkably fruitful period 1790-1820 came “the gradual acceptance of what we might call an actuarial conception of social risk … a social consciousness that comes to conceive of a greater and greater portion of activity as appropriately within the realm of chance” (p. 228). With the chartering in the 1790s of incorporated insurance companies with large pools of capital, marine insurance law — like bankruptcy and negligence law — devolved upon an actuarial conception of insurable risks. Losses were no longer unique events, but were predictable according to a probability distribution calculated on the experience of hundreds of voyages. Unseaworthiness and barratry were no longer bars to recovery against the insurance companies; moral responsibility became attenuated, and while the risks of moral hazard increased, insurance companies protected themselves by requiring a variety of warranties and representations any breach of which would defeat recovery. For example, “any deviation from the stipulated route of a marine voyage would void a policy even without a showing that it had increased the risk of loss” (p. 231).
“The ultimate triumph of a market ideology” (p. 241) was the movement to abolish usury laws. It is noteworthy, however, that by the Civil War, seven states still voided usurious contracts, penalizing them with fines and/or forfeiture of principal, and every state except California maintained some regulation over the legal rate of interest (p. 243), but by 1860, “it was no longer possible to recapture an earlier and more coherent system of premarket morality” (p. 245) in the context of which this lingering survivor of the ‘just price’ any longer made sense.
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Conclusion
As economic historians have been made increasingly aware of legal institutions, if not by Ronald Coase then by Douglass North, no one, I think, any longer doubts that they are intimately related to economic development. But can we understand that relationship without positing a direction of causation? For Horwitz, the transformation of American law after the Revolution appears to have been so thoroughgoing, so deliberate, so willed that it is possible to read him as suggesting that the causation might actually have run counter-intuitively: from legal change to economic change, from pro-entrepreneurial judges to instrumental legal rules; from instrumental legal rules to the institutions of corporate capitalism. And now, twenty-five years after The Transformation of American Law, the theoretical work currently being done by Andrei Shleifer, Robert Vishny, Edward Glaeser, Daron Acemoglu, and other New Political Economists can be read as suggesting that such a thing is not only possible, but a direction worth pursuing in the development field. (See for example, Glaeser and Shleifer, forthcoming.)
http://eh.net/book_reviews/the-transfor ... 1780-1860/
Any talk of capitalism/regulation without mention of usury is empty. Capitalism is predicated on usury.
Britannia's Rule.
The Omnipotent Warranty:
England v The World
John Hare[1]
I am the owner of a fishing boat. I have negotiated hull cover on a marine policy which, in its fine print, has a clause common in the Anglo-American marine insurance world: "Warranted that the vessel shall not be used more than 30 miles from the coast".
On my boat is also a GPS chartplotter. I use it to give me a graphic record of my courses to enable me to get back to that special place where I know The Big One is waiting to be caught. On a particular Saturday afternoon I take my children on a cruise just outside the harbour and I collide with a submerged log causing extensive hull damage. I put in a claim and I invite the insurers to come and have a look. The assessor is smart. He sees my GPS plotter and asks me to give him a demonstration. As I switch it on it gives him a graphic picture of my fishing expedition last month during which I happened to stray 32 miles off the coast. The next day I receive notification from my insurer rejecting my claim upon grounds of a breach of warranty. If my claim is brought in England, or in South Africa or indeed in New Zealand, Canada or the USA, I would need a magician rather than a maritime lawyer. The fact that my loss is completely unrelated causally to my breach of warranty would help me not one bit. The warranty, whether it be material or trivial, causative or inconsequential, trumps the claim.
FEW would challenge the inequity of the draconian effect of such a contractual term. The very existence of a warranty is anathema to many continental lawyers who are blessed with far more forgiving regimes in relation to contractual stipulations and their breach. This paper will therefore seek to persuade that the Anglo-American marine insurance warranty is a prodigal aberration from the European ius communis of marine insurance, and that the prodigal, in whatever systems it has raised its unwelcome head, ought to be brought back into the fold in the interests of the very fairness, justice and equity to which English law so properly aspires.
The paper will consider the following aspects of warranties:
The marine insurance warranty in history, and its reception into certain modern legal systems.
The warranty in present law.
The consequences of a breach of warranty.
Imperfections and inequities of the warranty.
Proposals for a way forward: the quest for fairness and uniformity.
[...]
http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/shiplaw/imic99.htm
Mystery Babylon.
Project Outline
Find out the origins and history of different types of insurance. When and how did they develop and grow? What was the impact on the development of society?
Research Information
History of Insurance
Way back in Babylonian times, around 2100 B.C., the Code of Hammurabi was the first basic insurance policy. This policy was paid by the traders in the form of a loan to guarantee the safe arrival of their goods by caravan. Of course, caravans faced the same kind of perils our transportation industry faces today – like robbery, bad weather and breakdowns
Source http://www.thehistoryof.net/the-history ... rance.html
Moreover, according to history, during the 13th century, the ancient Babylonians also devised a system that protected both the merchants and their customers against theft or loss, and this is one of the earliest recorded examples of insurance. The system involved wealthy people guaranteeing that they would pay for the loss of any ship that might sink, in exchange for receiving an agreed amount of money from ship owners.
Source http://www.onedollarglobeinsurance.com/ ... -Insurance
In Babylon merchants and investors devised a system of contracts in which the supplier of money for a trade venture agreed to cancel the loan if the trader was robbed of his goods. The trader who borrowed the money paid an extra amount for this protection in addition to the usual interest. As for the lender, collecting these premiums from many traders made it possible for him to absorb the losses of the few. This arrangement proved to be more appealing and sensible than the earlier one. Later this series of contracts was extended to include provisions for a family's home and even covered murder, the start of life insurance.
Source http://www.pier55.com/Insurance/Insurance-History.shtml
The Babylonians developed a system which was recorded in the famous Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC, and practiced by early Mediterranean sailing merchants. If a merchant received a loan to fund his shipment, he would pay the lender an additional sum in exchange for the lender's guarantee to cancel the loan should the shipment be stolen.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance# ... _insurance
The first written insurance policy appeared in ancient times on a Babylonian obelisk monument with the code of King Hammurabi carved into it. The "Hammurabi Code" was one of the first forms of written laws. These ancient laws were extreme in most respects, but it offered basic insurance in that a debtor didn't have to pay back his loans if some personal catastrophe made it impossible (disability, death, flooding, etc.).
Source http://www.investopedia.com/articles/08 ... urance.asp
[...]
History of Insurance Companies
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, London's growing importance as a centre for trade increased demand for marine insurance. In the late 1680s, Mr. Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house that became a popular haunt of ship owners, merchants, and ships’ captains, and thereby a reliable source of the latest shipping news. It became the meeting place for parties wishing to insure cargoes and ships, and those willing to underwrite such ventures. Today, Lloyd's of London remains the leading market (note that it is not an insurance company) for marine and other specialist types of insurance, but it works rather differently than the more familiar kinds of insurance
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance# ... _insurance
Insurance as we know it today can be traced to the Great Fire of London, which in 1666 devoured 13,200 houses. In the aftermath of this disaster, Nicholas Barbon opened an office to insure buildings. In 1680, he established England's first fire insurance company, "The Fire Office," to insure brick and frame homes.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance# ... _insurance
The world´s oldest insurance market, Lloyd's of London was formed 300 years ago. Queen Elizabeth I introduced the Insurance Act, stating the intention to ensure "that the loss lighteth easily on many rather than heavilie on few."
Source http://www.usbank.com/cgi_w/cfm/insuran ... _insur.cfm
Lloyd's of London saw the growing need for marine insurance and became one of the first established insurance companies.
Source http://www.onedollarglobeinsurance.com/ ... -Insurance
Then in London, in 1688, the first insurance company was formed. It got its start at Lloyd’s Coffee House, a place where merchants, ship-owners, and underwriters met to transact their business. Lloyd’s grew into one of the first modern insurance companies, Lloyd’s of London.
Source http://www.thehistoryof.net/the-history ... rance.html
[...]
http://humanscience.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_Insurance
Who started the Great Fire of London...
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later...