XVth World Economic History Congress

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 3-7 August 2009

Session Proposal

Insurance in History

Organisers:

• Leonardo Caruana (Madrid)
• Robin Pearson (Hull)
• Robert Wright (New York)

Much has been written on the rise and fall of national barriers to cross-border political, economic and cultural exchange during the last 150 years, on the emergence of multinational enterprise, and on the emergence of the world economy and the processes of globalisation in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. The insurance industry, however, with the exception of some studies of early modern marine insurance, has seldom been the subject of such analysis. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the era in which the modern insurance industry placed itself at the centre of the world economy, there are almost no studies of the role played by insurance in the process of internationalisation and globalisation.

Some company histories have touched upon this when examining a firm's overseas operations, but, outside the framework of commissioned corporate histories, only a few historians have begun to examine the process by which insurance moved across borders. One explanation for this may be the fact that the major branches of insurance, with the important exception of reinsurance, largely operate within national markets, and can therefore be studied country by country. To date, however, there remain relatively few such studies of national insurance industries.

This situation has begun to change during the past decade. There have been several sessions, workshops or entire conferences that have focused on insurance history since 1995 in the US, Japan, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. There are currently plans for a session on insurance at the Economic History Association in Austin in 2007, and a conference in Madrid in 2008. We anticipate that the latter will provide an initial opportunity for those to get together who are interested in participating in the session at the IEHA in Utrecht in 2009.

While the historical development of the insurance industry at local, national and international levels provides a unitary framework for all contributors, the organisers do not specify any single theme for the session. Papers may examine one or more branches of insurance in a wide range of different contexts and countries. Topics might include the successful and unsuccessful attempts by European and North American insurance companies to penetrate foreign markets during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the entry and exit decisions of insurance multinationals; the impact of changing regulatory regimes for domestic and foreign insurance companies; the impact of legal and political systems on insurance development; the relationship of the private insurance industry to the state under different polities; social insurance and provision for old age; the standardization of insurance technologies and the international diffusion of institutions; competition and cooperation, including attempts at cartels, tariff organisations, underwriters' and rate associations, and boards of local agents; marketing strategies; product design and innovation; problems of risk assessment, underwriting, pricing and loss adjustment under different economic and technological conditions; strategies for the international diffusion of risk, including reinsurance; the organisational forms chosen by promoters of insurance companies, including the historical debates between the relative advantages of mutual, stock and public ownership; the finance and investment of insurance; how questions of moral hazard and adverse selection have been approached by the insurance industry in the past; the changing meanings of risk and insurance to the insured.

Anyone interested in this session is most welcome to contact one or more of the organisers, viz.