Insuring the Industrial Revolution

Insuring the Industrial Revolution PDF Author: Robin Pearson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351927310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fire had always been one of the greatest threats to an early modern British society that relied on the naked flame as the prime source of heating, lighting and cooking. Yet whilst the danger of fire had always been taken seriously, it was not until the start of the eighteenth century that a sophisticated system of insurance became widely available. Whilst a number of high profile fires during the seventeenth century had drawn attention to the economic havoc a major conflagration could wreak, it was not until the effects of sustained industrialization began to alter the economic and social balance of the nation, that fire insurance really took off as a concept. The culmination of ten years of research, this book is the definitive work on early British fire insurance. It also provides a foundation for future comparative international studies of this important financial service, and for a greater level of theorising by historians about the relationship between insurance, perceptions of risk, economic development and social change. Through a detailed study of the archives of nearly 50 English and Scottish insurance companies founded between 1696 and 1850 - virtually all the records currently available - together with the construction of many new datasets on output, performance and markets, this book presents one of the most comprehensive histories ever written of a financial service. As well as measuring the size, market structure and growth rate of insurance, and the extent to which the first industrial revolution was insured, it also demonstrates ways in which insurance can be linked into wider issues of economic and social change in Britain. These range from an examination of the joint-stock company form of organization - to an analysis of changing attitudes towards fire hazard during the course of the eighteenth century. The book concludes by emphasising the ambivalent character of fire insurance in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, contrasting the industry's dynamic long-run rate of growth with its more conservative attitude to product design and diversification.

Insuring the Industrial Revolution

Insuring the Industrial Revolution PDF Author: Robin Pearson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351927310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fire had always been one of the greatest threats to an early modern British society that relied on the naked flame as the prime source of heating, lighting and cooking. Yet whilst the danger of fire had always been taken seriously, it was not until the start of the eighteenth century that a sophisticated system of insurance became widely available. Whilst a number of high profile fires during the seventeenth century had drawn attention to the economic havoc a major conflagration could wreak, it was not until the effects of sustained industrialization began to alter the economic and social balance of the nation, that fire insurance really took off as a concept. The culmination of ten years of research, this book is the definitive work on early British fire insurance. It also provides a foundation for future comparative international studies of this important financial service, and for a greater level of theorising by historians about the relationship between insurance, perceptions of risk, economic development and social change. Through a detailed study of the archives of nearly 50 English and Scottish insurance companies founded between 1696 and 1850 - virtually all the records currently available - together with the construction of many new datasets on output, performance and markets, this book presents one of the most comprehensive histories ever written of a financial service. As well as measuring the size, market structure and growth rate of insurance, and the extent to which the first industrial revolution was insured, it also demonstrates ways in which insurance can be linked into wider issues of economic and social change in Britain. These range from an examination of the joint-stock company form of organization - to an analysis of changing attitudes towards fire hazard during the course of the eighteenth century. The book concludes by emphasising the ambivalent character of fire insurance in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, contrasting the industry's dynamic long-run rate of growth with its more conservative attitude to product design and diversification.

Insuring the Industrial Revolution

Insuring the Industrial Revolution PDF Author: PROFESSOR OF ECONOMIC HISTORY ROBIN. PEARSON
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138277571
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fire had always been one of the greatest threats to an early modern British society that relied on the naked flame as the prime source of heating, lighting and cooking. Yet whilst the danger of fire had always been taken seriously, it was not until the start of the eighteenth century that a sophisticated system of insurance became widely available. Whilst a number of high profile fires during the seventeenth century had drawn attention to the economic havoc a major conflagration could wreak, it was not until the effects of sustained industrialization began to alter the economic and social balance of the nation, that fire insurance really took off as a concept. The culmination of ten years of research, this book is the definitive work on early British fire insurance. It also provides a foundation for future comparative international studies of this important financial service, and for a greater level of theorising by historians about the relationship between insurance, perceptions of risk, economic development and social change. Through a detailed study of the archives of nearly 50 English and Scottish insurance companies founded between 1696 and 1850 - virtually all the records currently available - together with the construction of many new datasets on output, performance and markets, this book presents one of the most comprehensive histories ever written of a financial service. As well as measuring the size, market structure and growth rate of insurance, and the extent to which the first industrial revolution was insured, it also demonstrates ways in which insurance can be linked into wider issues of economic and social change in Britain. These range from an examination of the joint-stock company form of organization - to an analysis of changing attitudes towards fire hazard during the course of the eighteenth century. The book concludes by emphasising the ambivalent character of fire insurance in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, contras

The Development of the Mutuality Principle in the Insurance Business

The Development of the Mutuality Principle in the Insurance Business PDF Author: Johann Brazda
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 364390973X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1080

Get Book Here

Book Description
Im Mittelpunkt steht die Entwicklung und Gewichtung des Gegenseitigkeitsprinzips bei Versicherungsvereinen auf Gegenseitigkeit (VVaG) in Österreich. Beginnend mit den ersten Gründungen von VVaG führen die Forschungen bis in die Gegenwart und stellen die jeweiligen Entwicklungsphasen der Gegenseitigkeit dar. Die dabei erkennbare schrittweise Verdünnung des Gegenseitigkeitsprinzips in den VVaG bzw. die phasenweise Modifizierung des Gegenseitigkeitsgedankens werden sowohl für Österreich als auch mittels internationaler Beispiele in Form von Länderstudien präsentiert.

The Appeal of Insurance

The Appeal of Insurance PDF Author: Geoffrey Wilson Clark
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442640650
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The Appeal of Insurance is an excellent collection that reflects a growing interest in insurance research within the social sciences. Clearly written and accessible to a variety of audiences, this is a volume of world-class scholarship.'-Luis Lobo-Guerrero, School of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy, Keele University In the marketing of its products, the insurance industry has always depended on a considerable dose of moral exhortation and enlightened appeal. The Appeal of Insurance traces the ways in which insurance over the past three centuries, perhaps more than any other business, has grown in concert with a clientele largely of its own making. Faced with a public that has preferred to avoid confronting the certainty of fatality or the probabilities of catastrophe, insurance promoters have had to create a demand for their products, first, by persuading the public to see the world as ruled less by divine judgments and more by statistical patterns, and second, by proclaiming a moral imperative of hedging against death and disaster by the prudential recourse to insurance. The essays presented here examine the history of insurance as a process of negotiation between the embedded social, legal, and cultural norms out of which the practice of insurance grew, and the new arrangements and sensibilities that insurance itself helped bring into being. Today, insurance is a global economic colossus and a fixture in the developed countries of the world. But neither the financial clout of the insurance industry nor its ubiquity conveys the full measure of its social and political influence. The insurance industry has in fact become a primary agent of discipline and control over public and private behaviours by imposing upon them the criterion of insurability. By tracing the boundaries of acceptable (and compensated) from unacceptable (and uncompensated) risk, insurers directly or indirectly govern people, products, and markets, and by this process become one of the most powerful and pervasive agents of social and economic control. Geoffrey Clark is a professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Gregory Anderson is the former Associate Head of the Business School at the University of Salford. Christian Thomann is a senior fellow at the Centre for Risk and Insurance at Leibniz University, Hanover. J.-Matthias Graf Von Der Schulenburg is the Director of the Centre for Risk and Insurance at Leibniz University, Hanover.

Prometheus Tamed

Prometheus Tamed PDF Author: Cornel Zwierlein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004431225
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Get Book Here

Book Description
Large city fires were a huge threat in premodern Central European every-day life; only quite late, institutional forms of fire insurances emerged as a post-disaster instrument of damage recovery. During the nineteenth century, insurance agencies spread through the World forming a plurality of modernities, safe or unsafe.

Historical Disaster Experiences

Historical Disaster Experiences PDF Author: Gerrit Jasper Schenk
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319491636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
Historical disaster research is still a young field. This book discusses the experiences of natural disasters in different cultures, from Europe across the Near East to Asia. It focuses on the pre-industrial era and on the question of similarities, differences and transcultural dynamics in the cultural handling of natural disasters. Which long-lasting cultural patterns of perception, interpretation and handling of disasters can be determined? Have specific types of disasters changed the affected societies? What have people learned from disasters and what not? What adaptation and coping strategies existed? Which natural, societal and economic parameters play a part? The book not only reveals the historical depth of present practices, but also reveals possible comparisons that show globalization processes, entanglements and exchanges of ideas and practices in pre-modern times.

Virtuous Bankers

Virtuous Bankers PDF Author: Anne L. Murphy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691248524
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
An intimate account of the eighteenth-century Bank of England that shows how a private institution became “a great engine of state” The eighteenth-century Bank of England was an institution that operated for the benefit of its shareholders—and yet came to be considered, as Adam Smith described it, “a great engine of state.” In Virtuous Bankers, Anne Murphy explores how this private organization became the guardian of the public credit upon which Britain’s economic and geopolitical power was based. Drawing on the voluminous and detailed minute books of a Committee of Inspection that examined the Bank’s workings in 1783–84, Murphy frames her account as “a day in the life” of the Bank of England, looking at a day’s worth of banking activities that ranged from the issuing of bank notes to the management of public funds. Murphy discusses the bank as a domestic environment, a working environment, and a space to be protected against theft, fire, and revolt. She offers new insights into the skills of the Bank’s clerks and the ways in which their work was organized, and she positions the Bank as part of the physical and cultural landscape of the City: an aggressive property developer, a vulnerable institution seeking to secure its buildings, and an enterprise necessarily accessible to the public. She considers the aesthetics of its headquarters—one of London’s finest buildings—and the messages of creditworthiness embedded in that architecture and in the very visible actions of the Bank’s clerks. Murphy’s uniquely intimate account shows how the eighteenth-century Bank was able to deliver a set of services that were essential to the state and commanded the confidence of the public.

Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment

Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004231196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment represents the first attempt to delve into the period’s enhanced architectural investment—its successes, its failures, and the conflicts it provoked globally.

Creating Capitalism

Creating Capitalism PDF Author: James Taylor
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0861933230
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
The growth of joint-stock business in Victorian Britain re-evaluated, showing in particular the resistance to it. Winner of the Economic History Society's Best First Monograph award 2009 The emergence of the joint-stock company in nineteenth-century Britain was a culture shock for many Victorians. Though the home of the industrialrevolution, the nation's economy was dominated by the private partnership, seen as the most efficient as well as the most ethical form of business organisation. The large, impersonal company and the rampant speculation it was thought to encourage were viewed with suspicion and downright hostility. This book argues that the existing historiography understates society's resistance to joint-stock enterprise; it employs an eclectic range of sources, fromnewspapers and parliamentary papers to cartoons, novels and plays, to unearth this forgotten economic debate. It explores how the legal system was gradually restructured to facilitate joint-stock enterprise, a process culminatingin the limited liability legislation of the mid-1850s. This has typically been interpreted as evidence for the emergence of new, positive attitudes to speculation and economic growth, but the book demonstrates how traditional outlooks continued to influence legislation, and the way in which economic reforms were driven by political agendas. It shows how debates on the economic culture of nineteenth-century Britain are strikingly relevant to current questions over the ethics of multinational corporations. James Taylor is Senior Lecturer in British History at Lancaster University.

The Value of Risk

The Value of Risk PDF Author: Peter Borscheid
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191003999
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reinsurance is an invisible service industry which enables insurance companies to insure more risks and to make better use of their resources. Until recently, reinsurers were only known to a small minority outside the insurance community. Major disasters, especially those caused by natural catastrophes, have increasingly brought the industry into the spotlight. Yet what is perceived today by a wider public still only represents a fraction of the industry, and the mechanisms of reinsurance to deal with global risk exposure are virtually unknown. The Value of Risk provides an overview of how today's reinsurance industry developed. It investigates for the first time the role of reinsurers in a changing risk, economic, and market environment. Harold James explains the fundamental principles of insuring and outlines the evolution of the industry in his introductory essay. In Part I, Peter Borscheid describes in detail the global spread of modern insurance, which emerged in the late eighteenth century amidst ideas of rationalism which attempted to quantify risk in monetary terms, the setbacks it encountered, and how the market environment changed over time. Professional reinsurance emerged with the rise in insured risks in the industrialising mid-nineteenth century. By the time the San Francisco Earthquake happened in 1906 the reinsurance industry had become well established and showed a remarkable ability to deal collectively with the catastrophe. David Gugerli describes in Part II how the industry as a whole dealt with such challenges but also the numerous exposures to a changing risk landscape. Against this background, in Part III Tobias Straumann examines the history of the Swiss Reinsurance Company, founded in 1863, providing a fascinating example of how professional risk taking was developed over the last 150 years.