Marine insurance: the historiographical context

Marine insurance has facilitated the development of long-distance trade and as such has influenced economic growth and progress of, in particular, seafaring nations in the early modern period. Its emergence, development and characteristics are therefore of importance to both economic historians and economists. Also, the existing structure and nature of marine insurance is rooted in early modern times: without marine insurance to facilitate long-distance trade maritime expansion would have been even more complicated than it is now, more costly and risky; developments would have taken place at a different pace and might even have taken a different route.

This research focuses on the emergence and development of marine insurance in the Netherlands between circa 1600 and circa 1870. A number of scholars have examined the insurance industry since its emergence four and a half centuries ago although, according to Frank Spooner, ‘the history of marine insurance… has still to be written’. In his monograph published in 1983, Spooner focused on the Amsterdam marine insurance market during the final quarter of the eighteenth century. He analysed how the insurance market was affected by structural influences on the one hand and event uncertainties on the other. Spooner concluded that more than financial crises or meteorological circumstances, political unrest and war affected the insurance industry, insurance price levels and the overall efficiency. Although Spooner's research has received academic praise, it does not seem to have spurred other researchers to take his study further until recently when Robin Pearson and Christopher Kingston published their studies regarding the insurance business. Pearson concentrated on the innovativeness of the British insurance industry whereas Kingston has compared the marine insurance industries in England and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In order to explain the developments of and the observed differences between these industries, Kingston chose to approach the issue from an institutional point of view. Kingston's approach is a break from most other research on marine insurance. Traditionally, marine insurance has been the domain of lawyers and legal researchers.