Publicado 23-06-10

Insurance is a vital and dynamic element in the modern economy. Although commercial forms of insurance have been present for several hundred years in Europe, this financial service first grew to maturity on a global scale during the nineteenth century, and by the First World War a wave of new insurance products had swept across the world. During the twentieth century, the areas of risk that could be insured and reinsured multiplied still further. By pooling a huge variety of complex risks, insurance enabled the production and consumption of goods that would otherwise not be produced or consumed – in this way insurance can be regarded as having achieved net welfare gains for both developing and more advanced economies.

Despite their economic and social importance, however, there are relatively few book-length studies of national insurance industries. This collection of nine essays by a group of international experts redresses this balance; providing an extensive geographical and thematic spread, linked via an extensive introduction. Also present is a consolidated, multilingual bibliography, allowing further research to be undertaken around the world.

Contents
Introduction: Towards an International History of Insurance – Robin Pearson
Part I: Non-Life Insurance
1 The Marine Insurance Market for British Textile Exports to the River Plate and Chile, c.1810–1850 – Manuel Llorca-Jaña
2 Actuarial Practice, Probabilistic Thinking and Actuarial Science in Private Casualty Insurance – Christofer Stadlin
3 The Difficulties of Spanish Insurance Companies to Modernize during the Franco Years: The Mechanism of Administrative Tasks and the Introduction of the First Computers, 1950–70 – Jerònia Pons Pons
4 Multilateral Insurance Liberalization, 1948–2008 – Welf Werner
Part II: Life, Health and Social Insurance
5 Policyholders in the Early Business of Japanese Life Assurance: A Demand-Side Study – Takau Yoneyama
6 Industrial Life Insurance and the Cost of Dying: The Role of Endowment and Whole Life Insurance in Anglo-Saxon and European Countries during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries – Liselotte Eriksson
7 From Economic to Political Reality: Forming a Nationalized Indian Life Insurance Market – Adrian Jitschin
8 Life Offices to the Rescue! A History of the Role of Life Assurance in the South African Economy during the Twentieth Century –Grietjie Verhoef
9 Competing Globalizations: Controversies between Private and Social Insurance at International Organizations, 1900–60 – Martin Lengwiler

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http://www.pickeringchatto.com/monographs/development_of_international_insurance_the