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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.
Since the end of the eighteenth century, the insurance industry has
cast a safety net around the world, first in the British Isles and
then further afield, irrespective of cultural, political and
ideological divides. Unlike previous publications on insurance
history, which tend to discuss the development of national markets
or individual companies, this book focuses on the creation of
networks across borders from the end of the eighteenth century to
the present day.
Distinguished international economic historians draw upon examples
from twenty countries across the continents to demonstrate how what
was called the 'British system' of risk management spread out in
waves, and describes the forces that made this possible--first
among them migration from Europe and international trade. The book
explores the economic, political, religious, and cultural obstacles
that blocked the path of this European invention--not only
religious law and traditional practices, but above all
protectionism, inflation, and political ideologies. It examines the
process of transformation through which modern insurance supplanted
traditional forms of protection against perils and risks and was
able to keep on offering new ways of dealing with the risks of
modern life. As well as discussing primary insurance, it also
considers the role played by reinsurance, without which the losses
arising out of today's natural and man-made disasters would be
immeasurably greater. Finally, taking modern-day disaster scenarios
as examples, the book shows just what the limits of insurability
are and what risks worldwide networks entail.
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