EH.N: CfP: Session, "Insurance in History, " XVth World Economic History Congress

[Robin Pearson]

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.

Professor Leonardo Caruana de las Cagigas
Faculty of Economics
Department of Economics
University CEU-San Pablo
Office B-010
Julian Romea 23
Madrid 28003
Spain
Telephone 914566300
Fax 91554896
E-mail: carcag at ceu.es

Professor Robin Pearson
Department of History
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
HULL HU6 7RX
UK
Tel. (0) 1482 466301
Fax. (0) 1482 466126
email. R.Pearson at hull.ac.uk

Professor Robert E. Wright
Department of Economics
Stern School of Business
New York University
44 West 4th Street
New York, New York 10012-1126
USA
Tel. 1-212-998-0756
Fax. 1-212-995-4218
rwright at stern.nyu.edu