Insurance Industrial Revolution

Insuring the Industrial Revolution fits this bill for British fire insurance, stretching from its roots in the early eighteenth century up to 1850, when it was on the verge of market saturation at home and (if only briefly) world domination abroad. Before this book, the history of British fire insurance mainly rested on three company histories, each longer and more magisterial than its predecessor: Clive Trebilcock’s history of Phoenix Assurance (appearing in two volumes in 1986 and 1999), Barry Supple’s history of the Royal Exchange (1971), and Peter Dickson’s history of the Sun (1959). Pearson integrates these books’ findings with a substantial amount of new archival evidence from other London companies, like the Hand-in-Hand, County, Guardian, Alliance, and Imperial; and from provincial fire offices in cities like Manchester, Newcastle, Bristol, and Leeds. This wider array of sources allows Pearson to bring to the history of fire insurance the same appreciation for regional diversity that has long marked our understanding of such British industries as textiles and coal, and, more generally, to take what he calls a “market-oriented rather than corporate-oriented approach” .Pearson opens with a quantitative chapter tracking premium rates, sums insured, and proportion of insured British property from 1760 through 1850. The latter category, for instance, rose to just over 34 percent from 1770 through 1790, fell during the Napoleonic Wars to under a third, then rose steadily from 1820 until it reached 56 percent in 1850. Since this growth pattern was out of sync with the pace of industrialization (which grew fastest in many sectors between 1780 and 1821), he accounts for it by referring to “supply side” explanations, including profitability(owing to luck or skill in assessing risk), better marketing, and more efficient management, and to unquantifiable “demand side” explanations, such as increased levels of risk aversion. His numbers, in other words, lead him to focus mainly on qualitative factors, which he spends the rest of the book untangling: first in a series of chronological chapters, and then in a set of thematic chapters covering company formation, marketing, underwriting, and investment.