Adrian Leonard

Marine insurance made a significant contribution to British success in her wars of the long eighteenth century. As both a defensive and offensive weapon, it allowed British sea-borne trade to continue, and foiled French designs to destroy the English economy. Underwriters were instrumental in ensuring that merchant convoys were protected by naval escorts, and that capture-and-ransom was preferred by enemy privateers to the seizure of prizes. Parliamentary legislation used marine insurance to encourage private adventures to support the war effort, despite the relatively small size of the navy in comparison to the merchant fleet.

Marine insurance was one of the great catalysts of trade between Europe and the Caribbean. By the eighteenth century, hardly any cargoes made the voyage uninsured, after a sophisticated network of risk transfer facilities had evolved to provide contingent capital which allowed merchants to trade on risky ocean routes with less capital than perhaps they prudently required.

In this period the technologies of European, and particularly British, marine insurance practice were exported to the Caribbean, where they served as an essential catalyst to commerce. Initially, marine insurance provision was a product of the metropole. Further, the marine insurance market in London emerged in the eighteenth century as the leading provider of risk transfer services, despite earlier dominance of other Atlantic commercial nations. Soon, however, local insurers gained importance, adopting the techniques developed in London. 

This paper explores the development and utility of marine insurance provision for the westward trade from the eighteenth century, in part through the unique underwriting records of the Rhode Island merchant Obediah Brown, and illustrating the beginnings of evolution of the peripheral economies of mainland British America into less dependent economic entities.

In the late eighteenth century, European merchants launched corporate insurance bodies in India and China. These new joint-stock companies followed London’s mature and efficient institutional systems for marine insurance, and adopted their basis in the European law merchant. They operated alongside local risk transfer facilities, but in both countries were quickly embraced by native merchants, who participated both as customers and shareholders. The rapid development of a corporate insurance sector in India and China, fuelled by the capital of local merchants and members of the European colonial elite, underlines the effectiveness of premium-based marine insurance, while its swift adoption by both local and international merchants shows its importance to the development of trade and empire.

The article is available on my Faculty page, here: www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/abl28@cam.ac.uk

This collection of essays explores the inter-imperial connections between British, Spanish, Dutch, and French Caribbean colonies, and the 'Old World' countries which founded them. Grounded in primary archival research, the thirteen contributors focus on the ways that participants in the Atlantic World economy transcended imperial boundaries. The volume presents linked chapters which together examine the evolving and strengthening interconnections between the changing political economies of Europe and the Caribbean during the 'long' eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It brings together research by well-established authors and early-career historians. Their work, and thus this volume, above all is about the historical formation of the modern political economy to which Europe and its Caribbean territories made a significant contribution. The chapters are about the exchanges and interconnections which characterised the Atlantic World; the book as a whole is about the Atlantic World's influence on the Caribbean, and the Caribbean's influence on the Atlantic World.

"Financial capitalism emerged in a recognisably modern form in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Britain. Following the seminal work of Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast (1989), many scholars have concluded that the 'credible commitment' that was provided by parliamentary backing of government as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 provided the key institutional underpinning on which modern public finances depend. In this book, a specially commissioned group of historians and economists examine and challenge the North and Weingast thesis to show that multiple commitment mechanisms were necessary to convince public creditors that sovereign debt constituted a relatively accessible, safe and liquid investment vehicle. Questioning Credible Commitment provides academics and practitioners with a broader understanding of the origins of financial capitalism, and, with its focus on theoretical and policy frameworks, shows the significance of the debate to current macroeconomic policy making.

Presents a broad analysis of the multiple factors leading to a state's financial credibility, revealing the origins for financial capitalism and the significance of the credible commitment debate to current macroeconomic policy making

Explores government borrowing and confidence in state credit-worthiness; in the current environment of concerns over national debts, economists and policymakers can learn much about the mechanisms of governments' credibility as borrowers

Features contributions from an interdisciplinary range of historians and economists"