Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700-1850

ISBN-13: 9781138277571 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 448 str.

Robin Pearson

Opis

Through a detailed study of the archives of nearly 50 English and Scottish insurance companies founded between 1696 and 1850, together with the construction of many new datasets on output, performance and markets, Insuring the Industrial Revolution presents one of the most comprehensive histories ever written of a financial service. As well as measuring the size, market structure and growth rate of insurance, and the extent to which the first industrial revolution was insured, it also demonstrates ways in which insurance can be linked into wider issues of economic and social change in Britain. These range from an examination of the joint-stock company form of organization, to an analysis of changing attitudes towards fire hazard during the course of the eighteenth century.

Recenzje

Winner of the 2004 Wadsworth Prize for Business History, awarded by the UK Business Archives Council for the best book in business history. '... meticulously researched... this monograph, the result of over a decade's research, makes a major contribution not only to insurance history, but also to British economic history and, in parts, to the social history of industrialization. With extensive footnotes containing a mine of detailed comparative evidence, Pearson has produced a first-class study of an industry that underwent major structural and cultural changes between 1700 and 1850.' Economic History Review 'Despite its rather obvious importance to modern economic development, the history of fire and property insurance has been largely neglected. Until now that is. Robin Pearson's exhaustively researched and meticulously argued study [...] offers the definitive history of the British Fire Insurance industry through the middle of the nineteenth century. Even more critically, Pearson establishes just how integral property insurance was to the industrial revolution. Insuring the Industrial Revolution is a singular achievement. Robin Pearson demonstrates that fire insurance played a consequential, if sometimes ambivalent, role in the industrial revolution. He also provides a roadmap that future scholars in this area will follow when constructing their own studies of the history of fire insurance. I hope that this fine study garners the wide audience it deserves.' EH.NET 'Pearson has done a superb job [...] to assemble the only truly comprehensive history of the British fire insurance industry to date.' Enterprise & Society 'This is a carefully crafted book that fully achieves its objectives.' Urban History

Spis treści

Contents: Introduction; Fire insurance and British economic growth, 1700-1850; Part I: The fire insurance markets of Georgian London; Provincial fire insurance in the 18th century; Insurance in wartime, 1782-1815; Insurance in and out of crisis, 1815-50; Part II: Company foundation; Marketing; Underwriting; Investments; Conclusion; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

O autorze

Robin Pearson