Insurance is a central, if until now ignored, instrument of war in the modern period. Ever since the eighteenth century, interaction between governments and insurers in Western countries has materialised in the form of war risk schemes that have contributed to the waging of war and the preservation of peace. The operation of those schemes has given rise to a curious, if not innocent, association between practices of statehood and practices of risk, which are theorised here under the label of 'insurantial sovereignty'. The book draws on the British experience of using maritime insurance as an...

Insurance is the world's largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is known about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance. This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that...