This book contains a selection of essays that derive from papers presented at the session ‘Insurance in History’, held at the XVth World Economic History Congress in Utrecht in 2009, and at a related pre-conference meeting held in Zurich. The theme of both meetings was deliberately left general with the object of casting the net as widely as possible. One aim of the organizers was to find out what historical research on the insurance industry was currently being carried out around the world and who was involved. The call for papers produced a result that surprised even the optimists among us. Altogether 18 papers from 22 authors were presented at the Utrecht and Zurich meetings. The authors came from Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, the USA, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Japan, Australia and South Africa. There were further offers of papers from researchers in the USA, Canada, Japan, France, the UK, Singapore, Hungary, Morocco and Nigeria that could not be included in either meeting or that were withdrawn, often for funding reasons. One outcome was that the existing pockets of insurance historians, hitherto working in a fairly small and specialized field of business and financial history, were now connected to a truly global network of researchers.

This is the latest stage in a process that has been gathering pace over several years.