Insurance Blog likes to educate our readers so today for those of you studying for your ACII Insurance Blogger Kris Oldland discusses the development and history of Insurance.
Part One: Insurance in the ancient world:Insurance is everywhere and attached to everything we do. In the western world practically each and everyone of us is involved with a number of seperate insurance policies everyday and everywhere we go. Whether it be in our cars, in our homes or in our jobs we will no doubt be insured somehow at any given moment. But where did this concept originate and how has it developed over the years to the modern sophisticated system that it is today?
Well, the history of insurance steps back a lot further back than many of us would ever imagine. In fact, throughout history wherever there has been any form of commerce and an economy in place, insurance of some description soon followed.
The earliest recorded descriptions of insurance date back over five thousand years to the third millenia BC, with the Chinese empire having established insurance methods in place. Of course, having invented, paper money, fireworks, and alcohol it was probably best that these clever chinese chaps came up with insurance too! With a thriving and thoroughly well established trade network developed, the creation of a system of insurance was driven by neccesity. Chinese merchants were incredibly tenacious and would make incredible journeys, often overcoming treachourous terrain and dangerous river rapids to complete their journey. It became standard practice for these merchants to redistribute their valuable wares across a number of vessels to limit the loss of any one vehicle capsizing. Essentially, risk management in its purest, most simplisitic form.
As we fast fowrard a millenia or so we encounter another bunch of rather clever folks who were off having a great old civilised time, whilst we in Britain were tentatively stepping out of caves, the Babylonians. This Mesopotamian civilisation flourished amongst both the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples and again was a sophisticated and complex society with commerce beating at its heart. This was a civilisation with an incredibly well organised government, an established, functioning bureaucracy, and complex taxation systems, much of which was installed by the sixth king of Babylon, Hammurabi.
Having brought stability to the Mesopotamian region, it was Hammurabi who introduced the groundbreaking (yet slightly unimigantively and rather egotistically named) Codes of Hammurabi; one of the first ever recorded codes of law. It was in fact from the Codes of Hammurabi that the phrase
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