Insurance in Elizabethan England
The London Code

Examines the origins of English insurance, focusing on the first English insurance code and its proximity to continental mercantile practice.

Guido Rossi (Author)

9781107112285, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2016

900 pages, 24 b/w illus. 5 tables
23.7 x 16 x 5.3 cm, 1.42 kg

'The non-specialist reader must stand in humble awe at the author's massive scholarship. It is scholarship conducted in numerous places. It is scholarship in primary sources written in several languages. It is scholarship obtaining little assistance from secondary works. The book is beautifully written. … The work is a supremely impressive addition to the series of which it is a part, Cambridge Studies in English Legal History.' J. D. Heydon, Cambridge Law Journal

English insurance came into being almost entirely during the Elizabethan period. However, the Great Fire of 1666 consumed most of London's mercantile document, and therefore little is known about early English insurance. Using new archival material, this study provides the first in-depth analysis of early English insurance. It focuses on a crucial yet little-known text, the London Insurance Code of the early 1580s, and shows how London insurance customs were first imported from Italy, then influenced by the Dutch, and finally shaped in a systematic fashion in that Insurance Code. The London Insurance Code was in turn heavily influenced by coeval continental codes. This deep influence attests the strong links between English and European insurance, and questions the common/civil law divide on the history of commercial law.

1. Introduction
Part I. Legal-Historical Background: 2. Some remarks on the origins of English insurance
3. Insurance in late sixteenth-century England
Part II. The London Code: 4. Preamble: sea-carriage and averages
5. The making of the London Code
6. Object of Insurance
7. Premium
8. The parties
9. Risks
10. Ship and voyage
11. Recovery
12. Abandonment to the insurers
13. Reinsurance
14. Life insurance
Concluding remarks.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Law [L], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], History [HB]