Phoenix Assurance And The Development Of British Insurance Volume 2 The Era Of The Insurance Giants 1870 1984

This is the second and final volume of the business history of one of the UK's oldest and largest insurance offices, based upon probably the best archive in the business. This volume covers the period from 1870 to the absorption of the Phoenix by Sun Alliance (now Royal and Sun Alliance) in 1984. The Phoenix papers are used to analyse the triumphs and trials, not only of a single insurance venture, but of an entire financial sector in a notably turbulent century. Insurance is concerned with the way people drive, the way they retire, or buy their houses, or invest, or educate their children, or go to war. It follows that a major insurance history also throws light on many aspects of modern British social history. As the great composite offices expanded to offer fire, accident, marine, and life insurance across a single 'counter', so they caught within their dealings an increasingly representative slice of British commercial and social life.

This is the first volume of a major two-part history of one of Britain's largest and longest-lived insurance ventures. For much of the nineteenth century Phoenix was the economy's biggest fire office. It pioneered the export of fire insurance and was the most committed insurer of industrial property. Though primarily a business history, the study has much wider implications. Connections between Phoenix's history and that of Britain's industrial economy in its heyday are fully exploited. Insurance records provide windows upon such issues as the wealth embodied in early industrial growth, the patterns of credit available to improving landlords, the investment required for urban expansion, the difficulties of predicting Victorian mortality, and the launching of 'invisible' exports. Much of the treatment is comparative, so the result is a history not simply of one fire office but of a rapidly expanding service industry.

How did Sweden go from a financially backward country to one with a well functioning financial system? Why did this financial revolution occur after the mid-nineteenth century and not before? This book discusses the role of politics and economics in this change and what it means for economic development, market integration and financial crises.

Cambridge University has and continues to be one of the most important centres for economics. With nine chapters on themes in Cambridge economics and over 40 chapters on the lives and work of Cambridge economists, this volume shows how economics became established at the university, how it produced some of the world's best-known economists, including John Maynard Keynes and Alfred Marshall, plus Nobel Prize winners, such as Richard Stone and James Mirrlees, and how it remains a global force for the very best in teaching and research in economics. With original contributions from a stellar cast, this volume provides economists – especially those interested in macroeconomics and the history of economic thought – with the first in-depth analysis of Cambridge economics.

This publication traces the global development of reinsurance from the early 19th-century until today. It gives a detailed account of how the nature of risk itself changed over the last 200 years, and highlights all aspects relevant in shaping the industry including the development of risk, risk engineering and risk management, actuarial science, market conditions, impacts of politics, and the effects of regulatory changes.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

The topic of 'corporate governance' attracts the interest of commentators, policy makers and academics due to its focus on major differences between national business systems and their performance. Yet many works engage in generalizations, and fail to appreciate the realities and circumstances of its long-term evolution. Comparative study is used in this book to analyse national, legal, cultural and industry-specific contexts and the broad range of key factors contributing to the emergence of business institutions. Historical insight into the origins of corporate governance systems and the impact of institutional legacy is used to unravel development pathways in Japan and Britain. The book is the result of genuine international cooperation between established Japanese and British business historians and management academics.

Around 1900, standard contracts and clauses spread throughout international industries such as transport, insurance and finance. The "earthquake clause", which was globally introduced by reinsurers after the 1906 San Francisco catastrophe, exemplifies this paradigmatic change of the law.