Guido Rossi, Insurance in Elizabethan England. The London Code

This monograph details the development of rules of maritime and life insurance in England and London in the second half of the sixteenth century. In extensive appendices, the author provides transcripts of the manuscripts of the London Code, which was a compilation of rules concerning insurance to be applied in London, and comparative tables of the sections of the Bruges Hordenanzas of 1569. Transcripts of 47 insurance policies dating between 1523 and 1604 are also appended. The first chapters of the book offer a thorough contextualization of maritime insurance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. The author shows how in the course of the later 1400s and early 1500s the Genoese style of writing insurance policies was eclipsed by a Florentine inspired approach, particularly a Florentine insurance contract. At first this followed on from the fact that Florentine merchants had become more prominent, but the model contract continued to be used among brokers and insurers of other nationalities afterwards. From the mid-1500s onwards the English were more often underwriter and insurance brokers than before. In the 1570s a standard model policy of London maritime insurance became established, and it was mainly of Florentine origins. The customs of Lombard Street had by that time absorbed many of the usages that had become applied in Antwerp some time before.

Actuarial science · Business · Contextualization · Fifteenth · General insurance · Insurance law · Insurance policy · Linguistics · Political science · Underwriting · Classics · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy