Risiko, Sicherheit und Resilienz. Die Seeversicherung im Venedig des Spätmittelalters, Annales Mercaturae 6, 2020, 89-109. (original) (raw)

Cornel Zwierlein Tod und Leben Das Reichskammergericht und die Lebensversicherung im 18. Jahrhundert

Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Munich Kolloquien 99, 2019

The history of late medieval and early modern premium life insurance in Europe is marked by a significant gap: Until around 1600, insurances as wagers on famous public persons were practiced, as there was also a constant though – compared to maritime transport insurance – usually small practice of individual premium life insurance contracts for private persons since the fourteenth century. Lawyers and theologians were usually condemning that practice though acknowledging its existence, but in any case, canon and early merchant law experts usually distin-guished between all kinds of wager and gambling (sponsio) and insurance, reserv-ing for the maritime transport insurance the term assecuratio; sometimes they used sponsio as the general term for both. During the sixteenth century a series of territorial prohibitions of life insurance were enacted which led to a quite com-plete disparition around 1600 of the practice and its treatment in learned discourse at least as far as sources hitherto uncovered by research can tell. The only excep-tion since the early eighteenth century of a revitalization of individual premium life insurance as usual every-day business seems to have happened in England, in most other countries, research only accounts for the emergence of life insurance business during the nineteenth century. An exceptional case from Hamburg, luck-ily transmitted due to an appeal process brought for the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar (1753–1767) shows that there must have been also some life insurance practice in Hamburg, probably imitating the English practice since the early eighteenth century until 1759. This case is analysed in the present contribution with the purpose to show the developments of the concept of “insurance” in gen-eral: the case bears proof that there was for centuries something like an invisible epistemic barrier to let emerge a universal concept of insurance covering all differ-ent realms and objects as it is known today. It seems that only at the end of the eighteenth century within the macroeconomic thought and perspective of Ger-man cameralism a vision on “insurance” became possible that narrowed it more and more to such a universalized concept – though, still, during the nineteenth century discussions remained strong whether to classify “insurance” as part of the gambling contracts or as a genuine form and part of new positivist codification law. Behind those developments in legal classification systems, larger trends of social history become visible: future oriented self-care instead of public post-fac-tum charity, individualization instead of collective conceptualization of the collec-tive, economization even of human life and the recognition of universal principles and concepts as common to practices and ideas that were hitherto treated as dis-tinct and separated.