World Insurance: The evolution of a global risk network

As Frank C. Spooner noted in 1983 (Risk at Sea: Amsterdam Insurance and Maritime Europe, 1766-1780, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), it was insurance and not war or diplomacy what made possible the opening of the markets in the Far East in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Travelling with traders, insurance not only enabled venturing into unknown markets but also began to effect the globalisation of a rationality of thinking and managing uncertainty as risk. Insurance, more than a financial instrument is the embodiment of a rationality of thinking and managing uncertainty, a crucial element for the understanding of western globalization in the modern period.