Professional guilds and the history of insurance: a comparative analysis

Abstract

Philip Hellwege’s edited volume on the history of mutual insurance, or lack thereof, within professional guilds across Europe is already the seventh volume in his Comparative Studies in the History of Insurance Law. The series derives from his European Research Council funded project A Comparative History of Insurance Law in Europe, in which the development of insurance in its manifold forms is explicitly researched from a comparative perspective. At the time of writing this review, volume fifteen has very recently appeared, testifying to the enormous productivity of Hellwege and his large team. The chapters in the book are divided geographically, with Hellwege writing an introductory text and the comparative conclusion (alongside a chapter on Germany). In order, the book contains chapters on the Southern Low Countries/ Belgium, the Northern Low Countries/The Netherlands, Germany, England, Scandinavia, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hungary. In the introduction, Hellwege explains (20) that he had considered various formats for the order of chapters, but in the end decided on this order, without explaining the reasons. This is unfortunate, as indeed multiple options could have been considered. Hellwege, writing from a German perspective, provides a most fascinating historiographical introduction on the link between guild support and (mutual) insurance. He explains that most German authors have seen three roots of insurance: first, marine insurance as the origin of commercial insurance; second, cooperative protection within guilds; and third, state-run insurance schemes developed from the seventeenth century onwards, the latter two as the origin for fire and life insurance. This provides a more sophisticated form of argumentation than the English-language literature, which most often teleologically presents marine insurance as the source of all forms of insurance. The German literature, while also flawed (as Hellwege points out in his chapter on Germany), therefore offers a more nuanced introduction to the problem of guilds and insurance. Why not then start with Germany and move thence to Poland? Hellwege and Jakub Pokoj (in his chapter on Poland) offer most interesting comparisons between the two case studies; moreover, this restructuring would move the contributions on the Low Countries and England deeper into the volume, thereby helping to avoid (however inadvertently) privileging Western over Southern and Central Europe. Hellwege, in his introduction, writes that the questions underlying the volume are