Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming

The business of reinsurance developed at the fringe of financial services and, for most of its existence, went largely unnoticed outside the expert community. More recently, both public and professional sensitivity towards managing risks has increased and reinsurers have emerged as authorities on global threats such as climate change and natural catastrophes.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive historical description of this industry. It traces the global development of reinsurance from the early 19th century until today. As such it gives a detailed account of how the nature of risk itself changed over the last 200 years. It highlights all aspects relevant in shaping the industry from the development of risk, risk engineering and risk management, actuarial science, the financial and monetary environment, market conditions, impacts of politics, the effects of regulatory changes, to large risks and natural catastrophes.

A comprehensive introduction by the editors highlights the different challenges and approaches to managing risk from a reinsurance perspective such as mathematical, financial, legal, and contractual developments, as well as the changing business models adopted. All of these are dealt with in further detail by ten contributing authors.

Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School, Neils Haueter, Head of Swiss Re’s Corporate History unit, Swiss Reinsurance Company.

Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. He has written extensively on the history of globalization. His recent books include Multinationals and Global Capitalism (OUP 2005) and Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry (OUP, 2010). He is co-editor of the journal Business History Review, and a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and the Royal Historical Society.

Niels Viggo Haueter is Head of Swiss Re’s Corporate History unit. He serves as Deputy Chairman of the Academic Council of the European Association for Banking and Financial History in Frankfurt and is a guest lecturer at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. Together with Peter Borscheid he edited WorldInsurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network published by Oxford University Press in 2012.