1945/11/01 by Florence Edler de Roover · 3 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #Maritime and Coastal Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1017/s0022050700112975
openalex publication_date 1945/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The problem of the origins of marine insurance is one of the most complicated and controversial questions in the history of business institutions. One cause of this confusion is the fact that the earliest documentary sources are often ambiguous and lend themselves to widely varying interpretations. The legal writers, who have done most of the research on the early history of insurance, have focused their attention upon certain documents of the late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. As these sources unfortunately give incomplete information, the results of all this research have been rather disappointing. The minute scrutiny with which the legal writers have examined the early documents has produced subtle and brilliant examples of textual criticism but has also given rise to conflicting theories which have confused the issues instead of clarifying them.