Given the infinite variety of risks throughout history, it is perhaps unsurprising that insurance - the world's primary risk mitigation industry - developed a wide range of organisational forms by which it was delivered. Yet we know little about how and why different forms were chosen in the past, or why they survived or disappeared. This book is the first to examine the development of multiple organisational forms in insurance from an historical and international comparative context, and to relate historical analysis to modern organisational theory. Thirteen chapters cover eight major markets, US, UK, Germany, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Australia, South Africa, which together account for over half of all world insurance today. Each chapter is authored by an expert in their field, and several include new datasets. Major themes covered are the variety, choice, governance and regulation of organisational forms in insurance, the experience of mutual insurance in frontier economies and uncertain political environments, the long-run business performance of different organisational forms, and the problems surrounding the demutualization of modern insurance companies. The book suggests the need for important revisions to current organisational theory, and it highlights several explanatory factors that have received little attention from scholars. These include the importance of regulation and the role of the state in shaping the organisational landscape of insurance at different times and places; the role of entrepreneurship in organisational choice; the utility of organisational forms as a risk management device, and the significance of cultural preferences in the selection of organisational forms.

This is the second and final volume of the business history of one of the UK's oldest and largest insurance offices, based upon probably the best archive in the business. This volume covers the period from 1870 to the absorption of the Phoenix by Sun Alliance (now Royal and Sun Alliance) in 1984. The Phoenix papers are used to analyse the triumphs and trials, not only of a single insurance venture, but of an entire financial sector in a notably turbulent century. Insurance is concerned with the way people drive, the way they retire, or buy their houses, or invest, or educate their children, or go to war. It follows that a major insurance history also throws light on many aspects of modern British social history. As the great composite offices expanded to offer fire, accident, marine, and life insurance across a single 'counter', so they caught within their dealings an increasingly representative slice of British commercial and social life.

"A guide to the press of the United Kingdom and to the principal publications of Europe, Australia, the Far East, Gulf States, and the U.S.A.

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.