World Insurance will prove a useful addition to many bookshelves, not least because so little work about insurance has been published which is neither vocational, nor legal, nor sociopolitical. This historical volume is ambitious in its breadth. It sets out to summarise the international spread of ‘modern’ insurance from Britain to the rest of the world from the late eighteenth century. The editors state that their intention for the volume is to ‘show how European immigrants and insurance companies exported the concept of insurance and modern underwriting from the British Isles and established them as a European invention and cultural asset throughout the world', by examining the ‘economic, political, and cultural conditions that influenced cross-border insurance dealings’ (p. 1). World Insurance achieves the editors’ goal reasonably well, given the enormity of the task and the limitations of space.

Separate chapters, each written by a local academic with a track record of writing about insurance, cover Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Russia, Canada, the US, South Africa, the Maghreb, the UAE, India, China, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Additional ‘overview’ sections by co-editor Borscheid, which introduce the volume's continental subdivisions, fill in some of the national gaps. In total more than 80 countries are discussed in greater or lesser detail, but important international markets such as the Netherlands, Poland, Scandinavia and Israel do not have their own chapters (while one chapter of 21 pages is dedicated to the United Arab Emirates).

Most of the national case studies in World Insurance cover ground sufficiently complex to warrant monographs, and many deserve more than one - particularly as the volume tackles both life and property-casualty (P&C) insurances. This pairing is akin to that of arable farming and husbandry: they are often done by the same people, but are fundamentally different, and probably deserve separate treatments. Including both in this volume (as is common in insurance histories) brought unavoidable imbalance to the contents. The chapter on Canada, for example, devotes 17 pages to the country's life insurers and their ‘global success', and only two to P&C insurance and reinsurance (and barely a sentence on foreign P&C insurers’ activities in Canada). Throughout, by the editors’ design, only scant attention is given to the early development of insurance itself. These lacunae will come as no surprise if readers are aware that the volume intends to discuss primarily the export of insurance products and international companies from the nineteenth century, but many readers interested in other aspects of the insurance story may realise this only after delving in: the book's title provides only a cryptic indication of its narrow focus. A more descriptive name, one which includes a date range, would have helped.

This should not detract from the quality of each chapter in what is essentially an edited collection. Cross-border insurance, and the political, economic and social factors which fostered or hindered its development in and from the countries which are treated, are generally described by individual contributors in satisfying detail. Some of these narratives have not been told elsewhere, and together they create an illuminating picture of the international uptake of British norms of insurance practice. What emerges is a picture of the spread from Britain in the late eighteenth century of European-style fire and life insurance, first to the colonial emigrant centres of its Empire. The nineteenth century saw the evolution from this imperial seeding of three ‘global insurance networks': first, that of Britain, Europe, and the colonial peripheries; next that of the US and its sphere of influence; and finally that of south-east Asia. In the twentieth century the creation of a ‘global insurance safety net’ (a phrase often invoked by Borscheid) was interrupted by Latin American protectionism and communist isolationism, but the path dependence which the volume proffers resumed in the 1980s, with the advent of a new era of free trade and economic reform, and later the entry of India and China into the global networks. The late-century burgeoning of stock markets and the crisis of the welfare state led to a significant expansion of cross-border life insurance and bancassurance, demergers, recapitalisations, and the development of new personal and commercial insurance instruments.

The book's exclusive focus on premium-based British-style insurance means that World Insurance is not World History. References to other risk transfer methodologies are missing or miniscule. Here the book's whiggishness rears its head: the editors regularly refer to British underwriting as ‘modern’ and ‘scientific', while ‘native’ companies which have not adopted these methodologies operate in countries repeatedly described as ‘backward'. Thus takaful, a millennium-old form of risk-sharing compliant with Islamic law, is mentioned only six times throughout, and then only in the context of its current sale by ‘modern’ insurers. Bīmā, a form of premium-based insurance developed independently in India long before the colonial era, and sold until the 1950s, is not mentioned at all. Mutual insurance in the Napoleonic tradition gets short shrift, while mutual Protection & Indemnity (P&I) clubs, which directly insure roughly 90 per cent of the world's ocean-going shipping fleet, get only a single passing mention (which includes a fundamental error: Pearson describes P&I as ‘for hull and cargo insurance', but P&I clubs insure exclusively marine liability losses: see www.igpandi.org, ‘International Group of P&I Clubs’ home page).

Other minor errors of detail disappointed this reviewer. Statements on the first six pages declare that underwriters at Lloyd's coffee house had created a ‘new marine insurance company’ (they had not; Lloyd's was, and remains, a society forming a market comprising scores of companies); that the first English life insurance company was founded in 1762 (the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance was launched in 1706); and that in India ‘modern’ insurance was offered ‘in the form of the agency houses’ (when in fact it was offered by joint-stock companies under the management of agency houses).Footnote ¹ The statement that ‘by 1970 the cost of insuring a Boeing 747 had risen to a little over USD 140 million for just one aircraft’ is absurd : in 2000, the total global premium for commercial passenger aircraft was just over $1 billion (Global Aviation Bulletin 49, 21 Dec. 2001). Here the author seems to have confused the limits of cover purchased with the rate of premium, which would have been a fraction of that total. Finally, it is not immediately obvious that World Insurance is a corporate production, conceived and financed by Swiss Reinsurance Corporation, the world's second-largest reinsurer – although the integrity of the work has not been compromised by this. Thus, despite the niggles and inconsistencies, World Insurance provides an valuable picture of the globalisation of one of the most important financial sectors, and deserves to be widely read.