How Marine Insurance Has Developed
A ship at sea faces many dangers even in
these days of instant communications, satellite navigation and modern
engineering standards. How much more dangerous they were when navigation was
in it's infancy, weather forecasting rudimentary, ships were far more
fragile and propulsion was dependent upon something so unreliable as the
wind. With such uncertainties, who would risk their entire fortune on the
possibility of a cargo load of valuable merchandise finishing up on the sea
bottom because of a storm, mechanical failure or error of judgement by a
captain or crew member?
The answer was for ship owners to band
together to share losses amongst each other. That way, the cost of losing a
ship, whilst painful financially, would be shared amongst many and so would
not be ruinous to one particular individual or company. The likelihood of
losses from a hundred voyages or so could be calculated fairly accurately
and so a common pool could be set up to compensate any member of the
syndicate who had a loss. Marine insurance was born.
Like every other human endeavour it was
not as simple as that. What happened if there was a partial loss only? What
if part of a cargo had to be sacrificed in order to save the rest; if the
rest was owned by a different merchant? Should a captain put his own ship
(and cargo) in danger in order to save the cargo on another vessel? These
and many other questions were answered by a variety of court decisions and
codified into a sometimes seemingly bewildering plethora of local, national
and international regulations. The old simple method of ship owners getting
together informally over few drinks in Lloyd's coffee house was no
longer enough and a more sophisticated system was needed.
Today marine insurance is a highly
efficient but complex operation, with worldwide premiums in 2014 calculated
to be in excess of forty billion pounds. The old sea dogs would have been
impressed, but initially baffled by the amount of knowledge and experience
that goes into administering this vast industry.
Marine insurance is not something to
entrust to amateurs any more.
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