The City of London in the 19th Century: The Growth of Insurance

The history of the city of London has for three hundred years been a reflection of the commercial and industrial history of the country at large; and in the nineteenth century, when the explosion of the Industrial Revolution worked itself out through laissez-faire to the beginnings of Government control and large-scale organization, the City can be seen as a microcosm of the developing new society. The history of insurance in itself is a mirror of a great deal of the activity that went to build it.

At the start of the century, when Britain had another fourteen years of Napoleonic war before her, insurance was still a much simpler matter than it was presently to become.

Marine insurance, which had already so long a history, was very well established; Lloyd’s had outgrown their coffee house and moved into the Royal Exchange; but the two chartered companies, the London and the Royal Exchange, which since the time of the South Sea Bubble had enjoyed a monopoly of marine insurance, so far as joint-stock companies were concerned, had not pressed their advantage and handled only a small percentage of the business.