Reinsurance is often characterised as a business built on personal relationships, goodwill and mutual trust. To what extent has this been true in the past? The aim of this paper is to investigate, for the first time, what was involved in the micro-business of doing reinsurance in the past. How did the process of reinsurance, and the individual business, social and personal exchanges that constituted that process, change since the early days of the industry? By necessity some attention will be paid to the technical aspects of reinsurance underwriting, but only to the extent that they shed light on the social and business history of doing reinsurance.

Despite possessing one of the largest and most important economies in the world for two centuries, the United States until recently was noted more for its securities markets than its banks, a fact generally attributed to regulatory rules, like unit banking and the separation of commercial and investment banking, that favored small banks. U.S. regulatory regimes also appear to have created a preference for alternative risk transfer mechanisms (ARTM), including risk markets, over the creation of large, domestic reinsurance companies. This paper explores that hypothesis by examining the history of reinsurance and reinsurers in the U.S. since the nineteenth century using both archival and printed primary sources and concludes that where large, domestic reinsurers are blocked by costly regulations, direct writers will turn to alternative forms of sharing risks, including ARTM and foreign and reciprocal reinsurance.

In the Netherlands, the breakthrough of reinsurance coïncided with the internationalisation of insurance during the last quarter of the 19th century. That is of life-insurance. A few, new companies internationalised, much in opposition to the established firms and the prevalent national orientation; also of indirect business. Reinsurance was used as a technique to ease expansion and to strengthen international contacts. However, management often had mixed feelings about this component of their business. The financial sector and Dutch insurance in particular became more global than the rest of business, but globalisation ended more sorrowful than in the “real” sector. Were those mixed feelings an indication that globalisation was more of a frail affair than management wanted to be aware of? And did reinsurance signal that globalisation came at a price, but was that message simply repressed?

The paper discusses the emergency and development of the Swedish reinsurance industry in the non-life sector. In addition, the paper will focus on major events that changed the circumstances and conditions for conducting reinsurance and how the business were organised. In Sweden, the reinsurance in the non-life sector was closely connected to direct insurance and within almost every larger (and to some extent in medium-sized) insurance group, an ‘independent’ reinsurance company was created. However, this changed considerably during the 19th and 20th century, in particular after heavy losses. In addition, the reinsurance business became an important part of expanding on foreign markets. In short, this paper will revolve around the issue of how the non-life reinsurance business shaped the setting of the Swedish insurance industry.

Even though the first French professional reinsurance companies dated back to the end of the 19th century, on the eve of the Second World War, foreign reinsurers dominated the French market. And in 1929, the largest French company accounted for only 10% of Munich Re premium volume and 15% of Swiss Re's premium volume. Fifty years later, the first French company, Scor, created in 1970, accounted for 14% of the premiums collected by Münich Re and 18% of Swiss Re's figure. And in 2014, Scor represented 35% of Munich Re and 42% of Swiss Re. Among the world's leading reinsurance companies, Scor's growth had been spectacular. These are the rhythms and factors (acquisition of technical expertise, international expansion) of this growth of a newcomer who has become in 45 years the 5th largest reinsurer in the world, along with the evolution of French reinsurance that this communication seeks to identify.

As a channel for risk diversification, reinsurance is essentially an international business. This global scope makes it extremely sensible to regulations on the access to international capital and foreign exchange markets. Indeed, while soft regulations during the nineteenth century allowed for the spreading of reinsurance, increasing restrictions posed during the twentieth century deeply affected the development of the industry. In the Spanish case, the international isolation of Franco dictatorship from 1940 and the implementation of an autarkic economic policy led to a strict intervention on the trade of capital and foreign currencies, which would transform the Spanish reinsurance business. Indeed, the obstacles to the access to international risk diversification services forced Spanish insurers to seek for alternate mechanisms as the creation of dependent reinsurers linked to the main primary insurers. The aim of this article is to examine these strategies and their effects on the Spanish insurance market.

The reinsurance industry will be mainly in hands of foreign companies or explained in another way, they are the leaders in the process in Spain. In all moment they will sustain the risk of the insurance industry. This paper will concentrate in the second half of the XX century to explain how the international reinsurance companies diminish the risk and reinforce the insurance business in a useful way to make possible that Spain joins the develop countries in this matter. In many ways, this is a general process in many countries, because reinsurance is mainly a business that is concentrated in few countries that expand in all the world, and in fact we should mainly refer to few companies that control or support the reinsurance development in the world and naturally main purpose, the insurance industry.

Due to the strict foreign currency regime, one might believe that National Socialist Germany was not a favorable place for internationally oriented reinsurance companies. But as a consequence of their position as foreign currency earners, the authorities of the Nazi regime subjected reinsurances only to a rather liberal prudential supervision. The paper will show how reinsurances like Munich Re navigated through the polycratic regime of the “Third Reich” and managed to keep a significant agency in domestic and foreign business. As a quid pro quo for non-interference into their underwriting business, insurances were under pressure to invest significant parts of their reserves in treasury bonds to finance the German war effort. In addition, the paper investigates the fact how and why insurances escaped the looming threat of nationalization despite significant pressure from Nazi Party activists.

Crop insurance and in general insurance to the rural economy is an activity with several market imperfections, which have led the State to make interventions in it. This research explains the historical development of agricultural insurance and reinsurance in Mexico in from the 1950s to the 1990s. It focuses on explaining how agricultural insurance and later reinsurance provided by the government began. The central argument of this paper is that the adoption of an agricultural reinsurance practice by the government was aimed at avoiding large fiscal losses and reactivating private markets. By using reinsurance, the fiscal losses were reduced. However, the government did not fully activate the rural insurance markets since it continued to intervene in the crop insurance markets with political purposes. On the other hand, the practice of reinsurance required a learning process, so it was not successful in its beginnings.

In Japan, life reassurance didn’t grow naturally. This is not only because of technical problems, but also because of luck of necessities for life reassurance. It is natural for life insurers that life reassurance was not appeal to a device of risk management, partly because the industrial organization was very stable. If there are needs for life reassurance in those days, it might be a useful to a start-up company and a countermeasure to infectious disease. In the meantime, a Germany reinsurance company send its officers to Japan for promoting life reassurance about 1930. They paid attention to substandard insurance in Japan. Someone discussed a problem on substandard whom life insurers gave refusal to be policyholder. The answer to the life assurance was not that a life insurer made a private contact with life reassurance companies, that they tried to make a reassurance company all together. It is an evidence on a trend toward institutional solution, rather than market.