Note 702 — INSURANCE.

In that old treatise, Le Guidon, inserted in Cleirac, it is remarked, chap. i. art. i. that in old times insurances were made without any writings: they were then called Assecurances en confiance; Confidential insurances.

[M‘Culloch, in his Dictionary of Commerce, art. Insurance, observes respecting this passage, that “Beckmann seems to have thought that the practice of insurance originated in Italy, in the latter part of the fifteenth or the early part of the sixteenth century. But the learned Spanish antiquary, Don Antonio de Capmany, has given, in his very valuable publication on the History and Commerce of Barcelona (Memorias Historicas sobre la Marina, &c., de Barcelona, t. ii. p. 383), an ordinance relative to insurance, issued by the magistrates of that city in 1435; whereas the earliest Italian law on the subject is nearly a century later, being dated in 1523. It is however exceedingly unlikely, had insurance been as early practised in Italy as in Catalonia, that the former should have been so much behind the latter in subjecting it to any fixed rules; and it is still more unlikely that the practice should have escaped, as is the case, all mention by any previous Italian writer. We therefore agree entirely in Capmany’s opinion, that until some authentic evidence to the contrary be produced, Barcelona should be regarded as the birth-place of this most useful and beautiful application of the doctrine of chances.” Had M‘Culloch consulted the treatise on Bills of Exchange, given in a subsequent part of the work (vol. iii. p. 430), he would have found that Beckmann, in noticing the curious memoirs of Capmany, with which he had then become acquainted, distinctly mentions “An ordinance of the year 1458 respecting insurance, which required that underwriting should be done in the presence of a notary, and declared polices o scriptores privades to be null and void.”]