Robin Pearson is Professor of Economic History at the University of Hull, UK. He has published widely on various aspects of British and international economic and business history, with a particular focus on insurance. His first book, Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance and the British Economy, 1700–1850, won the 2004 Wadsworth Prize for Business History. He has recently finished a book, Shareholder Democracies? Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850, co-authored with Mark Freeman (University of Glasgow) and James Taylor (Lancaster University), forthcoming with University of Chicago Press. He is currently working on a project entitled Insuring America: Multinational Insurance Companies in the United States, 1850–1920.

• Introduction: Towards an International History of Insurance, RobinPearson; Chapter 1 The Marine Insurance Market for British Textile Exports to the River Plate and Chile, c. 1810–50, Manuel Llorca-Jaña; Chapter 2 Actuarial Practice, Probabilistic Thinking and Actuarial Science in Private Casualty Insurance, Christofer Stadlin; Chapter 3 The Difficulties of Spanish Insurance Companies to Modernize During the Franco Years: The Mechanization of Administrative Tasks and the Introduction of the First Computers, 1950–70, Jerònia Pons Pons; Chapter 4 Multilateral Insurance Liberalization, 1948–2008, Welf Werner; Chapter 5 Policyholders in the Early Business of Japanese Life Assurance: A Demand-Side Study, Takau Yoneyama; Chapter 6 Industrial Life Insurance and the Cost of Dying: The Role of Endowment and Whole Life Insurance in Anglo-Saxon and European Countries During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Liselotte Eriksson; Chapter 7 From Economic to Political Reality: Forming a Nationalized Indian Life Insurance Market, Adrian Jitschin; Chapter 8 Life Offices to the Rescue! A History of the Role of Life Insurance in the South African Economy During the Twentieth Century, Grietjie Verhoef; Chapter 9 Competing Globalizations: Controversies Between Private and Social Insurance at International Organizations, 1900–60, Martin Lengwiler;