Did you know that the idea of insurance dates back thousands of years. Since ancient times, the richest merchants have insured themselves by distributing their goods on the road in different caravans, so that in case of robbery they do not lose everything at once. Hunters, on the other hand, hunted in groups so that the risk of being torn apart by a wild animal could be shared equally.
The first written evidence of something like insurance is associated with the Babylonian king Hammurabi. This is one of its laws, according to which the creditor is forbidden to seek his amount if the recipient of the loan has experienced an accident such as death in the family, fire, flood, etc.
The history of the emergence of different types of insurance is interesting, so especially for the most curious we have prepared a few facts from the history of insurance, which, perhaps, you do not know:
Group insurance
During the Middle Ages, there were guilds among the artisans, whose operation was based on the insurance principle. For example, if for some reason a master's workshop burns down (and this, as we know from history, happened often), it rises again with money from the guild's treasury. If a craftsman was maimed or killed, the guild took care of his family. In this way, the flourishing of handicrafts was encouraged at the expense of farming.
The guild's treasury was replenished thanks to a special training system - young apprentices were given the opportunity to train with a master without paying almost anything, and then, when they became masters, they began to pay some tribute to the guild and train new apprentices. . Clean work.
Fire insurance and Life insurance
In 1666, while the great old London was still slowly recovering from the devastating plague, a huge fire broke out that burned almost 14,000 buildings to the ground. Then a small group of entrepreneurs with more opportunities, who until now earned their living only by shipping, came up with a brilliant idea for a new business - fire insurance. They used Pascal's table to calculate the damage and its value.
Shortly afterwards, in 1693, they began to use the same method to calculate the probable life expectancy of an individual in view of the factors that surround him. Thus, the "Life" insurance was naturally "born".
Civil Liability Insurance
In the 19th century, the spread of motor machines began, but at the same time the number of workers who died working with them increased. Thus, people quickly discovered that the industrial revolution posed a number of dangers - especially around the operation of new machines and especially those with steam boilers. Thus, because of this and because of the increase in the number of motor vehicles, the Civil Liability Insurance appeared, which was obligatory even then.