Reviews
Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, and University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2021, 335pp, illus, notes, index, isbn 978-1-46966363-0, $34.95hc) Marine insurance may not seem like an important, much less an interesting, topic to many people interested in history, but as Professor Hannah Farber demonstrates in this deeply researched, smartly written book, it played a critical role in the formation of the early republic. The fact that there is little in the historical literature about marine insurance makes Underwriters of the United States an original and welcome addition. Farber argues that marine insurers underwrote the establishment of the United States or, as she puts it, “bet on American independence for their own benefit.” Insurers were merchants who understood doubleentry bookkeeping, risk in its various forms, and interest calculations. They were attuned to the latest news from overseas and foreign admiralty court decisions, and they mastered the law of merchants (lex mercatoria), what Farber describes as “a bottomless ocean of rules, customs, provisos, and exceptions.” Insurers underwrote privateers and merchant vessels in the American Revolution and continued to do so in the near-continuous worldwide French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Risk was thus distributed, providing some security to commerce, which sustained customs revenue to the government. With their profits, merchantinsurers invested in government debt, thereby bolstering the credit of the new government. Later, they founded and invested in banks. As the insurance business matured and grew, insurers left the consortium model (the leading example of which was Lloyd’s of London), and with state charters embraced the corporate form, which further distributed risk. Farber’s prologue sets up the whole story. She proffers a hypothetical insurance transaction in Boston in 1800, which allows her to delve into various types of maritime risk, the mechanics of insurance, and the elements of an insurance contract. There is much to learn here, but Underwriters of the 58
United States is not an insurance treatise. Rather, Farber writes about the political economy of insurance. Each chapter deals with a different era of insurance, as insurers dealt with the changing risks to maritime commerce and as the insurance business expanded geographically, with regard to the numbers of companies and types of risks insured. In the early republic, marine
insurers were the preeminent interpreters of the international market; they provided political and commercial intelligence to the federal government, which lacked its own apparatus to gather and synthesize information on foreign developments; and insurance policies limited risks to traders, while forcing them to conform to the rules laid down in the policy or forfeit indemnification for any ensuing loss. One theme throughout Underwriters of the United States is that insurers simultaneously wanted to be autonomous actors, outside of public scrutiny because of the difficulty in understanding the specialized knowledge of the business, and yet able to call on the federal government as the ultimate insurer when huge risks produced negative outcomes. Although marine insurance might be considered a sterile subject, Farber’s writing is pithy and witty, such as her assertion that underwriters “lamented wars loudly but sought out war risks quietly,” or describing one rapacious merchant-insurer as drawn to the city of Philadelphia “like a mos-
quito to a warm artery.” Farber provides readers with deft, colorful portraits of some of the leading figures of this history, most of whom are unknown today. For historians, Farber’s eighty pages of endnotes (onequarter of the book) are a treasure trove of supporting information and sources, but a more casual reader sticking with the text need not worry about being bogged down in scholarly minutia. Underwriters of the United States is an excellent book in every respect, full of fresh insight into an overlooked aspect of the history of the new republic. It would be unfortunate if this book only attracts academic readers. Hannah Farber demonstrates how marine insurance, “a quintessential practice of capitalists,” was a spur to economic risk-taking, encouraged longdistance trade, buttressed American diplomatic policy, and allowed for the accumulation of capital that was in turn invested in the institutions of the new country. Much of this story will be eye-opening to readers. In short, Underwriters of the United States provides a new gloss on the early history of the United States. Frederick C. Leiner Baltimore, Maryland Opening the Great Depths: The Bathyscaph Trieste and Pioneers of Undersea Exploration by Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2021, 359pp, illus, notes, biblio, appen, index, isbn 978-1-68247-591-1; $44.95hc) Exploration of the deep ocean began in the early 1900s and continues today in an environment hostile to humankind. Modern technology—fiber optic cables, advanced sonar systems, and autonomous and unmanned vehicles—has made these expeditions safer and the depths more accessible, yet less than 10% of the seafloor has been explored to date. We have better maps of the moon and Mars than of our oceans. These endeavors to explore the depths of the oceans culminated with the first manned descent into the Challenger Deep, the deepest place on earth (near Guam), by the submarine Trieste in 1960. Opening the Great Depths is a detailed look at the technological development of deepsea bathyscaphes and manned expeditions into the deepest places of the planet. SEA HISTORY 179, SUMMER 2022
