Marine Insurance in Early Modern Scotland: A New Perspective on the Emergence and Development of Legal Practice and Doctrine

New research carried out in the archival records of the High Court of Admiralty in Edinburgh as well as material found in the archive of Rotterdam suggests that Scottish merchants made use of insurance besides other risk-shifting devices well before the mid-eighteenth century, when the Court of Session and Scottish jurists first began to take a strong interest in the phenomenon.1 This evidence furthers an argument made by Scott Styles,2 who convincingly questioned A. D. M. Forte’s still dominant account that the Scots did not make widespread use of insurance prior to the 1800s, and that its subsequent development was predominantly through English transplant.