Forging Capitalism by Ian Klaus

Author:Ian Klaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

The commercial environment in which Globe operated at the time that Watts’s fraud came to light was significantly more developed than that at its founding in 1803. Parliamentary legislation had opened the industry to new operators, expanding the insurance market and making it more competitive. New firms and old introduced new forms of insurance and sought to extend life and fire insurance throughout the commercial middle class. But new ways to manage risk opened new opportunities for fraud. The nature of business by the 1850s and 1860s—both within firms and between clients and companies—was increasingly impersonal and complex and thus prone to fraud, posing a distinct challenge both to the distribution and payment of insurance policies and to management of employees and agents.

In this commercial environment Globe sought to increase public confidence in the insurance industry, in general, and trust in itself, in particular, by publicly emphasizing its stability and history. Meanwhile, it sought to hedge against its own insurance risk through investment. Finally, given the problem of managing its employees and agents and insuring strangers, often at a distance, it began taking more active and aggressive approaches to information gathering. The business demanded that principal-agent relations continue, but the tenor and tone of those associates had to change. The networked trust of reputation was not abandoned, but it was to be bolstered by additional checks and inspections. This turn toward process and inspection eventually gave rise to an era in which verification, even more than reputation, became the foundation of commercial exchange.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.