The project contributes to the growing body of research into the institutional and cultural conditions of globalisation. It focuses on the tertiary sector and its goods and services, which were key to economic development also in non-Western regions. Taking insurance as a representative branch of the tertiary sector, it analyses the expansion of the service sector into non-Western markets. The period investigated stretches from the 1870s to the 1970s.

Geographically, the project focuses on three regions:

  • The Middle East (with a focus on Turkey in the late Ottoman period and the early Republic)

  • Asia (South, South-East, and East Asia, focusing on India, China and the Philippines)

  • Sub-Saharan Africa (with a focus on Nigeria, Cameroon, and the activities of international organisations in the region)

The project is innovative in two respects.

  • Firstly, it investigates the expansion of Western, multinational corporations with a specific focus on non-Western countries and their cultural conditions.

  • Secondly, in focusing on insurance it takes up an emblematic yet often neglected field of the service sector, itself crucial to the global expansion of capitalism and the economic development of non-Western regions. The project highlights the concept of cultures of risk as an analytic tool for understanding the institutional and cultural conditions of non-Western approaches to risk. How did Western and non-Western insurance companies deal with the cultural contexts of non-Western regions and markets? How did they sell their intangible services in foreign markets?

Headed by two of the leading authorities in the field, this research project will build on their outstanding work and a prestigious network of scholars. It comprises three dissertation projects, the publication of a series of articles in highly rated journals, and the creation of an open access web-platform called “Global History of Insurance Online” (GHIO). GHIO publishes a large collection of annotated statistics on international insurance. Designed as a lasting output of the project, it is to be integrated, at the end of the project, into an established digital repository.