Publisher's Synopsis
Marine insurance is as old as marine trade. Chinese merchants were practising the risk sharing
principle by deliberately spreading cargo shipments among several ships as far back as 3,000 B.C.1 Turning to Europe, marine insurance arguably originated from bottomry, a conditional loan repayable with interest upon successful completion of the voyage but retained if the ship was lost. 2 The bottomry loan was normally secured by a pledge over the financed ship.3 Such a pledge would affect the lender's remedies: if the voyage was successful but the loan was not
repaid, the lender could acquire the title of the ship.4 Since bottomry went some way towards providing a sharing in the risk of trading by sea and made the lender both a financier and an insurer, representing the first intersection of ship finance and marine insurance.
