The contribution of women to the economy as investors has an increasing profile, but sources of information on women's economic activity in the nineteenth century are limited. However, shipping registers provide new avenues for exploring this largely hidden perspective. Women investors in shipping are revealed here to be more consistently active across the century with a close involvement with their investment. They were a significant factor in enabling smaller port communities to remain self‐sufficient in their industry funding until the dominance of steam in the 1880s caused the sailing vessel to become increasingly obsolete.
The six-year shipbuilding partnership between Captain James Dunn and Thomas Henna ended acrimoniously in April 1806 when Henna took Dunn to the Chancery Court in a dispute over profits. The partnership was officially dissolved in an advertisement in the local papers that same year when the contents of the yard were put up for auction. "All persons having any claims on the partnership are desired to send them to James Dunn." 1 While the court proceedings dragged on over the next twenty-eight years, Dunn continued to operate a shipyard. Dunn died in 1842 at the age of eighty-seven, an apparently prosperous shipbuilder. Henna was last heard of in 1834 as a pauper living in Middlesex, and his death has not been traced. The business documents, provided as evidence to the lengthy and expensive Chancery case, were not claimed by either party. The Dunn and Henna records in the Master's Exhibits cover more than the partnership activity from 1799 to 1806. The Chancery case took many years, and Dunn was reluctant to tum the accounts over to the court. For that reason, the surviving documents provide information for a longer period because Dunn continued to use the main partnership ledger for his own business until 1816. The ledgers list income, expenditure, accounts for each vessel and payments to shipwrights.? The details include a full breakdown of the cost of building a vessel, the types of materials purchased (and from whom), profits and debts. What makes the surviving documents of this short-lived business in a remote Cornish port of interest to maritime historians? It is because shipbuilding businesses are poorly represented in scholarly publications due to a paucity of sources. As Simon Ville has noted, this is particularly true for the late 'Royal Institution of Cornwall (hereafter RIC): Mapplebeck notes, Folio 3. 2The National Archives, Public Record Office (hereafter TNA, PRO) CllO/167, main ledger.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were three principal forms of organization in British marine insurance: individual underwriters working at Lloyd's or the outports, two large chartered corporations in London, and small mutual associations of shipowners in London and provincial ports. The two corporations, the Royal Exchange Assurance and the London Assurance, enjoyed monopoly privileges granted by the famous Bubble Act of 1720, by which no other stock companies or partnerships were permitted to write marine insurance. Other organizational vehicles were added when the Bubble Act was finally repealed in 1824, including new unincorporated joint-stock and mutual companies and new 'protection and indemnity' (P&I) clubs that evolved from the older shipowners' associations. The growth and internationalization of one of the P&I clubs, the Steamship Mutual Underwriting Association of 1909, is examined in the fourth section below.At times the issue of what was the best organizational vehicle to deliver marine insurance became a hotly debated topic both within the industry and in parliament. The questions that this chapter addresses are: why did these different organizational forms emerge; what were the relative advantages and disadvantages that might explain their subsequent performance; and what conclusions can be drawn from this history that have relevance for organizational theory? EARLY MARINE INSURANCE: FINDING SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF ADVERSE SELECTION? By 1700 maritime insurance had diffused from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, Baltic, and North Sea routes and specialist communities of underwriters had OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRST PROOF, 16/6/2015, SPi
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