The history of insurance can be traced back thousands of years ago. It dates back to at least the 18th century BC with the Code of Hammurabi. The code appeared in ancient times on a Babylonian monument with the code of King Hammurabi carved into it during his reign from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. The code is carved into a four tonnes slab of diorite.

During the ancient era, there were two types of economies existed in human societies, natural and monetary economies. Where natural or non-monetary economies was applied using barter and trade with non centralized nor standardized set of financial instruments.

Marine insurance is broadly acknowledge as the oldest form of insurance. About 5.000 years ago Chinese merchants spreading cargo among multiple ships and Babylonian ship merchants who had loans paid lenders an additional sum to provide guarantee against losses for their commodities. This started the idea of insurance. The concept of sacrificing a portion of a shipment in order to save the majority of cargo or human life took root in Rhodes in the first century BC.

In the 13th century, ship owners wanted to protect themselves against the possibility of catastrophic losses. This led to the actual insurance contracts. Wealthy individuals agreed to receive a certain amount of money from each ship owner in exchange for a promise to pay for the loss of a ship when it occurred.

The world’s first insurance company is The Insurance Office, founded by Nicholas Barbon in 1666 in England. He developed the idea of fire insurance when the Great Fire of London took place. It destroyed more than 13.000 buildings over five days.

In the United States, Benjamin Franklin is credited for starting up the insurance industry when he formed Philadelphia Contributionship in 1752. It was the first company in the US to offer the fire insurance. Franklin’s famous line “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” referred to his call for firefighting preparedness