Risk management policies of maritime insurance companies in Southern Italy over the 19th century: an accounting history perspective

This paper addresses the issue of uncertainty and risk in maritime business as a key issue to evaluate economic systems’ resilience, over a long time. Differently from the traditional notion of insurance that quantifies the perception of risk in probabilistic terms, this paper adopts a different approach, by using a qualitative analysis of balance sheet items and attached reports, to categorise risks in the long run. It focuses on the case study of maritime insurance in the South of Italy throughout the 19th century. Through thematic content analysis (TCA) we try to understand if there was homogeneity between companies in risk management strategies and thus in risk perception, whether it varied according to firms’ dimension, whether these strategies changed with Italian Unification, whether the opening of the Southern market, the first globalisation and the arrival of foreign companies led to a change in the classification of risk and/or an adaptation to the categories used abroad. To do this, we collected original sources mostly available at the Naples State Archive (balance sheets and attached reports) to obtain a massive collection of quantitative and qualitative data. The analysis follows the systematic of a qualitative TCA (Kuckartz 2018), to which the “deductive-inductive category formation” corresponds. A concept-driven (deductive) development of risk categories derived from different kinds of literature (regulatory, accounting, and mercantile literature) and a data-driven (inductive) development of risk categories, derived from thematic analysis of archival sources will be outlined. This way the paper aims to understand how risk perception guided the management risk policies of marine insurance companies over time. How these firms planned strategies to deal with uncertainty and risk is also a key issue to discuss, in a long-run perspective, the aspects of risk conceptualisation, vulnerability, adaptation capacity, tools, and policy options adopted under different market conditions.