Editing Commercial revolution (section)

====Insurance companies====
[[image:Insurance Contact 2.jpg|thumb|right|A sample insurance contract. Documents such as this helped traders survive losses.]]
Insurance companies were another way to mitigate risk. Insurance in one form or another has been around as far back as there are records.  What differed about insurance going into the 16th and 17th centuries was that these informal mechanisms became formalized.

[[Lloyd's of London]] came into being in 1688 in English coffee shops that catered to sailors, traders, and others involved in trade. Lloyd's coffeehouse published a newspaper, which gave news from various parts of the world, and helped the underwriters of the insurance at the coffeehouse to determine the risk.<ref>{{cite book| title= The History of Lloyd's and of Marine Insurance in Great Britain| url= https://archive.org/details/historyoflloydso00martuoft| author= Martin, Frederick|year=1876|publisher = MacMillan and Company, London|pages=[https://archive.org/details/historyoflloydso00martuoft/page/65 65]–80}}</ref>  This innovation was one of many that allowed for the categorization of risk. Another innovation was the use of ship catalogs and classifications.

Other forms of insurance began to appear as well. After the [[Great Fire of London]], [[Nicholas Barbon]] began to sell fire insurance in 1667.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/about_us/our_history/key_dates.asp |title=London Fire Brigade – History, key dates (Our history) |access-date=2007-10-27 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080618055617/http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/about_us/our_history/key_dates.asp |archive-date=2008-06-18 }}</ref>

Laws were changed to deal with insurance issues, such as ''[[Ordinance of Marine|l'Ordonnance de la Marine]]'' (by Colbert in 1681).<ref name="isbn1-84542-013-6">{{cite book |author=Smits, Jan |title=Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (Elgar Original Reference) |url=https://archive.org/details/elgarencyclopedi00smit_487 |url-access=limited |publisher=Edward Elgar Publishing |year= 2006|page=[https://archive.org/details/elgarencyclopedi00smit_487/page/n333 315] |isbn=1-84542-013-6 }}</ref>