ABSTRACT
New world discoveries from 1492 increased the known land endowment per European capita six-fold. This enormous introduction of one of three factors of production into Europeans’ early modern mercantilist economies could be exploited only after the addition of the other two, labour and capital. Historians have only recently begun to explore one important source of the latter in the context of Atlantic World development, the provision of capital through marine insurance. There as elsewhere, marine insurance provided individual merchants with crucial contingent capital, allowing them to trade with less resources than the perils of a speci c voyage prudently demanded. It permitted the maximum investment of cash and credit into cargoes and vessels. As Captain John Butler wrote to a correspondent in Amsterdam in 1735, ‘I could make no Ensurance here, and I beg of you that you would get insured for me two thousand pounds, for it is too great a Risque for me to run with my little fortune, without insurance’.1
