Fire and life insurance in the Dutch Republic:Development and legal aspects

This study revisits the prevailing claim made by Van Niekerk that in the Netherlands fire and life insurance are an offspring of marine insurance. It focusses on the Northern Netherlands between roughly 1581 and 1795. Insurance emerged in the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century. Its most prevalent form was premium marine insurance, which was extensively regulated by the authorities and mostly discussed by legal scholars. Yet fire insurance occurred also, in the form of mutual fire insurance schemes, wherein parties involved are simultaneously insurer and insured. Chapter 2 covers the history of fire insurance law. It deals with the general emergence and spread of fire insurance schemes in the Dutch Republic and embeds the history of fire insurance law in its socio-economic and historical background. It analyzes the oldest instances of premium fire insurance, which date back to 1646 and 1663, both in the city of Rotterdam and both in the form of insurance contracts between private parties. The influence of marine insurance was marginal. The oldest known mutual fire insurances date back to 1663, yet here contracted between oil-millers in the Zaanstreek (near Amsterdam). There were more than seventy contracts, and most were designed for the long run. The development of the Zaanstreek contracts can be divided into three stages. With each stage, their legal characteristics developed along. Clauses allowed millers to join or leave the scheme as they pleased. A few mutual fire insurance contracts can be found in Amsterdam and Groningen as well from the 1740s onwards, although the legal characteristics of the Groningen contracts in particular differed from the Zaanstreek contracts. All these mutual fire insurance contracts were legal constructions sui generis and developed independently from marine insurance as well as from the older Hamburg Feuerkontrakte. Premium fire insurance developed further in Rotterdam with the establishment of the Rotterdam Insurance Company in 1720. This particular company was also the first (Dutch) insurer to offer premium fire insurance and issued its own fire insurance policy. In 1744 the Amsterdam authorities introduced their new insurance regulation which included a section on fire insurance and a model fire insurance policy to be used in practice, that were updated in 1775. These Amsterdam model fire insurance policies show a gradual influence from marine insurance. From the 1770s onwards, premium fire insurance companies emerged mostly in Amsterdam, whereas mutual fire insurance companies emerged throughout the Dutch Republic. The influence from marine insurance grew gradually as classic marine insurance clauses were taken over in these later fire insurance policies used in practice. Chapter 3 covers the history of life insurance in the Dutch Republic. Initially premium life insurance appears to have developed as an offspring of marine insurance but its statutory prohibition in 1571 by Philips II stalled its further development. Notwithstanding this prohibition, we find two life insurance policies in Amsterdam, one from 1676 and the other from 1712. These policies differ on many points. A practice of life insurance cannot be established, as it is more likely that these policies were isolated instances. Finally, Chapter 3 considers the Dutch Life Insurance Company of 1807, which is said to mark the beginning of modern life insurance in the Netherlands. At the time of its establishment, life insurance was not yet recognized by statute. Rather than an influence from marine insurance, the life insurance practice by the Dutch Life Insurance Company of 1807 shows influences from foreign life insurance companies

Some Marginal Remarks on Prof. Randazzo's Paper

L'interessante intervento del Prof. Randazzo sulla continuità e discontinuità del decurianato ha offerto molti spunti di riflessione. Certamente il decurionato rappresenta in questi secoli, oggetto del Convegno, la spina dorsale dell'amministrazione locale. Vorrei fare alcune osservazioni in proposito, anche in relazione a quanto detto dal prof. Randazzo. Prof. Randazzo’s paper on the question of continuity or discontinuity in the decurionate is very interesting and he made many inspiring observations. It is a long period we are talking of, and the decurionate was in any case for a greater part of this period the backbone of local government. It is, therefore, a large subject and I can only hope to make some marginal remarks and contribute to his paper

The dynamics of self-interacting dark matter in galaxy clusters

This thesis presents three different but connected projects related to the study of the nature of dark matter (DM) using galaxy clusters. In particular, in the first two projects I use cosmological simulations to investigate how DM particles that interact through forces other than gravity affect galaxy clusters as a whole as well as the galaxies that reside inside them. First, I compared the mass loss of galaxies accreted unto simulated clusters ran with both cold dark matter (CDM) and self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) physics. Due to the additional interactions between the DM haloes of the galaxies and of the clusters, we expect there to be additional mass loss in SIDM galaxies on top of the tidal mass loss due to the gravitational field from the cluster. Indeed, I find that on average not only do SIDM galaxies lose more mass, they are also more susceptible to total disruption. Second, I investigated the effects of SIDM on major mergers of galaxy clusters. In such events, the gas is offset from the collisionless galaxies due to ram pressure. If the SIDM cross-section is non-zero, the DM can be offset from the galaxies as well. By comparing the offsets of the gas, DM, and stars in simulations ran with different SIDM cross-sections, I found that the DM offset increases with cross-section as expected from analytical models. The third project was undertaken for the upcoming balloon-borne telescope SuperBIT, whose main science goal will be to map out the DM in and surrounding galaxy clusters. To keep up with SuperBIT's (and any possible successor's) relatively high data rate, we have developed a toolkit of hardware and software that would allow us to physically downlink data mid-flight. I wrote software predicting the trajectories of the system, given the location and time of the release. The system was successfully tested from beginning to end during the SuperBIT 2019 test flight. In essence, all three projects are based around simulations to predict the trajectories of some form of matter falling into some other form of matter, i.e. DM into clusters, or parachutes into the Earth's atmosphere. The intention was to bring the three projects together and use the SuperBIT hardware that I have helped develop to measure the behaviour of DM and calibrate it against the cosmological simulations. Unfortunately SuperBIT's first science flight was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I did not get to measure the DM effects on real astronomical data. I intend to do so in the future

Preračunavanje koordinata državnog koordinatnog sustava u Zemunski gradski koordinatni sustav i obratno

Preračunavanje koordinata državnog koordinatnog sustava u Zemunski gradski koordinatni sustav i obratno

Triangulacije u geodetsko-geometarskoj praksi u raznim projekcionim i koordinatnim sistemima na teritoriji Kraljevine Jugoslavije

Triangulacije u geodetsko-geometarskoj praksi u raznim projekcionim i koordinatnim sistemima na teritoriji Kraljevine Jugoslavije