A Special Agent: Insurance Comprador for Western Insurers in 19th Century China

The history of modern Chinese insurance is a history of foreign insurance industry to control and monopolize the old Chinese insurance market while the Chinese insurance industry tried to be independent and anti-monopoly. Insurance compradors have played an important role in the Western insurance “Indigenization” process in the 19th century China. Insurance buying is a form of western capital in modern insurance industry, which is born and comes for profit. This paper argues, to expand in Chinese market, Western insurers designed a set of system, based on social networks, incorporating marketing, incentive, and credit guarantee namely the insurance buying system; that is, the insurance comprador system, which has assisted Western insurers in monopolizing the Chinese insurance market and bred a group of parvenu insurance compradors. With the growth of both Western insurers and insurance compradors, their relationship has gradually turned from inter-dependence to independence. On the one hand, when Western insurers came to scale, risk control replaced market expansion as development priority, which necessitated the change from a business model weighing insurance compradors to that weighing professionalization and risk-control; on the other hand, insurance compradors founded Chinese insurance industry with the capital and know-how accumulated in working for Western insurers.