Hartford as the Insurance Capital of the World

Hartford's nickname as the insurance capital of the world is not a figure of speech. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more insurance companies were headquartered in this city than anywhere else on earth, and the industry's origins here trace back to the riverfront commerce of the colonial era. River captains and merchants who operated out of Hartford in the seventeen hundreds developed informal agreements to share the risks and profits of river voyages.

If a captain's cargo was lost on the Connecticut River, other merchants who had agreed to share the risk would compensate him. This pooling of maritime risk was a direct precursor to the formal insurance industry that followed. The Hartford Fire Insurance Company was founded in eighteen ten.

Aetna, which would eventually become the nation's largest health insurer, was incorporated in eighteen fifty-three, growing from an eighteen nineteen meeting at Morgan's Exchange Coffee House in which Hartford businessmen debated how to improve the city's fire insurance industry. The Hartford, Travelers, and dozens of other companies followed, and by the late nineteenth century Hartford's downtown was defined by the neoclassical office towers of the insurance trade. At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, Hartford was home to more than one hundred insurance companies.

The industry shaped everything: the architecture of downtown, the philanthropy that built the parks and museums, the economy that supported the middle class for generations. Hartford still carries more than a hundred insurance companies today, including headquarters of Aetna and The Hartford. The industry is quieter than it once was, but its towers still define the skyline, and its money is still in the walls of nearly every civic institution in the city.