From Hammurabi to Trump: The Making of a Global Insurance System Against Piracy
- sara john
- Jul 16
- 5 min read
By Dr. Samir Altaqi
In response to Iranian piracy in the Arabian Gulf, President Trump announced on March 3, 2026, that the United States would provide political insurance and guarantees for maritime commerce, and above all for the energy shipments that move through the Gulf.
After the war in Ukraine, and then Iranian piracy, the back of the guarantee system underwriting world trade was broken, nowhere more than in the Gulf. Capitalist civilization, after all, arose and stood upon two hidden pillars: the insurance policy, and the navy that protects and underwrites it. Together they decide what moves and what does not, what gets built and what does not, what settles in place and what the winds carry away.
Trump's announcement returns us to 1750 BC, where the Babylonian merchant stands watching, with great anxiety, as his ships depart toward the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, to return laden with copper, tin, spices, and lapis lazuli. The moment they slip beyond the horizon, all news of them ceases. They pass into the mercy of pirates who may seize them or storms that may sink them, and with them the fortune of a family built over centuries. What a wager.
In those days, the merchants of Babylon began borrowing money for their trade at rates of interest reaching one hundred percent of the value of the goods, the price of a creditor's willingness to bear the risk.
Hammurabi understood, in 1750 BC, that the flow of commerce and the fate of his kingdom's prosperity depended on guaranteeing it. His two hundred and eighty-two ordinances therefore contained the first system of interest, a contractual guarantee against commercial risk, inscribed on clay tablets, and constituting what may be regarded as the founding document of the global economic order.
After them, the Phoenician traders carried these traditions forward, and then the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, and finally the merchants of the Silk Road, until this instrument, the bottomry loan, became the hidden backbone that allowed global trade, and globalization itself, to flow.
By the fourteenth century, Genoa had become the most important city in the system of trade, finance, credit, sovereign debt, and maritime commerce. And Genoa had two principal problems: the pirates and the Pope.
The pirates spread across the straits, and states themselves came to finance their piracy against the trade of rivals, militias whose men were paid and decorated with the highest honors. A ship was not targeted for its cargo but for the flag it flew. How closely today resembles yesterday.
The Pope, for his part, issued a condemnation of the maritime loan in 1236, deeming it usury and a sin against the Church, at the very moment when such interest-bearing loans were the principal instrument and the backbone of Genoese trade. And Genoa, in its turn, went around the papal condemnation with a basket of contracts and quiet games.
The Arab merchants had their share in this too, so much so that the word risk was derived from the Arabic rizq, which was taken as a measure of gambling with God's provision, "granted to whom He wills, and taken from whom He wills," until risk became the foundation of risk calculation and of insurance policies themselves.
It was then that Thomas Casanova, a notary in Genoa, laid down the founding framework of the modern insurance document, which became in its turn a major turning point in the world trading system.
The Genoese merchants soon grasped that their ability to offer competitive prices for this commercial interest depended entirely on the quality of their information, the thing that made it possible to price risk at all.
For the states possessing the finest banking system to guarantee trade, and the finest intelligence, would alone be capable of offering the most reliable prices for insuring global commerce. Intelligence knows the safe route, the trustworthy captain, the trustworthy ports; it knows which pirates are "friends" and which are "enemies." And so knowledge and intelligence became an inseparable part of the insurance system written into the contracts.
Then came coffee, one of the most heavily traded commodities on earth.
In seventeenth-century London the drinking water was filthy and the beer was bad, and a hot beverage had become a necessity. London filled up rapidly with coffeehouses, and their owners came to understand that the winning commodity in London was not coffee alone but the news of trade. In a world without telephones or radio, direct contact was a vital necessity. Specialized coffeehouses emerged, and produced in their turn many of the institutions still standing today, among them the London Stock Exchange.
Edward Lloyd, for his part, understood what his customers needed: urgent information. So he gave the house over to them alone, a place where ship data, arrival records, departure schedules, commodity prices, and maritime gossip were gathered systematically. In parallel, Lloyd built an integrated system of information and intelligence.
At a certain moment, Lloyd posed a question: what if we could distribute the risk as a wager among any customers who wished to take it? Are you prepared to bet on the ship's return? Lloyd's was not yet an insurance company. It was a room for pricing risk, negotiating over it, and spreading it.
The merchant writes the details of the voyage on a small slip of paper: the ship, the route, the cargo, the value, and the attendant dangers. The slip is passed around the coffeehouse, and the patrons bet on it, signing their names beneath the heading "risk."
Lloyd's went on to become the largest maritime insurance market in the world, built on coffee, information, and trust. The British navy, British intelligence, and Lloyd's together held the pillars of superiority over their Dutch and French competitors.
It is a single economic and political thread, the founding thread of the global capitalist order. It runs from Hammurabi to Sinbad, to the Genoese notary, to the desks at Lloyd's and the intelligence services in London.
Then the United States arrived to complete the picture: gathering intelligence, calculating rizq and risk, pricing the insurance policies that became an organic part of the value of the American dollar. They sell knowledge; they control the risk calculator.
The states and cities that internalized the trading system Hammurabi launched, that the merchants of Genoa modernized, and that crystallized in London, were the only ones that rose and advanced.
The security of trade is no longer a mere conditional policy. It has become the hidden infrastructure of civilizational progress. And far from the headlines, the international insurance system operates with all its financial, intelligence, and military components.
Days ago, that system observed with alarm the collapse of risk coverage in the wake of the war in the Arabian Gulf. Suspending insurance does not require closing the strait. It is enough to render the risk of passage unmeasurable.
The structural logic of the Hormuz game has not changed. Only the names, the flags, and the goods have changed.
But those who took the decisive decisions to strip away the Iranian blackmail were not generals, or diplomats, or heads of state. They were the strategic insurance systems.
And if we recall the launches of the "Pasdaran pirates" alongside the pirate boats of the Gulf who came down from the Zagros plateaus in ages past, we understand that with the collapse of the private insurance market, the American state steps in as rescuer and guarantor of the strait's commerce. And the guarantor dominates.
For four thousand years, insurance has been the hidden load-bearing wall that civilization built in order to make the unbearable bearable, and to neutralize the pirates arriving from every corner, in the only logic they understand.
How closely, indeed, today resembles yesterday. Article link
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