[608] ... Of course there was nothing new about the idea of marine insurance in the 1970s. Insurance on vessels and cargoes had first appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among Italian merchants, and by the seventeenth century it had become a regular feature of overseas commerce in England. By the early 1700s, the English marine insurance market was centered in London at Edward Lloyd's Coffee House. According to historian Keith Thomas, the development of marine insurance reflected a larger shift in the intellectual and cultural life of the Western World, away from an acceptance of fate and chance and toward a greater reliance on the powers of human reason to control the natural and social environment. Though the early marine insurance policies were often akin to wagers on particular voyages because the character of the insured played as great role in deciding the specifics of a contract as mathematic models of risk, nonetheless, as insurance developed over the course of the 18th century, merchants developed confidence in their ability to protect themselves against misfortune. Better map-making skills and navigational instruments and expanding information networks abour overseas markets enabled brokers and underwriters to turn marine insurance into a thriving business that few merchants involved in overseas trade failed to employ. In short, merchants' commercial success became closely linked to the growth of statistical solutions for reducing risk on the high seas.