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==Later Developments==
[[File:Anonymous_Venetian_orientalist_painting,_The_Reception_of_the_Ambassadors_in_Damascus',_1511,_the_Louvre.jpg|thumbnail|275px|left|Figure 2. The Venetian merchants in Damascus were very active in trade in the late Medieval period, helping to spawn new developments in insurance.]]While the Murashu archive suggests an early form of an insurance company, the details are still unclear, and insurance was still relatively primitive. Insurance firms in the late Medieval period, at around 1300, in particular, related to Genoa and later Venetian traders, begin to show more sophistication of insurance as shipping trade once again began to expand rapidly along the Mediterranean basin. Double-entry book keepingbookkeeping, enterprise risk, and investment firms begin to emerge in the commerce states of Italy.<ref>For information on how late Medieval insurance developed in Venice, see: Madden, Thomas F. 2013. Venice: A New History. New York: Penguin Books. For information on Genoa and it’s a its form of insurance development, see: Van Doosselaere, Quentin. 2009. ''Commercial Agreements and Social Dynamics in Medieval Genoa''. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, pg. 196.</ref>
By this time, the critical development was that insurance becomes a separate enterprise from loans and other forms of commerce. In other words, it begins to be seen as its own economic enterprise or a form of business. With insurance beginning to emerge as a separate entity, this eventually paved the way for it to spread beyond simply commercial interests to other fields such as private holdings. By the 17th century, for instance, property insurance develops to cover major disasters, which was a concept born from the Great Fire of London in 1666.<ref>For information on how the Great Fire of London shaped insurance in later decades and even into the modern era, see: Mokyr, Joel, and Oxford University Press. 2005. ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History''. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195105070.001.0001/acref-9780195105070.</ref> With insurance emerging as an enterprise separate from other trade and commerce, and greater awareness of disasters, made clear by the Great London Fire, we then see the emergence of what becomes modern forms of insurance that are prevalent for many types of things, covering basic households, to large businesses, and even governments.
