From Wood to Stone: The Risk Management of Swiss Re in The Sundsvall Fire 1888 1 ELEONORA ROHLAND Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Goethestraße 31 45128 Essen, Germany Email: eleonora.rohland@kwi-nrw.de ABSTRACT Through the lens of the Swiss Reinsurance Company’s (today Swiss Re) nine- teenth century correspondence, the Swedish and international (re-)insurance industry’s risk management after the devastating ire of Sundsvall, Sweden on June 25, 1888 unfolds. The article focuses on the Swiss Reinsurance Company’s post disaster ‘risk-shaping’ and the formation of reinsurance lobby-groups in the aftermath of the disaster. It argues that even the insurance industry’s con- cept of ‘objective risk’ is not static but luid and open to negotiation within the insurance system. Since the insurance industry works on the interface between the natural and the built environment it can inluence directly how societies interact with nature. The article argues furthermore, that perceiving ire merely as a man-made hazard without considering its ‘natural’ context falls short of an accurate analysis, in particular concerning ‘catastrophic loss’ (i.e. large-scale loss) affecting (re-)insurers’ geographical risk distribution. KEYWORDS Risk, reinsurance, ire, disasters, risk management, Sweden, Swiss Re, environ- ment, lobby-groups 1. I would like to thank several people for their generous support: Elisabeth Bechter, Niels- Viggo Haueter and Rudolf Frei from Swiss Re for kindly supporting my research in the Swiss Re Company Archive. Dr Paul Della-Marta and Prof. Dr. Jürg Luterbacher contribut- ed the weather maps in Figure 1 and Figure 2 to this paper. Jürg Luterbacher provided fur- ther help in phrasing precise descriptions for the captions and in the text. Lothar Krempel designed the network graph in Figure 4. Anna Amacher helped with a translation from Swedish. Tommy Jansson (Sundsvall Fire Brigade) and Lena Nygren (Sundsvall Archive) provided a wealth of information in their answers to my emails. Environment and History 17 (2011): 153–169 © 2011 The White Horse Press. doi: 10.3197/096734011X12922359173096