Swiss Reinsurance Company was founded in Zurich in 1863 to help Swiss insurers spread catastrophic risk internationally, pioneering the modern reinsurance model in which primary insurers offload portions of large losses to specialist global carriers.

The rise of global reinsurance companies in the nineteenth century expressed the Victorian internationalisation of risk; the abstract, transnational nature of reinsurance contrasted with the concrete suffering it ultimately underlay — a tension that appears in Victorian social poetry and the prose of Trollope and Conrad.