According to tradition, around 300 B.C. Vishnagupta Kautilya wrote a book called the Arthashastra in which he spelled out in exhaustive detail the methods of statecraft, economics, law, war, etc. that he recommended, and that he had used to make Chandragupta Maurya emperor of India. Missing nothing, he identifies force majeure events in much the same way we do today:

Calamities due to acts of God are: fires, floods, diseases and epidemics, and famine.

Other calamities of divine origin are: rats, wild animals, snakes, and evil spirits. It is the duty of the king to protect the people from all these calamities.

He recommends the government be the guarantor not only of last resort but of first resort:

Whenever danger threatens, the King shall protect all those afflicted like a father and shall organize continuous prayers with oblations.

And he recommends specific measures:

All such calamities can be overcome by propitiating Gods and Brahmins. When there is drought or excessive rain or visitations of evil, the rites prescribed in the Atharva Veda and those recommended by ascetics shall be performed. Therefore, experts in occult practices and holy ascetics shall be honoured and thus encouraged to stay in the country so that they can counteract the calamities of divine origin.

He provides a handy table of which deities to propitiate for which calamity, for example Agni the god of fire for wildfires.

To be fair, he also includes practical instructions for specific calamities, such as:

During the rainy season, villagers living near river banks shall move to higher ground; they shall keep a collection of wooden planks, bamboo and planks.

In addition, the King is to keep stores of food and seeds to distribute in case of famine. So Kautilya advises some collective action as practical insurance.

He also discusses relative seriousness of calamities, dismissing irremediability in favor of breadth of effect. Some previous pundits had ranked fire as the most serious, because it burns things up irremediably, but Kautilya ranks flood and famine as most serious because they can affect whole countries, followed by fire and disease, then by local problems such as rats. So the concept of aggregation as used by modern insurers is apparently at least 2300 years old.

Nonetheless, Kautilya does not mention pooling finances in a form that would be recognizable as insurance. That was a risk management strategy yet to be invented in India.

The Arthashastra by Kautilya, edited, rearranged, translated, and introduced by L.N. Rangarajan.Penguin Books, 1992.

-jsq