Definition
A Dutch and civil law term for insurance or assurance, used historically in maritime and commercial legal contexts to denote a contract by which one party undertakes to indemnify another against specified risks of loss, particularly in connection with sea voyages and cargo. The term is the Dutch and continental European equivalent of the English "insurance" or "assurance," and appears primarily in older treatises on maritime law and the law merchant.
Common Confusion
ASSECURANTIE, ASSURANCE, and INSURANCE are functionally equivalent in the historical legal literature, but the choice of term often signals the legal tradition being invoked. Assecurantie appears in Dutch and continental sources; assurance is the preferred term in English common law and equity, particularly for life and property coverage; insurance is the modern English term of general application. Researchers encountering assecurantie in translated or comparative sources should not assume a substantive legal distinction from insurance — the difference is linguistic and geographic, not doctrinal.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker rather than an independent doctrinal concept. When assecurantie appears in a source, it signals continental European — most often Dutch — legal provenance. The term surfaces in treatises on the law merchant and maritime law that were influential across early modern commercial law, including in English admiralty practice, where Dutch and Hanseatic commercial customs were regularly consulted.
Researchers working in early American commercial law, admiralty records, or colonial-era insurance disputes may encounter assecurantie in translated Dutch sources, in treatises drawing on continental authority, or in arguments before admiralty courts where civilian learning carried weight. Its presence is a flag to consult the broader civil and maritime law tradition, not just common law sources.
The term largely disappears from English-language legal literature after the eighteenth century, replaced entirely by "insurance" in ordinary legal usage. Any modern appearance of assecurantie in an English-language legal document is almost certainly a direct quotation or translation from an older continental source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines assecurantie simply as "assurance or insurance," citing Loccenius, De Jure Maritimo et Navali (lib. 2, c. 5, §1). Loccenius was a seventeenth-century Swedish jurist whose work on maritime law drew heavily on Dutch commercial practice, which was the dominant source of maritime insurance law in that era. Burrill's entry is characteristically spare — it identifies the term, gives its meaning, and anchors it to the authoritative civilian source. There is no further doctrinal elaboration, which reflects the term's role as a foreign-law equivalent rather than a standalone English legal concept.
Historical dictionaries broadly treat assecurantie as a term of art from the civil and maritime law tradition, not as a term requiring independent definition. Researchers should expect that older dictionaries will dispose of it quickly with a cross-reference to insurance or assurance, and that the substantive law on the underlying concept will be found under those headings.
Jurisdictional Note
Assecurantie is a term of Dutch and continental civil law. It has no operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions, where insurance and assurance fully occupy the field. Its significance in Anglo-American legal research is exclusively historical, arising in admiralty and commercial law contexts where continental sources were cited as authority.