What does Canopius’s coffee have to do with Graunt or Halley or with the concept of risk? Simply that a coffee house was the birthplace of Lloyd’s of London, which for more than two centuries was the most famous of all insurance companies.18 Insurance is a business that is totally dependent on the process of sampling, averages, independence of observations, and the notion of normal that motivated Graunt’s research into London’s population and Halley’s into Breslaw’s.
