Lloyd’s began life as a coffeehouse run by Edward Lloyd, the son of a stocking knitter, in the late seventeenth century, only a few hundred yards from its modern home. At the time, coffeehouses were fashionable, sometimes raucous places for London merchants to conduct business. Over the subsequent decades, Lloyd’s attracted a varied crowd of traders, speculators, gamblers, and con artists, as well as businessmen who funded lucrative sea voyages—and those willing to insure them. (As Lloyd’s acknowledged in a 2020 apology for its role in the trade, many of those journeys were to transport
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