The purpose of the reinsurance industry is to provide insurance for primary insurers. Primary insurers have fairly standardised policies, whereas those of reinsurers are often less so, more internationally oriented and likely to cover very large risks. There is little doubt that primary insurance policies, as well as an insurance market based on fixed premiums, would be difficult to sustain over the long run without reinsurance. Reinsurance enables portfolio diversification by the primary insurer in order to avoid the kinds of devastating losses that could threaten its survival (Kopf 1929; Golding 1930; Doherty & Smetters 2005; James et al. 2014; Borsheid & Haueter 2012).

This paper discusses the emergency of the Swedish life reinsurance market from the mid 19^th century and describe the development until the 2010s. In the wake of the founding of the first joint stock corporations in the middle of the 1850s, insurers set rather limited risk maximums and signed reciprocal treaties with mainly foreign insurers to limit their risks. During the following six decades the life reinsurance was handled by individual corporations but in 1914 a commonly owned life reinsurance company was organised to deal with the issue for reinsurance for the entire market. This continued until the end of the 1980s when most of the individual insurers preferred to set up their own corporations for dealing with the issue of life reinsurance and Sweden Re was transformed into a completely different organisation.